30 november, 2008

Pleidooi voor christen-anarchisme in VS


Een theologische stem uit de VS die pleit voor christen-anarchisme:
However, if the historical conjunction between Christian nationalism and Enlightenment liberalism, which has sustained American political life for generations, is breaking down, there is always the possibility that those who are alienated from both the theocratic tendencies of the Right and the secular impotencies of the Left can find a new political impulse in the (surprisingly natural) alignment of Christianity and the anarchist critique. To give just one example of this natural alignment, both Christians and anarchists believe that ultimate authority is not to be found in any human system and that human organizations have a Babel-like tendency to become anxiously invested in their own perpetuation and to react violently toward those who threaten them. Therefore, both Christians and anarchists should never foreclose the possibility of fundamentally changing those systems if they threaten important values. From a Christian perspective, systems based on greed and fear are faithless; from the anarchist perspective, such systems are inegalitarian and a threat to individual liberties. A Christian anarchism that combines the two perspectives would thus act politically in ways that would resist and undermine systems of control based on anxiety, greed, and fear rather than on faith, hope, and love.

Christian anarchists would resist military-state-industrial complexes that pursue the chimerical goal of absolute security and the all-too-enticing goal of market (and profit) expansion. They would undermine financial systems that are fundamentally abstracted from the responsibilities of personal giving-and-receiving so that they are oriented toward the accumulation of wealth for its own sake. Economic systems of this sort have severed the term economic from its root, the Greek word oikos, which means living place and suggests an emphasis on caring about the ordering of households. And they would speak out against education systems that depend for their own existence on fulfilling market and institutional systematic demands for a certain type of student-product, thereby transforming education into a transition period for students into these systems of control.

But on a more fundamental level, the revival of Christian anarchism would open up the realm of politics to a public examination of a much wider range of issues than are possible in our current environment, an environment where the existence of certain systems have been naturalized and thus placed outside the realm of the political. A Christian anarchist perspective would explore the deeper reasons for our calamities, and it would be discontent with just managing the systems better, especially because the systems are starting to seem both unjust and unmanageable.

Verder lezen - ironischerwijze heet de onderwijsinstelling Mars Hill.

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