"Christian anarchist" seems like a contradiction in terms. "God" is the ultimate coercive authority and the Church the ultimate hierarchy, and most of the evils of government have been done in the name of both.
I think we should be careful about the word Christian. It has different meanings to different people. Christian anarchism seems quite consistent with the words and actions of Jesus as written in the gospels. But if looked at from the perspective of American evangelical christianity or traditional Catholicism, yes it seems absurd.
There are also other conceptions of God beyond the coercive demiurge. Again I think we should be careful when throwing around words like God as though we all agree on the meaning.
> the word Christian. It has different meanings to different people.
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“All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus—that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since.”
It's been a while since I read him, but I believe Tolstoy, like Jesus (or for that matter, Brian), was pretty anti-Church. I mentioned him specifically because his justification for anarchism was all the love & peace & everything in common (or at least eye of the needle?) hippy biblical stuff.
The Buddha was also anti-Church, I believe. (and St. Francis was fonder of animals than his fellow clerics?)
There's an excellent conceit in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) in which the diagnosable mental disorders have their corresponding roles in society: the paranoid form the military, the narcissists the political class, etc. Hebephrenics provide their religious prophets.
Jesus was not anti-church, he founded the early Christian church and established Peter as its leader. Catholics are often heard saying to Protestants that God did not give his people a book, but he did give them a church.
The cleansing of the Temple isn't evidence that Jesus objected to combining spiritual with temporal power. Jesus didn't object to the existence of the Temple, he objected to its' corruption by the presence of the merchants and moneychangers. He was still traveling to Jerusalem and to the Temple, and he referred to it as "my Father's house." He was a Jew preaching to Jews and claiming to be the messiah of the Jews. All of that presupposes the legitimacy of the extant temporal Jewish hierarchy and the Temple itself as a holy site. By my reading, Jesus wasn't an anarchist, he was a reformist.
Also Matthew 16:18, where Jesus declares Peter as "the rock" upon which his church shall be built, is well known. You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_Peter
Although personally I would claim the modern church owes more to Paul (for better or worse) than Peter.
I'm not religious myself anymore, but try to keep an open mind to alternative ideas. My assumption is we still haven't figured out an optimal system...and may never escape bouncing from one idea to the other.
