I’m glad you stumbled onto this post. Here is a website you may want to check out:

http://www.inthelandoftheliving.org

I haven’t looked at YAR for a long time. For reasons a little too complicated to explain in brief, I looked back tonight and immediately found this post. I don’t generally identify as Mennonite any more. My lone post here at YAR only partially represents my thinking these days. But I’ve long had sympathies with anti-civ schools of thought. Today I identify most often as an animist — that is, someone who tries to recognize the personhood of human and non-human beings. I don’t really know where or whether God fits into it all.

But the woman who is wife to me and I have been very lonely over the past few years. We have visions of the kind of life we want to lead and the sorts of spirituality we aspire to, but with only our little family we feel quite isolated.

We’re looking for folks who want to rekindle an intimate relationship with the land and all its denizens. While we’re descended from European immigrants, I’m hoping that our descendants become as deeply a part of the living communities here as indigenous peoples have been and are.

But while our aspirations and current theological leanings tend to separate us from many Mennonites, we still find it difficult to make friends outside the Anabaptist community.

So let’s just say that I’m intrigued by your post, and I’m interested in connecting with anti-civ and/or animist-leaning Menno and post-Menno folk.

Thanks for your post.

After posting this, I began to realize how much more should have been said to have actually given a proper run-down of these ideas. In regards to Anarcho-Primitivism, civilization is a point in social development where several preceding factors (sedentary living, exportation of recourses, division of labor, specialization, etc) all come together to form a mass society in which there is hiearchy. The AP critique, and a lot of recent athropological work, points to agriculture as being the ‘big boom’ of development leading to civilization. There is a ton of good work out there regarding these topics… John Zerzan, Marshil Salhins, Jared Diamond, Chellis Glendening just to name a few). It can come off sounding like a complicated theortical framework, but the basis of these ideas lies in the discontent so many of us feel with how disconnected we are from the natural world. When you start learning about nature-based people groups and how healthy, peaceful, happy, and spiritually vibrant they are, you begin asking the hard questions… and then you start questioning progess.

I’d need to read more of the Anarcho-Primitivist ideas to get a better understanding of the argument. However, off the cuff I wonder why the wholesale condemnation of “civilization”? If one defines civilization as the social rules that a people follow when living together, I’d say that they’re pretty important. Indeed, hunter-gather societies have such social rules.

Even if, as SteveK suggests, it’s about permanent vs. transient living (city dwellers vs. nomads), I still see the Scriptures praising both nomads and city dwellers. Wasn’t the “promised land” about not needed to wander?

There are of course great evils in civilization, but I’m just not sure that civilization itself is evil.

This is not to say that the city dwellers are all bad. The eschatalogical utopia in Revelation is dwelling in a city. But the ancient texts reflect the battle between the nomads and the city dwellers, and this battle continues on to this day.

Thanks for this analysis and summary of the bible and the anti-civilization. I find that approaching passages about the Hebrew/Israelites from this lens to be really fascinating and enlightening.

My one questions from this post would be about the Numbers passage in which the Hebrews yearn for leeks, onions, fish and melons. Isn’t this a case of them pining for civilization while they are in the wilderness? Of course, in verse 10 God gets “exceedingly angry” because they are ignoring all the horrible parts of being enslaved. The whole chapter is about God getting really ticked off and unless we think that God just REALLY doesn’t like whining, it makes most sense as a thorough rebuke of Egyptian civilization, the dominant “civilizing” force in the region for hundreds of years. There’s probably a lot more there really, but that’s enough for now.

Also, for those of you interested in reading more about this conference, Ched Meyers wrote a report here:

http://unhewnstone.blogspot.com/2009/10/brief-report-on-conference.html (Thanks, Ric)

folknotions,
The christian story offers salvation for all of creation, and it waits in eager anticipation for us to “get it,” as it says in Romans. I have a deep spiritual connection to the earth, and realizing that the elders of our faith, including Jesus, hold that same sort of connection is really liberating to me, especially as more and more of the earth is destroyed each day to forward technological progress. So many think that the bible condones “domination,” yet it’s just the opposite: it demands that we be invloved in the work of restoration.
Does that answer your question?
In peace,
Rusty

May I ask why this approach to biblical ethics is appealing to you? Thanks.

“The Anarcho-Primitivist critique is a powerful ally in this process, and seems to be a fast growing movement among Christians.”

I have many things to share about your piece (as I wonder/wander myself) but just suffice to say that I do not see this growing here. Instead it’s a mega Charismatic-Pentecostal movement, but the gifts of the spirit don’t extend/are not recognized as a type of spirit that would call people to question the development of Ghanaian civilization into “modern” society.

It’s too bad because this is one of the many places on Earth that Christians could come to take part in a society that is relatively anarchic (police are irrelevant, you can do whatever you want, there are many affinity groups etc.) and where ancient wisdom resides.

The Rastafarians (as an OT-leaning African-centric Christian group) here are the closest to anarcho-primitivists but they are chastized greatly; they are seen as deviants and made fun of for marajauna usage.

Thanks again for this post. I’m still thinking about what all this means in the context here, and cross-contextually as we discuss something like this.

I support this taking root in the West, and I’m on the lookout for African anarcho-primitivists