Anarchist Anabaptist: Cody Cook’s Journey to Faith and Libertarianism

My journey to faith and my journey to libertarianism ran on parallel tracks.

My mother’s family was nominally Christian, but my dad’s was Southern Baptist. I was baptized in my grandma’s Southern Baptist church at a young age, but self-selected out of theism altogether by the time I hit double digits. There were a few reasons for that. In particular, I thought their traditional view of hell as eternal conscious torment suggested a God who was too cruel and petty to be believable as the God of love who cared about us like a father.

As a teenage atheist, I became more aware of political ideology. I took on a generalized anti-authoritarian stance that kept me bouncing back and forth between Constitutionalism and radical leftism. I grew out my hair and started smoking pot — not because I really liked marijuana, but for “political reasons” — it was associated with the 1960s counterculture that I was growing enamored with. In my early teens, I read memoirs of Black Panthers and Yippies like Bobby Seale and Abbie Hoffman. I took school photos in plain white t-shirts on which I had scrawled political sentiments like “FREE MUMIA.”

The other side of my anti-authoritarian counter-culture pendulum swing put me into a vaguely “libertarian” space, though I’m not sure how long it was before I finally heard the word used. I watched conspiracy theory videos from Alex Jones that I found online. I burned copies on DVD of a bunch of them so I could share them with friends. I was impressed with what he did and wanted to be like him, so I started making my own videos and documentaries. On more than one occasion I took my video camera to police drug checkpoints to read them the fourth amendment.

In short, I was a headstrong kid with a lot of anti-authoritarian conviction but no clear ideology.

As I approached the end of high school, I became open to God again, which happened for a few different reasons. One component of this change was that a Seventh Day Adventist friend told me about their view of hell – a perspective called annihilationism where the lost aren’t tormented forever in flames but are instead put out of existence. I read the Bible with him and became convinced that this was indeed what it actually taught.

When I finally committed myself to Christianity, I dove in head first. I read the Bible regularly. I discovered knowledgeable preachers and apologists who were making their recordings available online and listened to my favorite ones over and over. I also dug deep into church history. The group that fascinated me most was the 16th century Anabaptists. Unlike the Southern Baptists I knew who went all in for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Anabaptists were pacifists. I wasn’t sure if I was one yet, but I liked the change of pace. They also believed strongly in freedom of religion, unlike the Catholics and Protestants of their time who only believed in freedom for themselves. As a sign of their belief in voluntary faith, they only baptized professing adults who were ready to commit to following Christ even if it meant death. It often did. Re-baptizing adults who had already been “baptized” as infants became a capital crime in a number of the places where the movement flourished. I didn’t live close to any churches with Anabaptist roots, but the more I learned about them, the more I felt that I had found my faith tradition.

Due to my growing obsession with Christianity, I decided to go to Bible college so I could learn more. A couple people directed me to a conservative Methodist college called God’s Bible School. The men were required to cut their hair short and be clean shaven and the women couldn’t cut their hair at all and weren’t allowed to wear pants. This seemed pretty weird to me, but classes were affordable and I knew that I would get to learn more about the Bible and church history. It was also at God’s Bible School that I was first exhorted to pray for the president. At that time it was George W. Bush – a man whom I had hated deeply. That experience changed me and my attitude toward those whom I disagreed with or thought were immoral.

Around this time I befriended a few Objectivists – atheists who followed the libertarian-oriented philosophy of Ayn Rand. They got me thinking about libertarianism as a complete political philosophy as opposed to something I could pull bits and pieces from to create my vaguely anti-authoritarian worldview.

I learned about the Non-Aggression Principle, the ethical centerpiece of libertarian ethics which holds that it’s always wrong to initiate force against a peaceful person. It made a lot of sense to me, but I carved out a few exceptions for things like “free” healthcare which I thought the government ought to be providing. Slowly, those dominos fell too as I learned about how a free market can more efficiently meet people’s needs than a centralized state can without having to steal money through taxes.

Libertarian anarchism gave me one practical way to express the New Testament idea that Christ is Lord and Caesar is not–that while Christians should find ways to peacefully accommodate themselves to the secular order in which they find themselves, our primary allegiance is to Christ to the exclusion of any which would seek to contradict it. Insofar as we do speak truth to secular power, it should be to promote an order which protects our neighbors instead of abusing and dominating them. It also was consistent with research I had been doing (summarized in my book Fight the Powers) regarding what the Bible has to say about the relationship between political and demonic powers.

I now attend and occasionally teach at a local non-denominational church, but throughout my growth in libertarianism, Anabaptist Christianity has been a constant companion. While acknowledging a limited role for governance in deterring aggressive criminals like thieves and murderers, the early Anabaptists practiced separation from the state and its violence, seeing it as inappropriate for followers of Jesus. Furthermore, far from looking to the state to provide for them, Anabaptists created voluntary communities of mutual support and sharing that worked well then and still work today.

For me, libertarianism serves as a clarifying counterpart to Anabaptist Christian teaching about the role of government. Anabaptists preceded the classical liberal tradition by about two hundred years, so their leaders didn’t generally seek to answer the questions that later libertarian theorists would formulate. But where Anabaptism’s earliest leaders wrote about voluntary religion, very limited functions for government, and a general distrust of the state, libertarianism provided some logical application for what these 16th century religious radicals envisioned in the secular, political realm while still respecting the Anabaptists’ biblical distinction between the church and the world.

The biblical prophet Jeremiah provided a model for Christian engagement with government that sums up well my approach as a libertarian Anabaptist Christian. In Jeremiah 29, the prophet delivered a message from God to the Jewish exiles in Babylon. As exiles, they were called to maintain a healthy distance from Babylonian culture–Babylon’s gods were not their own just as Babylon’s king was not their own. Nevertheless, Jews in Babylon were encouraged to build houses, work for a living, and be prosperous. Indeed, they were to “seek the peace of the city where [God] sent [them] into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its peace [they would] have peace” (v. 7).

One day God would end the exile and bring them home, but in the meantime they must maintain a careful balance between keeping a healthy spiritual distance from Babylon and seeking the well-being of themselves and their pagan neighbors. Libertarian Anabaptism maintains this balance by not becoming complicit in the violence of the state, but indeed speaking truth to power by calling it away from the warmongering, aggression, and economic central planning which contradicts what makes for peace in a society.

This account is modified from one given in Cody Cook’s The Anarchist Anabaptist, now available from the Libertarian Christian Institute.

Source: https://libertarianchristians.com/2025/02/05/anarchist-anabaptist-cody-cooks-journey-to-faith-and-libertarianism/