The first paper in this volume, by Benjamin Pauli, examines a group perhaps not unfamiliar to those with an interest in anarchist history: the Catholic Worker community. Founded in the United States by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the early 1930s, in Pauli’s analysis the group exemplifies the seeming tension at the heart of the overlap between religious ideas and anarchist politics: reconciling a religious faith apparently weighted down by a history of authoritarianism, with a politics whose first principle is a repudiation of hierarchy. Viewing the Catholic Worker movement through the lens of ’exemplarity’, Pauli sees in Day and Maurin’s efforts to offer leadership through the power of example rather than coercion, an intriguing model of political action directly inspired by an interpretation of central figures in the Christian pantheon. Rather than its Catholicism mutilating its anarchism, Pauli sees the Catholic Worker’s religious attachments as ’enhancing’ its anarchism, a reading that, he contends, is important even to those anarchist theorists who regard the claims of religion with scepticism.
In his contribution, Ruy Blanes similarly investigates how a specific historical moment in the history of Christianity, and a particular cultural manifestation of organised religious practice, was imbued with essentially anarchistic values. The Tokoist Church, which rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s in Angola as it became a key actor in the fight against Portuguese colonialism, continued this oppositional role as a critique of the country’s post-independence People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government. Offering a history of Simão or Simao Toko and his followers, Blanes examines the problems associated with peremptory rejection of religion that is characteristic of many anarchists, when the religious group itself initially embodied many anarchist principles: a commitment to horizontalism, a communal approach to leadership, faith in the powers of mutualism, and a burning desire to fight the forces of colonialism. At the same time, Blanes traces the process of 'hierarchization' that confronted the Tokoist movement, examining how these early principles were co-opted, and now often serve as fetters to 'processes of ideological and institutional innovation'.
Just as Blanes' contribution looks to the illumination of a fascinating but relatively unknown history as a means of interrogating
