Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
religious groups and the religious perspective →
miscellaneous Christian perspectives
Some quotes from tax resisters this year:
“I just celebrated Jesus’s Easter victory over death, so I won’t pay for killing.
Religious freedom is at the very foundation of our nation and it’s against the law to love your enemies and make a living.
I love America, but I love Jesus and humanity more.” ―Thad Crouch
“We are war tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Cæsar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.” ―John K. Stoner
I reviewed the heartfelt struggle by a small group of Christians to find an attitude toward war taxes that meets the challenges of their faith.
, I will highlight the 250th anniversary of a document that launched the American war tax resistance movement — the result of a small group of Quakers having the same sort of wrestling match with their own consciences and faith.
, I’ll fill this sandwich with my considerably more ambivalent (some would say hostile) feelings about the Christian faith.
People have a long-standing tradition, starting well before Christianity and continuing up to the present day, of collecting together and tenaciously holding to agglomerations of balderdash under the heading of “religion.”
This much is hard to dispute, and any of us can list dozens of mutually-incompatible examples at the drop of a hat.
So my first inclination is to say “to heck with all you nuwaubians, mormons, harmonica virgins and the like — y’all’s talking smack.”
But if I’m wise, I’ll prudently leave myself some wiggle room either if I can find an angle — some reason why professing or ritualizing or what-have-you might be beneficial to me or my hopes for the world — or better yet if it turns out that one of these seeming balderdash-conglomerations is actually the One True Story Of How Things Are.
Is Christianity true, in which case I ought to believe it, or if not true, is it beneficial, in which case I ought to practice or profess it anyway?
How might I distinguish the One True Story from all the others?
I have to have tests of some sort, nets that catch the plausible and let the nonsense slip away.
As far as I can see, though, Christianity doesn’t even survive the laugh test.
The Christian story — start to finish — doesn’t hold together, it doesn’t correspond to reality except in its trivia, while in its most important and profound lessons for evidence it relies on unverifiable absurdities and unreliable revelations, and it shows every resemblance to a hundred other crackpot tales that have been cooked up from the first anthropomorphic explanation for thunder in five-digits B.C. up through the fantasies of Malachi Zodoq-El.
So this knocks out one path, but also makes the other path, the “is there an angle” path, more difficult.
Even if it were worthwhile, how does one go about believing such an absolutely uncorroborable, completely implausible fairy tale?
I wouldn’t know where to start.
(Though maybe also there are benefits to being a Christian even if you don’t really believe in it, there are also disadvantages to professing one thing and believing another.)
Attempts have been made to salvage the story behind Christianity by jettisoning or ignoring or explaining away the parts of it that most clearly contradict reality or each other.
Say, for instance, the incompatible genealogies of Jesus given in Luke and Matthew.
Not important; easily ignored or explained-away.
But what good is it to throw out bits and pieces of the alleged historical record contained in the Bible when their absurdity becomes too rank to suffer with a straight face, and yet the core of the faith has no more evidence to back it up than that same document and a telephone game of disciples and clergy over two thousand years?
Furthermore, how different is this from jettisoning inconvenient directives or commandments?
How ambiguous does this sound to you:
That’s just one example — the gospels are full of inconvenient instructions that Jesus considered crucial and that most Christians ignore.
Christianity, as far as I can see, seems to be whatever Christians want to believe with an “amen” tacked on to the end for emphasis.
There’s almost no part of one Christian creed that doesn’t have a completely contradictory counterpart held as an essential tenet of another.
There is no way to conduct real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus.
There is no way to train people for real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus.
¶ The morality of the balance of terrorism is a morality that Christ never taught.
The ethics of mass butchery cannot be found in the teachings of Jesus.
In Just War ethics, Jesus Christ, who is supposed to be all in the Christian life, is irrelevant.
He might as well never have existed.
In Just War ethics, no appeal is made to him or his teaching, because no appeal can be made to him or his teaching, for neither he nor his teaching gives standards for Christians to follow in order to determine what level of slaughter is acceptable.
That’s the considered opinion of George Zabelka, who believed that “What the world needs is Christians who, in language that the simplest soul could understand, will proclaim: the follower of Christ cannot participate in mass slaughter.
He or she must love as Christ loved, live as Christ lived, and, if necessary, die as Christ died, loving ones enemies.”
But he writes all of that in the course of apologizing for having been the man who gave the official blessing of Christianity to the bomber groups that flew over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“As Catholic chaplain for the 509th Composite Group, I was the final channel that communicated this fraudulent image of Christ to the crews of the Enola Gay and the Boxcar.”
