The ‘Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen’ Journey

Exploring Christ's Gospel, Exploring Anarchism, and Realizing Their Beautiful Harmony

Anarchism gets a bad reputation. Part of it likely stems from the fact that the term is a statement of negation, rather than a statement of position. It immediately tells you to oppose something, but not to support something.

Christian ethics and morals similarly carry a negative connotation for many people, likely because the most well-known guidelines are the Ten Commandments, which are dominated by what “not” to do.

But the Ten Commandments, with their restrictions on behavior that most people can recall — don’t have false gods, don’t curse (“take the Lord’s name in vain”), don’t murder, don’t violate marriages (“adultery”), don’t steal, don’t lie (“bear false witness”), don’t covet/envy — are a comparatively primitive and incomplete idea of ethics.

Substance: a deeper understanding

When teaching Christian morality to teens and pre-teens, I give them an exercise: Take each “not”-formulated Commandment, and find the positive assertion about humanity on which the restriction is based. The kids typically figure out the answers quite readily. It requires a switching of framework, and once they get the switch, the understanding of positive morality isn’t beyond their abilities.

Instead of “don’t murder”, the lesson becomes, “respect each person’s life.” “Don’t steal” similarly becomes, “respect each person’s property.” “Don’t lie/bear false witness” becomes, “be a good witness, and respect the truth.” All of the “nots” work this way, if you think about them.

By the time of Jesus Christ’s ministry, the understanding of morality becomes even more substantive. Jesus regularly preaches — and leads by example — what to seek and do, not merely what to avoid. The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12) , the Corporal Works of Mercy (Matthew 25:35-40), and plenty else from the canonical Gospels record Jesus showing people the dignity of human beings and how to act with substance, rather than only with absence.

Likewise, digging deeper into anarchism gives us the underlying position of the philosophy. Anarchism in its most literal sense is “no rulers”; not “no rules,” as the rational process that each person engages in is, essentially, a rule-making process. Rules exist, but no one’s rationality of rules should be imposed in might-makes-right fashion on others.

Anarchism is against the official State or government or whatever other term you’d like to use for a coercive civil authority, a monopoly-violence institution, an imposed hierarchy of social order. But that’s not all that anarchism opposes. Revolutionaries who seek to replace the current institutional regime with their own favorite agents and agencies, individuals or mobs acting out vigilante fantasies, and any other attempts to impose might-makes-right order also run afoul of anarchism.

“No rulers” also means “no wannabe rulers.”

Natural human rights and the authority of personhood

Because underlying true anarchism is the substance of natural human rights: valid claims that any person can make, pre-politically, simply by virtue of being human.

What valid claims can people make, pre-politically?

• A claim to one’s own person (life).

• A claim to one’s intentional actions and consent-based, voluntary interactions with others (liberty).

• A claim to cultivated and duly obtained material goods not already validly claimed by another person (property).

The authority of personhood, of conscience, and of proprietorship all exist and are just, honorable, and defensible. But any attempt to assert an alleged “authority” to initiate violations of anyone else’s natural human rights, is unjust.

Being true to the model of Jesus means being anarchistic. It’s more than that, because the Gospel is full of positive, dignified, human substance. But the Christian call to social behavior is thoroughly anti-violence, and, as such, anti-violent-ruler(s). No coercive civil authority, no monopoly-violence institution, no imposed social order, no might-makes-right exercises align with the teachings and model of Jesus, as recorded and lived by the Early Church.

Front cover designed by Sheryl Lynn Ludwig

I hope to examine and expound more on these themes in this Substack, as I did in the short book of the same name — Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen — available at:

• Amazon (paperback & Kindle)

• Barnes & Noble (paperback)

• Lulu (paperback)

And I hope others will join me on the ‘Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen’ journey. Thanks for reading!