I Speak Only for Myself—Bucko Rinsky

By Bucko Rinsky

My progression from a mild-mannered conservative to a mild-mannered anarchoprimitivist took place from my sophomore year to my senior year of high school. It was NOFX’s song “Franco Un-American” that started it all:

I never looked around, never second-guessed Then I read some Howard Zinn now I'm always depressed And now I can't sleep from years of apathy All because I read a little Noam Chomsky -Franco Un-American, NOFX

I became addicted to books and floated around in a leftist/social justice critique for my sophomore and junior year of high school. Translated, this meant that I, a privileged male residing in America read into how screwed up everything is so that I can be a privileged male residing in America. During my senior year, I picked up Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan, and found the totality of critiques in the opposition to civilization to be the most appropriate response to how terribly messed up everything is. During this time of mind expansion and knowledge accumulation I struggled with how I could be an anarchist and a Christian since they seemed to me at the time to be incompatible. It was Jacques Ellul, Shane Claiborne, and Marcus J. Borg who put Christianity into a new perspective for me. The Christianity I grew up on, a religion of requirements that one believes to get into heaven was not “the Way” that reflected the life of Jesus. In fact, it was a subverted Christianity that gave birth, “to a society, a civilization, a culture that [is] completely opposite to what we read in the Bible, to what is indisputably the text of the law, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul” (The Subversion of Christianity, Ellul, p.3). Ellul offers many reasons, but he summarizes the main cause by saying that, “Subversion takes place, not because society is wicked, but because revelation is socially intolerable” (The Subversion of Christianity, p. 158). The subversion also accounts for much of Christianities terrible history towards nonChristians and the earth. In Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman offers a reason for the rise of the Roman Catholic Church saying that, “the Church gains power because it is Roman, not because it is Christian” (p.151). This statement applies to many historical accounts. Constantine lived as a civilized Roman emperor, not a follower of Christ. Spanish missionaries to the Americas lived as civilized Spaniard conquistadores, not followers of Christ. And many Americans continue to live as civilized Americans, not followers of Christ. Throughout history, Christians continually identify more with the death culture of civilization than with the life-affirming proclamations of Jesus Christ. From reading Ellul (Anarchy and Christianity, Subversion of Christianity), Claiborne (Jesus for President), and Borg (The Heart of Christianity), I’ve come to understand more and more how Jesus’ message is not only about personal transformation but social transformation through questioning and resisting power. Borg in his book, The Heart of Christianity, notes that, “we as Christians participate in the only major religious tradition whose founder was executed by established authority” (p. 91). In the Gospel of Luke we see Jesus’ proclaimed mission to, “bring good news to the poor,” “proclaim release to the captives,” “recovery of sight to the blind,” and to, “let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18). He continuously teaches against wealth and possessions (Luke 12:13-21, Luke 18:18-30), he commands us not to worry about our lives,

what we will eat and wear (Matthew 6:25-34), he tells us that the “kingdom of God is among [us]” (Luke 17:20-21), and says those who, “try to make their life secure will lose it, and those who lose their life will keep it” (Luke 17:33). (“Holy shit! What if He meant it?!”) Trying to accommodate Christianity to a 21st century civilized lifestyle is not the life Jesus offers. Christians are not meant to live conventional lifestyles. The first Jesus followers in the book of Acts claimed no “private ownership of possessions, but everything they owned was held in common,” resulting in there being, “no needy person among them” (Acts 4:3235). These are our roots as followers of Christ, roots we desperately need to return to. And where does a critique of civilization fit into all of this? Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus traveling on the fringes of society, often times retreating to the wilderness to spend time with God. John the Baptist lives a feral faith in the desert off of locusts and wild honey wearing clothes of camel’s hair. The prophet Elijah traveled the wilderness doing as God directs of him. And the founding story of Judeo-Christianity, Genesis’ narrative of The Fall, “reflect[s] on nothing less than civilization itself, and as such it narrates the history of the human condition” (Cultural/Linguistic Diversity and Deep Social Ecology (Genesis 11:1-9), Ched Myers). The story manifested in Genesis, reflects our roots as people thriving in creation with our Creator, then falling into a life of agriculture, suffering, and civilization as we try to be more like Him. For the vast majority of human existence our ancestors were nomadic huntergatherers living rather egalitarian lives with limited wants and unlimited needs absent of guns, cars, poverty, many modern diseases, and everything that goes along with NOT having faith in the good creation for provision. But for 10,000 years, human history has been spiraling out of control into war, technology, environmental destruction, slavery, oppression, and the continuous neglect of all that is living (Fredy Perlman, Marshall Sahlins, John Zeran). Civilization is a continuous path of destruction, alienation, murder, theft, and a disregard for life that will eventually crash or destroy all life on the planet. And the deeper we travel down the rabbit hole of the critique of civilization, the more we find that civilization is incompatible with all that lives. Anything incompatible with the living earth and the life it sustains is incompatible with a life in relationship with the Creator and with Jesus Christ. Christianity, like anarcho-primitivism, was (and should be) a fringe dwelling resistance movement, a resistant movement that offers a way out of this Leviathan we currently find ourselves in both spiritually, and physically. As Christians and people opposed to civilization we have a lot of shit on our plate. Many secular anarcho-primitivists don’t want anything to do with us. Mainstream Christians will be more than reluctant to accept a critique of the system that sustains their comfort and current way of life. We’re stuck in the middle, and even more, the middle is still civilized. Although we’re in a tough spot, I believe we have the greatest access for liberation, both personally and communally. We have a solid, community of humble and passionate people (and music!) full of rage and mercy with the understanding that this mode of existence cannot continue. But most importantly we have God, His grace and teachings from Jesus that, when taken seriously, allow for complete liberation free of all anxiety and free from the fear of death! For me, this means having the faith to let everything go and live out the kingdom of God, a kingdom not of civilization, but of something holy and wild. And this type of radical faith is complete liberation in this life. And in this liberation, in this way of living, we will show the civilized the glorious way of life that Jesus promised. P.S- Christianity has always been at its best as a resistance movement. From Jesus questioning and resisting the dominating system of power, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposing Nazi Germany, to