[I]f a soldier came to me and asked if he could put a bullet through a child’s head, I would have told him, absolutely not.
That would be mortally sinful.
But in Tinian Island was the largest airfield in the world.
Three planes a minute could take off from it around the clock.
Many of these planes went to Japan with the express purpose of killing not one child or one civilian but of slaughtering hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of children and civilians — and I said nothing.
And:
I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians to the men who were doing it.
I was brainwashed!
It never entered my mind to protest publicly the consequences of these massive air raids.
I was told it was necessary — told openly by the military and told implicitly by my Church’s leadership.
(To the best of my knowledge no American cardinals or bishops were opposing these mass air raids.
Silence in such matters is a stamp of approval.)
“I was brainwashed” he says.
“I was had by the father of lies.”
But if the very core of your belief system is based on taking a bunch of implausible and unverifiable absurdities on faith, where do you expect that to lead?
That’s the very garden the Father of Lies tends — are you surprised at the quality of the produce?
George Zabelka changed his mind about what Jesus wanted from us, but never changed his mind about believing that his latest guess about what Jesus wants from us ought to guide his behavior, and that “[w]hat the world needs is Christians who…” will do the opposite of what he did as a Christian priest on Tinian Island.
Maybe what the world needs is not more Christians, but more people who are able to understand that it’s rotten to participate in mass-slaughter without having to somehow tease that lesson out of the confused tangle of Christianities or hear the news from “cardinals or bishops” first.
Historic Russian admiral Fyodor Ushakov — a hero of Russia’s wars against Turkey and Napoleon Bonaparte — was designated the patron saint of nuclear-armed, long-distance Russian bombers by the Orthodox Church.
Russian Patriarch Alexei Ⅱ, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, carried a reliquary and an icon of the admiral, who was canonised in , into the Moscow chapel of the Russian Air Force’s 37th Air Army in Moscow…
“His strong faith helped Saint Fyodor Ushakov in all his battles,” the religious leader said, reminding his audience that the famous admiral of never lost a battle.”
Ushakov’s canonisation as a saint in follows a strong tradition in Russia of close relations between the Orthodox Church and the state, which was revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Christians may use an unstable and unlikely base when they wrestle with their consciences, but at least they do wrestle and debate.
And sometimes these debates can be quite challenging.
The following excerpts are from the speech that is said to have led to the formation of the Christian Peacemaker Teams:
If we want wars to be fought, then we ought to have the moral integrity to fight them ourselves.
To vote for other people’s sons and daughters to march off to death while ours safely register as conscientious objectors is the worst form of confused hypocrisy.
We must take up our cross and follow Jesus to Golgotha.
We must be prepared to die by the thousands.
¶ Those who have believed in peace through the sword have not hesitated to die.
Proudly, courageously, they gave their lives.
Again and again, they sacrificed bright futures to the tragic illusion that one more righteous crusade would bring peace in their time.
For their loved ones, for justice, and for peace, they have laid down their lives by the millions.
¶ Why do we pacifists think that our way — Jesus’ way — to peace will be less costly?
Unless we Mennonites and Brethren in Christ are ready to start to die by the thousands in dramatic vigorous new exploits for peace and justice, we should sadly confess that we really never meant what we said.
What would happen if we in the Christian church developed a new nonviolent peacekeeping force of 100,000 persons ready to move into violent conflicts and stand peacefully between warring parties in Central America, Northern Ireland, Poland, Southern Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan?
Frequently we would get killed by the thousands.
But everyone assumes that for the sake of peace it is moral and just for soldiers to get killed by the hundreds of thousands, even millions.
Do we not have as much courage and faith as soldiers?
Compare this to the bleatings of comfortable bloggers like myself or the satisfied platitudes of superior secular pacifists who have been living inside the castle walls all their lives and have never really had to make the hard choice of whether or not to pick up arms. The Christian Peacemaker Teams shame us with their courage and dedication and clearly their faith guides them.
There are many more people, both religious and secular, actually working for war than there are people, either religious or secular, actually working against it.
And for every Ronald J. Sider calling on Quakers to lay down their lives to stop the dogs of war, there are Quakers who want to oppose war but get surprised and indignant if the dogs actually feel like they’re being threatened and start to bite back:
“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.”
…“I mean, we’re based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are Quakers.”
(Yes, indeed, how could the military have gotten the idea that a bunch of innocent, inoffensive Quakers were a threat to them?
