When it comes to the Church, Blake is no less iconoclastic. The modern Church, he thought, ‘Crucifies Christ with the Head Downwards’. He rejected all political and religious authority since human beings are made in the Divine Image and can govern themselves. He identified with the rebel Jesus against the tyrannical Jehovah God of the Old Testament: ‘Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.’ Since man is innocent and natural desires are beneficial, it followed for Blake that any hindrance is harmful and unnecessary. Indeed, at the heart of his visionary anarchism is the belief that ‘The Gospel is Forgiveness of Sins & Has No Moral Precepts’. He looked forward to a time when every individual would be ‘King & Priest in his own House’ in a society of complete forbearance, for ‘What is Liberty without Universal Toleration?’.9
At the same time, Christianity influenced Blake’s contemporary William Godwin in an indirect way and helped him become the father of anarchism. Godwin was an extreme Calvinist in his youth and was trained to become a Dissenting minister. As a young man, he concluded that the God of the Old Testament acted like a ‘political legislator’ in a theocratic State and yet had ‘not a right to be a tyrant’.10 When he wrote his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), he had under the influence of the French philosophes become an atheist, but his moral and economic beliefs had been largely shaped by his early Calvinism.11 He developed Aquinas’ notion of stewardship of the good things of the earth in a communist direction: the individual should distribute any surplus wealth he possessed to the most needy. Godwin’s anarchism moreover resulted from a strict application of the Dissenters’ right of private judgement from the religious to the political realm.
The great nineteenth-century anarchist thinkers Proudhon, Stirner and Bakunin were all imbued with the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment and identified Christianity with the existing authoritarian Church. Proudhon wanted to show that Catholicism was the counterpart of a hierarchical system of secular government. Since the Catholic God is considered the authority on which all other authorities rest, governments can be nothing less than ‘God’s scourges set up to discipline the world’. Even from a moral point of view, Proudhon was convinced that ‘God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil’. It is therefore the first duty of the thinking free man to banish the idea of God from his mind. Since we acquire knowledge and social life in spite of God, ‘Each step in our progress represents one more victory in which we annihilate the Deity’.12 But although Proudhon was militantly anti-Catholic, he still interpreted the Christian doctrine of original sin as a symbol of man’s ineradicable inclination towards evil and he sought to create a social order which would restrain his evil tendencies. Moreover, he talked of the idea of Justice inherent in nature as if it were a divine principle. In the form of natural law, it provided an ultimate reference point for his morality and operated as a kind of disguised Providence.
Stirner, on the other hand, thought God, along with the State and Morality, was just another spook to delude humanity. He argued forcibly that the State had come to be considered sacred like the Church, and laws were presented as if they were God’s commandments:
If the Church had deadly sins, the State has capital crimes; if the one had heretics, the other has traitors; the one ecclesiastical penalties, the other criminal penalties; the one inquisitorial processes, the other fiscal; in short, there sins, here crimes, there inquisition and here – inquisition. Will the sanctity of the State not fall like the Church’s?13
Bakunin for his part was haunted by the problem of God’s existence in his youth. But he eventually became a militant atheist, adopting the slogan ‘Neither God nor Master’. For him, the Christian God, who judged every action and threatened eternal punishment, was the ultimate symbol of authority. Like Stirner, he argued that God does not exist but is an abstraction which men project into heaven to worship.
Bakunin believed that Christianity taught:
God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, good, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave …14
Christianity had understood this better than all other religions. As a result, it was the absolute religion, and the Roman Church the only consistent and logical one.
Like Nietzsche, Bakunin declared the death of God and argued that we must transcend Christian values and create our own. The destruction of religion is a prerequisite of a free society since ‘The idea of God implies the abdication of reason and of justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.’ Bakunin was at his most passionate in his denunciation of Christianity, but he made his case for the death of God in the form of a syllogism: ‘If God exists, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle.’ Loving human freedom and considering it to be the absolute condition for all he respected in humanity, Bakunin reverses the phrase of Voltaire to affirm: ‘if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him’.15 For this reason, he praised Satan for being the first rebel and the ‘emancipator of worlds’.
According to Bakunin, the Church represents the interests of the clergy, as the State represents those of the bourgeoisie. ‘Does She’, he asked rhetorically, ‘not turn what is living into a corpse, cast aside freedom, preach the eternal slavery of the masses for the benefit of tyrants and exploiters? Is it not this implacable Church that tends to perpetuate the reign of shadows, of ignorance, of poverty and of crime?’ He therefore affirmed that the abolition of the Church and the State must be ‘the first and indispensable condition of the true liberation of society’.16 These sentiments, particularly in Latin countries where the Catholic Church was so dominant, had a widespread influence. Bakunin was no doubt partly responsible for the militant atheism of the Spanish anarchists which led to many cases of church-burning during the opening period of the Spanish Revolution.
Not all nineteenth-century anarchists were atheists; others inferred their philosophy directly from their Christian beliefs. The American Adin Ballou reached anarchist conclusions in his Practical Christian Socialism (1854) from a more rational route. Since man has only an obligation to obey God and his divine government, he has no obligation to obey the law of the land or human government. Human government is the will of man exercising ‘absolute authority over man, by means of cunning and physical force’. God on the other hand divides his authority with no creature; he is the absolute sovereign. The will of man has therefore no intrinsic authority, ‘no rightful claim to the allegiance of man’. Ballou therefore asks rhetorically about government: ‘is it not a mere cypher?’
Although he did not call himself an anarchist, Ballou preached against voting, office-holding, legislating, or punishing since ‘Majorities often decree folly and inequity. Power oftener corrupts its possessor,