Faith in humanity
[Catholic Anarchist Ammon Hennacy said] Anarchy is an attitude. It’s not a programme, it’s not a revolution. It’s not a set of principles that if you subscribe to it you’re an anarchist. He said, it’s kind of like the tension between moral autonomy and political authority. Especially in the area of combinations, especially whether they’re going to be coercive or voluntary. Most of us grow up culturally compelled by combinations of which we’re not the architects. We didn’t decide on Boss-Employee combinations, Marital combinations, Teacher-Student combinations, all these combinations that are coercive and push us around. He’d say, all we ever wanted to do is to be able to create voluntary combinations among ourselves, which we create according to what we define as our needs. He’d look at somebody, he’d say, if you and I can agree to do our share of work in the world.. if you and I can agree to only take what we need and put back what we can.. if we both agree to care for the afflicted, and if we both agree not to hurt anybody.. all the things you can’t get from the Boss and the State, then we can begin to create for ourselves those voluntary combinations and get the work of the world done. Without the Boss, and without the State. Hard to do!
— Utah Phillips quoting Ammon Hennacy
After the collapse of an old relationship and a rekindling older ones, I’ve had had the privilege in the last year of coming back into contact with the faith tradition I was brought up in and it is giving me an opportunity to evaluate my position with respect to my outlook on other people, on faith, hope, political belief, and so on. I was raised a Catholic, something which, when I take the time to think about it, shaped both my life long dedication to anarchist politics and commitment to living a life in opposition to authoritarian violence through to my love of black metal with all its depictions of Satanism.
My experience of faith growing up was one of powerful and almost unshakable belief. That lasted up until it ran up against being a transgender bisexual 12 year old living with a version of Catholicism that was opposed to queerness. My absolute belief in an all loving God who it turned out wouldn’t nevertheless deliver me from a body I felt I couldn’t survive in couldn’t survive. Things came to a head and after surviving an attempt to end things, my faith gave way and my life persisted.
But I think one of the things that coming back into community with a queer fringe of churchy people, particularly gay, dyke, trans and nonbinary Catholics in the last year or so has given back to me is a recognition of the peculiarly Catholic habits I’ve been left with regardless. It turns out, I didn’t so much abandon my faith as it ruptured, making space for me to breathe and survive and changing shape in the process while retaining much of its original form. In the years of becoming an atheist after trying to be pagan for about 5 minutes in my mid teens teens, I spent many weekends of my late teens out with the Catholic Anarchists in Parliament Square fighting against the escalating Global War on Terror. I’d tell myself that they’re wrong about God but at least they’re right about the sanctity of human life. We’d be rounded up by the police together for arrest. I attended a mock funeral service held by a priest and a Catholic worker’s group where we both theatrically and quite sincerely mourned the destruction of life waged by Britain and the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not because of my affinity with the faith obviously, I just wanted to take any opportunity to do something about the pain of complicity with the imperial war machine and that was what was on that weekend and I couldn’t think of anything better to do.
It’s not passed me by that much of my life has been spent preaching Anarchy as well. I’ve occasionally called myself a propagandist, being a little glib about the topic, but it would be just as apt to describe myself as a preacher. The messages you say when you’re out preaching are simple. You don’t have to solve everyone’s problems with your messages. Your first job is to connect with them as a fellow human being. You’re doing a good job when you reach out to the problems people are facing and you help them understand they are shared, and you help them find hope in communion with others facing similar problems. The Anarchist soap boxer’s message is at once stark and terrifying, and at the same time exhilarating and empowering: Noone but ourselves can save us. It takes a multitude of cops and soldiers to prevent freedom from breaking out. We could be free to enjoy the good things of life in common if we choose to take the terrifying path and shed ourselves of the benefits that keep us complicit in oppression.
Other times religious friends have asked me about my religious beliefs and in between describing myself as an atheist I’ve tried to articulate my position of spiritual connection with humanity and the universe as something deeply meaningful to me. My work with Trans Safety Network comes from a position of insistence that anti-trans harm must be given meaning (and if we don’t make it matter by trying to document it, witness it, show to others that it matters, it will be allowed not to matter). We show reverence and care for the sanctity of trans life, (at least certainly I do, I’m not speaking for my TSN colleagues here) in part because it is a practice that makes trans life sacred. I’m a life long vegan since I was an adult because I can’t tolerate murdering things needlessly to live and that too is a way I show reverence for the significance of sentient life and suffering, even while I acknowledge there are ways to show reverence for life that fall outside of veganism.
I’m struggling for a footing here to contextualise what I’m trying to say or to get to a particular point. I don’t want to draw anyone towards any particular faith. I’m not evangelical about religion. The Pope is a fool, and the Church is an organised cartel for promoting sexual and domestic violence, child abuse and many other sins. But I am reconnecting with my Catholic roots to an extent, healing some old wounds, getting familiar with where and how I picked certain habits up. And I think I’m opening up a bit about it here because of how much my understanding of what is sacred, and not being a hypocrite about pretending to a political detachment from spiritually or culturally Catholic dimensions of that means.
I believe, as a matter of faith, that human beings are fundamentally inclined towards being good to each other, on the whole. That we only have each other. That life is sacred. I believe that the best thing we are able to do is create intentional, voluntary community with those who are willing to share in that work and create space to thrive. I believe human creativity and intelligence is a gift from the universe that we ought to deeply guard and protect from being battered out of us as children in the interests of institutional convenience, “growing up” or any other lies deceivers would tell us to excuse abandoning what’s holy. I believe wholeheartedly in treason against every institution that abrogates basic human decency, from nations to racial chauvinism to the gender system to the class system and beyond. I believe the greatest threat to people of faiths worldwide are the array of theocratic institutions attempting to dominate and control humanity’s spiritual life, that spiritual fulfilment is about human relationships with divinity or spirituality over which there is no higher authority than the relationships themselves. The biggest obstacle to understanding my own experience of relationship with spirituality was what felt like the ownership of that whole domain by Church authority and authorised interpretations of canonised scriptures.
I particularly think, when I’ve had the privilege to come into contact with pieces of Catholic teaching that still hold a charm for me—love your neighbour, but don’t just love your neighbour but love strangers too, be humble, come together in communion and share bread and wine, be tolerant of children, be hospitable to others and depend on the hospitality of others and create a community based not on transaction but on humanity, build a community that is a fit and safe world to live in poverty — the values that it pulls on are values where, when I have strayed from them, I have strayed from the spark of the divine in me. That relationship to divinity has stayed present, for me to come back to it and it is as true as it was before. I love people. Loving humanity is the closest I get to holiness. I also relate the inspiration I get from those passages to the gut feel I get from reading passages like Eugene Debs “while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
I may well be a member of a global colony of eusocial hairless apes that emerged from the parting of the dust and rocks from seas on a ball spinning through space. Morality may be a figment of our imaginations. But the inherent goodness of humanity and human agency and the gift that is to all of us is deeply sacred to me.
Much of my political beliefs around Anarchism are entangled with my spiritual beliefs around humanity. I have not dedicated myself to religious life, I have not abandoned all my possessions to the poor in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, any more than I have taken on a one woman revolution against the state and all authorities. But the belief that it is fundamentally something to strive towards is something I’ve taken to heart.