How sad.)
But as hard as it is for me to understand what makes someone a Christian, if I’m picking a partner to fight the good fight, give me a righteous and stubborn Quaker over a peacenik with a Darwin fish on her car any day.
Is there some way to bring the passion and self-examination and willingness to change and sacrifice that can be found in some varieties of Christianity into a secular peace movement without also importing the balderdash?
Milton Mayer, whose book On Liberty I reviewed , was a war tax resister.
In his essay The Tribute Money (The Progressive, ), he explained why.
Excerpts:
I cannot see why I should not persist in my folly.
Like every other horror-stricken American I keep asking myself, “What can a man do?
What weight does a man have, besides petition and prayer, that he isn’t using to save his country’s soul and his own?”
The frustration of the horror-stricken American as he sees his country going over the falls without a barrel is more than I can bear just now.
He tries to do constructive work, but all the while he is buying guns.
I have thought as hard as I can think.
I have thought about, for example, anarchy.
Not only am I not an anarchist, but I believe in taxes, in very high taxes, and especially in a very high graduated income tax.
I realize that a man who believes in taxes cannot pick and choose among them and say he will not spend 50 per cent of them on guns just because he doesn’t need guns.
I realize that anarchy is unworkable and that that is why the state came into being.
And I realize, too, that the state cannot be maintained without its authority’s being reposed in its members’ representatives.
I realize all that.
But in this state — and a very good state it is, or was, as states go, or went — I cannot get anybody to represent me.
My senators will not represent me.
My congressman will not represent me.
I am opposed to taxation without representation.
Were I God I would turn Milton into a pillar of salt for how many times he looked back behind him on those patriotic liberal platitudes (“its members’ representatives”) and rose-lit recollections (“a very good state it is, or was”) as he was walking away to dissidence.
Don’t tell me that I am represented by my vote.
I voted against the national policy.
Having done so, I am constrained in conscience to uphold my vote and not betray it.…
If my offense is anarchy — which I dislike — I can’t help it.
If the preservation of society compels me to commit worse evils than anarchy, then the cost of preserving society is too high.
Society is not sacred; I am.…
Would that he would extend the realm of the sacred so as to let other people participate in it, rather than making his conscience king of his own money while advocating “a very high graduated income tax” for others.
My first responsibility is not to preserve the state — that is Hitlerism and Stalinism — but to preserve my soul.
If you tell me that there is no other way to preserve the state than by the implicit totalitarianism of Rousseau’s “general will,” I will reply that it is the state’s misfortune and men must not accept it.
I have surrendered my sovereignty to another Master than the general will — I do not mean to be sanctimonious here — and if the general will does not serve Him it does not serve me or any other man.
In so far as there is any worldly sovereign in the United States, it is not the general will, or the Congress, or the President.
It is I.
I am sovereign here.
I hold the highest office of the land, the office of citizen, with responsibilities to my country heavier, by virtue of my office, than those of any other officer, including the President.
And I do not hold my office by election but by inalienable right.
I cannot abdicate my right, because it is inalienable.
If I try to abdicate it, to the general will, or to my representatives or my ministers, I am guilty of betraying not only democracy but my nature as a man endowed with certain inalienable rights.
I have thought about all this, in the large and in the little.
I have thought about my wife and children and my responsibility to them.
War will not even save them their lives, not even victorious war this time.
And it will lose them their most precious possession, their souls, if they call a man husband and father who has lightly sold his own.
I have thought of the fact that better men than I, much better men, disagree with me.
That grieves me.
But I am not, in this instance, trying to emulate better men.
I have thought about my effectiveness.
A man who “makes trouble for himself,” as the saying is, is thought to reduce his effectiveness, partly because of the diversion of his energies and partly because some few, at least, of his neighbors will call him a crank, a crook, or a traitor.
But I am not very effective anyway, and neither, so far as I can see, is anyone else.
If anything is effective in matters of this sort, it is example.
I go up and down the land denying the decree of Caesar that all able-bodied men between eighteen and twenty-five go into the killing business and urging such men as are moved in conscience to decline to do so.
If a million young men would decline, in conscience, to kill their fellow men, the government would be as helpless as its citizens are now.
Its helplessness then would, I think, be at least as contagious abroad as its violence is now.
Other governments would become helpless, including the Russian, and thus would we be able to save democracy at home and abroad.
Victorious war has failed to do it anywhere.
But how can a million old men who themselves will not decline to hire the killing expect a million young men to do it?
How can I urge others to do what I do not care to do myself? …
Of course the government doesn’t want me for military service.
I am overage, spavined, humpbacked, bald, and blind.
The government doesn’t want me.
Men are a dime a dozen.
What the government wants is my dime to buy a dozen men with.
If I decline to buy men and give them guns, the government will, I suppose, force me to.
I offer to pay all of my taxes for peaceable purposes, the only purposes which history suggests will defend democracy; the government has, I believe, no way, under the general revenue system, to accept my offer.
I like the out-of-doors and I do not want to go to jail.
I could put my property in my wife’s name and bury my money in a hole or a foreign bank account.
But I am not Al Capone.
I am… an honest man.
And I am not mathematically minded; if I did try deceit, I’d be caught.
There is only one other alternative, and that is no alternative either.
That is to earn less than $500 a year and be tax-free.
I’d be paying taxes anyway on what I bought with $500, but that doesn’t bother me, because the issue is not, as long as I am only human, separation from war or any other evil-doing but only as much separation as a being who is only human can achieve within his power.
No, the trouble with earning less than $500 a year is that it doesn’t support a family.
Not a big family like mine.
If I were a subsistence farmer I might get by, but I’m a city boy.
I would be hard put to answer if you asked me whether a man should own property in the first place, for a government to tax.
If I said, “No, he should not,” I should stand self-condemned as a Christian Communist.
It is illegal, under the McCarran Act, to be either a Christian or a Communist, and I don’t want to tangle with both the Internal Revenue Act and the McCarran Act at the same time, especially on the delicate claim to being a Christian.
Still, the Christian Gospels are, it seems to me, passing clear on the point of taxes.
When the apostle says both that “we should obey the magistrates” and that “we should obey God rather than man,” I take it that he means that we should be law-abiding persons unless the law moves us against the Lord.
The problem goes to the very essence of the relationship of God, man, and the state.
It isn’t easy.
It never was.
History, however, is on the side of us angels.
The primitive Christians, who were pacifists, refused to pay taxes for heathen temples.
They were, of course, outlaws anyway.
The early Quakers, who were pacifists, refused to pay tithes to the established church and went to prison.
But the war tax problem seems not to have arisen until , when a considerable number of Quakers refused to pay a tax levied in Pennsylvania for the war against the red Indians.
The Boston (and New York and Baltimore and Charleston) “tea parties” of the 1770’s were, of course, a vivid and violent form of tax refusal endorsed, to this day, by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Seventy-five years after the Revolution, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax because the government was waging both slavery against the Negroes and war against the Mexicans.
Thoreau was put in jail overnight, and the next day Emerson went over to Concord and looked at him through the bars and said, “What in the devil do you think you’re dong, Henry?”
“I,” said Thoreau, “am being free.”
So Emerson paid Thoreau’s poll tax, and Thoreau, deprived of his freedom by being put out of jail, wrote his essay on civil disobedience.
Seventy-five years later, Gandhi read Thoreau’s essay and worked it into a revolution.
It could happen here, but it won’t.
The place was propitious for Gandhi, a slave colony whose starving people had no money or status to lose, just as the time was propitious for Thoreau, a time of confidence and liberality arising from confidence.
Totalitarianism was unthinkable and parliamentary capitalism was not in danger.
The appeal to the rights of man was taken seriously, and McCarthyism, McCarranism, and MacArthurism were all as yet unborn.
I doubt that anybody will be able to bring me more light in this matter than I now have.
The light I need will come to me from within or it won’t come at all.
When George Fox visited William Penn, Penn wanted to know if he should go on wearing his sword.
“Wear it,” said Fox, “as long as thou canst.”
I hasten to say that I feel like Penn, not like Fox.
I know I can’t say that you ought to do what I can’t do or that I’ll do it if you do it.
But I don’t know if I can say that you ought to do what I do or even if I ought to do it.
I am fully aware of the anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 percent of the 50 per cent I do pay is used for war.
I am even fuller aware of the converse anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 per cent of the 50 per cent I won’t pay would be used for peaceable purposes.
In addition, if the government comes and gets it, and fines me, as I suppose it might, it will collect more for war than it would have in the first place.
Worst of all, I am not a good enough man to be doing this sort of thing.
I am not an early Christian; I am the type that, if Nero threw me naked into the amphitheatre, would work out a way to harass the lions.
But somebody over twenty-five has got to perform the incongruous affirmation of saying, “No,” and saying it regretfully rather than disdainfully.
Why shouldn’t it be I?
I have sailed through life, up to now, as a first-class passenger on a ship that is nearly all steerage.
By comparison with the rest of mankind, I have always had too much money, too many good jobs, too good a reputation, too many friends, and too much fun.
Who, if not I, is full of unearned blessings?
When, if not now, will I start to earn them?
Somebody will take care of me.
Somebody always has.
The only thing I don’t know is who it is that does it.
I know who feeds the young ravens, but I know, too, that the Devil takes care of his own.
It tries to describe the path that Quakers, Brethren, and others in the traditional peace churches take on their way to conscientious objection to military taxation:
Making the Connection — support for the military conflicts with our peace testimony
Recognizing that paying taxes for military purposes directly and personally involves a citizen in militarism
Deciding to take action
Saying “Yes”: Positive actions for peace
Saying “No”: opposing taxes for military purposes
This pamphlet may be a useful way of reaching out to members of those Christian churches that claim to be peace-oriented.
It is also noted that in some countries where there is a right to conscientious objection to military service, some Christians have become sensitive to the use of their tax money for supporting war, and in some cases have faced government action against them because of their conscientious objection to paying for war.
This development of conscientious objection deserves further study and consideration.
The central committee
Calls upon churches to encourage their members to object to military service in situations when the church considers armed action illegal or immoral.
[And] Encourages churches to study and address the issue of military or war taxes and of alternatives to military service.
This is not the first time the World Council of Churches has put out a document supporting war tax resistance.
In , they issued “a covenant… …supporting the right to conscientious objection to military service and tax for military purposes, and providing alternative forms of service for peace, and taxation.”
Thomas Cogswell Upham, who was born , wrote about the possibilities and promise of pacifism, and suggested that the reason why a Christian peace had not yet pervaded the globe was that Christians did not take their testimony seriously enough:
Professing Christians occupy precisely the same position, in regard to the great pacific reformation which must, sooner or later, inevitably take place, that temperate drinkers but recently occupied in respect to the temperance reformation, which is now in such encouraging progress.
It is but a few years since, and drunkards universally appealed for example and authority to those who were not drunkards, but nevertheless advocated the right and the expediency of drinking occasionally, only let it be done temperately.
Nothing could be effected under such circumstances.
It was found necessary that a new principle should be adopted, before a reformation could reach the drunkards; it was necessary that there should be an absolute and total reformation of the temperate drinkers.
And now we have another great reformation in hand, still more important; and in pursuit of it we declaim against military men and military statesmen; but we do not touch their conscience; we do not start them a hair’s breadth from that position of crime and cruelty which we believe they occupy.
And why not?
It is because they are sustained by professors of religion; it is because, while they avowedly drink often and deeply into the spirit of war, the followers of the benevolent religion of Jesus support them by drinking temperately; it is because they see Christians cheerfully paying taxes for their support, and behold Christians in their own ranks, and hear Christians praying for their success.
This is the secret, as time will assuredly show, of the great strength of that spirit of war which has so long pervaded the world.
If these suggestions are well founded, it cannot be denied that an immense responsibility rests upon the church; and we have no doubt that the time is coming, and coming speedily, when they will be disposed to confess, with sincere sorrow, that the immeasurable evils resulting from the wars in which men have been engaged, are justly chargeable, in a very high degree, to their own stupidity, blindness, and dereliction of principle.
We solemnly put it, therefore, to the professors of the Christian religion, how they can answer it to their conscience and their God, that they remain so quietly and stupidly accessory to the evil of war, — by their own admission, one of the greatest evils that ever afflicted our sinful and suffering race.
It will not avail them to say that they have always assented to the evils of war; that they have always maintained it would be for the interests of mankind to leave off war; the root of the malady is not reached by such methods as this; “leviathan is not so tamed.” In this case, as in others, and more than in most others, Christians are bound, by every consideration of duty and of love to Christ’s cause, to oppose the spirit of the gospel to the spirit of the world; to put off their shoes from their feet, and to stand firmly upon the only ground which will sustain them in such a conflict, — the holy ground of Christian principle.
They must learn what the gospel teaches; the doctrine of the gospel, whatever it may be found to be, must be their immutable rule of conduct.
When they conform themselves to this rule, and not otherwise, they may be said to act upon principle.
And the rule of the gospel, the principle which it establishes beyond all question, is, total abstinence; touch not, taste not, handle not; have nothing to do with war; have nothing to do with the preparations for war.
Wash your hands clean, now and forever, from the stain of human blood.
But in these views it seems proper to make a distinction between ministers of the gospel and the great mass of Christian professors.
If a great responsibility rests upon professors of religion in general, a still greater rests upon preachers and ministers.
All Christians are represented as lights in the world, and are required to let their light shine for the illumination of others; but ministers are, in some important sense, the light of private Christians.
We are persuaded that no private Christian ought to mistake his duty on this subject; so explicit are the instructions of the New Testament in regard to it, that no one can justly plead ignorance; but this does not alter the well-known fact, that private Christians do not, as a general thing, adopt novel principles and practices, however scriptural they may be, unless they are led into them, and encouraged in the course they take by their stated religious teachers.
We come to the conclusion, therefore, that the attention of ministers of the gospel is particularly called to the subject before us; that upon them, more than upon any other class of persons, rests the important question, whether wars shall cease from under the whole heaven.
It is desirable that they should weigh well this solemn responsibility.
Whether they have done their duty in this matter hitherto, whether they have brought to its investigation all their powers of intellect, and all their spirit of prayer, is for them to determine.
If they have not, let them think well of it; let them compensate, so far as can now be done, for the negligence of the past by the fervent zeal and untiring efforts of the future.
If ministers will faithfully do their duty in this thing, there is no question that the churches will ultimately, and in all probability very soon, respond to their efforts.
No minister ought to rest, no minister ought to consider himself as having discharged his whole duty, until he has seen the members of his church formed into a peace society on the gospel principle of total abstinence, renouncing forever, and at all hazards, military enrolments, military musters, the payment of military fines, and all other efforts and contributions of a clearly military nature.
What a spectacle would then be presented to the world!
Even impenitent and irreligious men would rejoice in it.
Hope would arise in the darkened and depraved mind of the soldier.
The eyes of experienced statesmen would be gladly directed to this transcendent beam of millennial light.
Mankind would smile in their sorrows, and say, It is indeed the star of Bethlehem!
From: Upham, Thomas Cogswell, The Manual of Peace, Boston: American Peace Society, (pages 189–192).
Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You
“Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You
overwhelmed me,” wrote Gandhi. “It left an abiding impression on me.”
Ammon Hennacy wrote: “I felt that it must have been written especially for me,
for here was the answer already written out to all the questions that I had
tried to figure out for myself…”
Gandhi went on to read more of Tolstoy’s works on nonviolence, and began to
develop his own implementations of ahimsa (non-harm) and
satyagraha (truth-force) at a place he called “Tolstoy Farm”
in South Africa. Hennacy adopted a life of voluntary poverty and tax
resistance “as I had learned them from Tolstoy and the
Catholic Worker.”
The book is the most influential work of
Christian
anarchism, and would probably be considered the founding work of that
tradition if it didn’t itself claim to merely be pointing out Christian
anarchism as the plain meaning of the gospels.
I added many links so that when Tolstoy mentions events and personalities from
the end of the 19th century that are no longer
common knowledge, or he references Bible verses or quotes from other works,
you can more-easily figure out what he was getting at.
I’ve also made a few changes to Leo Wiener’s translation: modernizing and
Americanizing spelling, putting Tolstoy’s footnotes in-line in bracketed
sections, correcting some unfortunate translation decisions (calling Ivan the
Terrible “John Ⅳ,” overliterally translating Nicene Creed into the Nicene
“Symbol,” referring to icons as “images,” and so forth), and when I could find
the original sources for things in English that Tolstoy quoted but that Wiener
translated back to English from Tolstoy’s Russian translations I have replaced
these with the originals.
You’d rather I summarize it for you?
It is hard to do justice to the book by a quick summary, but I’ll give it a
shot.
Tolstoy argues that Christianity as it currently exists in the form of
doctrines, church institutions and hierarchies, and ritual practices, is
anti-Christian. Not just that it happens to be anti-Christian because these
things have become corrupt (though they have) but because Christ explicitly
told his followers to reject doctrines, church institutions and hierarchies,
and ritual practices, and instead to love truth, to honor God, and to treat
all people as your family and as you would want to be treated.
This intuitive and simple message, which Jesus made explicit in the gospels,
ought to be the lodestone of all of our lives, and indeed the progress of
society throughout human history is leading us in this direction as truth
slowly erodes away falsehood.
An inevitable conclusion of the command to treat all people as your family and
as you would want to be treated is that the current political order is
unsupportable. You cannot participate in the political system, which is based
on the use of violence to enforce the separation of people and the privileging
of some people over others, and at the same time follow the guideline to love
your neighbor.
Everybody ought to work to orient their lives along true Christian lines
immediately (without waiting for the world to be “ready” for it). This means
ending all support of and participation in government, for instance as a
soldier, an office-holder, a juror, or a taxpayer. And it also means
renouncing any privileges that the government implicitly defends by violent
means (such as private property).
What did I think of it?
I am not a Christian. That Jesus said this or the gospels say that, to me does
not constitute an argument for a course of action. Tolstoy’s interpretation of
Jesus’s message is attractive in some ways, but does not convince me as being
so clearly the best and most accurate summation of what Jesus had to say
(though it strikes me as much less preposterous than most of Christianity then
or now). When I read the gospels, Jesus seems to me to be saying something
like:
There is nothing in this world — family, honor, riches, even knowing where
your next meal is coming from — that matters even a little bit compared to
devoting yourself entirely to God, since I will be coming back to earth on
the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory, sending my angels with a
loud trumpet call to gather my elect from the four winds, from one end of the
heavens to the other, and putting an end to everything and ushering in
something entirely new within your lifetime.
This makes questions of worldly ethics a sideshow at best, and may explain why
people have so much difficulty trying to get a consistent worldly ethics,
applicable to our situation today, from the gospels (Jesus never intended to
develop one).
Jesus also didn’t come back on the clouds of the sky,
etc.,
etc., like he said
he would, which to me means that we do need to create a worldly
ethics after all and that Jesus is unlikely to be of much help to us in this
regard.
So while Tolstoy thought of himself as explaining the clear teachings of
Christ to people who wanted to follow those teachings, I think of Tolstoy as
explaining to us what worldly ethics he thinks the wisest person he
can think of would have naturally taught. This is the Gospel of Tolstoy, and
as such it is interesting even to a non-Christian.
The Birds & The Bees
One of my favorite parts of the book is when Tolstoy explains why he thinks
small, individual, conscientious actions are important in creating large-scale
social changes:
In their present condition men are like bees which have just swarmed and are
hanging down a limb in a cluster. The position of the bees on the limb is
temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must rise and find a new home
for themselves. Every one of the bees knows that and wishes to change its
position and that of the others, but not one is able to do so before the
others are going to do so. They cannot rise all at once, because one hangs
down from the other, keeping it from separating itself from the swarm, and so
all continue to hang. It would seem that the bees could not get out of this
state, just as it seems to worldly men who are entangled in the snare of the
social world-conception. But there would be no way out for the bees, if each
of the bees were not separately a living being, endowed with wings. So there
would also be no way out for men, if each of them were not a separate living
being, endowed with the ability of acquiring the Christian concept of life.
If every bee which can fly did not fly, the rest, too, would not move, and
the swarm would never change its position. And as one bee need but open its
wings, rise up, and fly away, and after it a second, third, tenth, hundredth,
in order that the immovable cluster may become a freely flying swarm of bees,
so one man need but understand life as Christianity teaches him to understand
it, and begin to live accordingly, and a second, third, hundredth, to do so
after him, in order that the magic circle of the social life, from which
there seemed to be no way out, be destroyed.
But people think that the liberation of all men in this manner is too slow,
and that it is necessary to find and use another such a means, so as to free
all at once; something like what the bees would do, if, wishing to rise and
fly away, they should find that it was too long for them to wait for the
whole swarm to rise one after another, and should try to find a way where
every individual bee would not have to unfold its wings and fly away, but the
whole swarm could fly at once wherever it wanted. But that is impossible: so
long as the first, second, third, hundredth bee does not unfold its wings and
fly, the swarm, too, will not fly away or find the new life. So long as every
individual man does not make the Christian life-conception his own, and does
not live in accordance with it, the contradiction of the human life will not
be solved and the new form of life will not be established.
I also found interesting his discussion of the “intoxication of servility” — what happens when, by submitting to the orders of an authority figure, you
become capable of doing things that your conscience would normally not permit
you to do. (Several times before at The Picket Line I
have referred to Hannah Arendt’s ponderings about this temptation and its
consequences and to the Milgram Experiment and its theory of the “agentic
state.”) Tolstoy sees the intoxication of servility as the flip-side of the
intoxication of power — if you feel yourself to be occupying a role that gives
you authority over other people, this has the same intoxicating, morally
enfeebling, and disastrous effects as does feeling yourself to be occupying a
role in which you are obeying and carrying out orders.
To Tolstoy, much of the evil in the world is done by people who have become
blinded by the hierarchical roles they inhabit, and it doesn’t really matter
where in the hierarchy the roles put you. When you feel you are enacting a
role in a hierarchy rather than fulfilling the common responsibilities of an
equal human being, you become willing to do things to other people that you
would never do to them if you saw them as a member of the human family whose
needs were as worthy of respect as anyone else’s.
I always appreciate Tolstoy’s witty mockery of liberal pretensions, and this
book has a particularly good analogy. He spends some time reviewing the
proclamations, propositions, declarations, denunciations, petitions, and
recommendations of various international peace conferences, and says:
When I was a little fellow, I was assured that to catch a bird it was just
necessary to pour some salt on its tail. I went out with the salt to the
birds, and immediately convinced myself that, if I could get near enough to
pour the salt on a bird’s tail, I could catch it, and I understood that they
were making fun of me.
It is the same that must be understood by those who read books and pamphlets
on courts of arbitration and disarmament.
If it is possible to pour salt on a bird’s tail, this means that it does not
fly, and that there is no need of catching it. But if a bird has wings and
does not want to be caught, it does not allow any one to pour salt on its
tail, because it is the property of a bird to fly. Even so the property of a
government does not consist in being subjected, but in subjecting, and a
government is a government only in so far as it is able, not to be subjected,
but to subject, and so it strives to do so, and can never voluntarily
renounce its power; but the power gives it the army, and so it will never
give up the army and its use for purposes of war.
A little clumsy, in translation anyway, but a good analogy. I see a lot
of these salting-the-bird’s-tail proposals from liberal peaceniks today.
The Nazarenes are another pacifist Christian sect that apparently preached tax resistance, at least in its Hungarian incarnation.
On , the Friends’ Intelligencer published the following (which it sourced to Voice of Peace):
A new variety of the Mennonite, or continental Quaker sect, is gaining ground in Hungary to an extent that threatens considerable embarrassment to the Administration.
These so-called Nazarines not only disown all clerical organization and refuse to take any oath or enter any military service, but they dispute the lawfulness of taxes that go to support a State Church or army.
All assessments made on them are therefore levied under protest.
They are said to be an offshoot of Calvinism, but have of late been largely recruited from among the working Catholic population, so that their numbers, estimated a few years since at 6,000 only, are now officially stated at 30,000, and said to be really much larger.
The Casa Grande, Arizona, Dispatch carried this news on :
New York (AP) — Twenty-three Lutherans, including 12 clergymen, have signed a call for tax resistance against the arms race, declaring, “We will no longer pay for war while praying for peace.”
The call was issued by the Lutheran Peace Fellowship and is being circulated nationwide.
The Rev. Dennis Jacobsen, fellowship coordinator, says hundreds of Lutherans are expected to sign.
Nuclear weapons “are an abomination in the sight of God,” the statement says, pledging signers to withhold taxes for arms and use the money to help the poor.
Here are a few things of interest to flash by my screen in recent days:
Here’s a short film on the Dublin anti-water charge movement of , being used to inspire the household tax resisters today (and, it appears, to boost the public image of Joe Higgins, a Dublin politician who has hitched his wagon to the tax resistance star):
NWTRCC held its earlier this month in New York City.
Word about what took place at the gathering is still trickling out, but meanwhile here are some photos.
A new project — Your Faith, Your Finance — has been launched as a joint project of the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility and Quaker Peace & Social Witness.
It aims to help Christians in the United Kingdom “explore ethical and spiritual issues around the use of money.”
Their website has a section on taxes that gives a half-hearted nod in the direction of conscientious tax resistance:
A small number of self-employed people have chosen to withhold part of their tax in protest over how it is spent.
This is usually based on an objection to expenditure on war and preparations for war.
Some of these individuals have had their goods seized or been imprisoned, although others have paid up after withholding payment for a while to make a point.
This action is not of course open to people whose income tax is taken directly from their wages.
and quotes English Quaker war tax resister Simon Heywood:
“I withheld the military proportion of my income tax for two years during the Iraq War.
I felt I had no choice: if others were going to risk their lives on my behalf, for this nonsense, I had to risk some of my own personal convenience to protest against the waste and folly.
I was summonsed before the magistrate and told I had thirty days to pay.
I paid up on day twenty-nine, having discovered some foe making arrangements to pay up behind my back.
It was all spectacularly unheroic.
I’m glad I did it though.
It was very slightly less unheroic than paying up on time.”
