It seems nothing has escaped analog media’s tsunami rennaissance. For someone my age it can feel almost as if the brief window of digital tyranny never even happened. I grew up enamored with my grandmother’s vinyl collection, and by the time I got my first job, I was dropping whole $80 paychecks on record-hauls. My introduction to Susan Sontag came in the form of a beat-up paperback copy of Against Interpretation which I nicked from a coffee shop, and I still treasure my cover-less French-English copy of Les Fleurs du Mal (also nicked, but from my high school art classroom). Now the restorationist fever has reached the Christian-Anarchist milieu, with a flurry of new zines about radical Christianity. As Abby Rampone, co-founder and editor of Left Catholic zine put it, “I love print. There’s something magical about how tangible it is. It feels more rooted in something.”
Fortunately for radical Christian ephemera-lovers, The Anvil Library isn’t going to let the zines of yesteryear crumble into dust without a fight. The website, plastered with old-school collages, aims “to provide a platform for marginalized voices to be heard and to ensure that their stories of resistance are shared and not forgotten.” Anyone can peruse the library’s growing collection of print zines — dating all the way back to the ’60’s — via scans. Most importantly, they can reproduce and distribute them as God intended thanks to downloadable PDFs and, in my case, ten cents per black and white page printing at the public library. They’re all free by the way.
Anvil’s existence is quite appropriately owed to the very same DIY culture it nurses today. Growing up in conservative rural Florida, Anvils’ founder – who requested to remain anonymous – encountered Christianity’s radical strands through the DIY grapevine. They went to a Christian bookstore to hang up a poster promoting their Christian hardcore band’s first gig, but felt shy about not buying anything. They ended up going home with a copy of Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution which, according to Anvil’s founder, laid on their bedroom floor for more than a year before ever being read.
Eventually, the hungry teenager picked up Irresistible Revolution, and it “blew” their mind. After hunting down compatriots and mentors on MySpace and other aught-y online spaces, the founder made one very consequential connection: a friend who brought them a few zines from PAPA Fest — a flash-in-the-pan Anabaptist happening circa 2008 — which ignited their definitive passion for DIY print.
“I was like ‘this is so awesome’ — I lived by those things, I’d pass them around to my friends, scan them and turn them into PDFs,” the founder of Anvil said. Already an endangered species, these intentionally ephemeral items were hard to come by in the early days of digital media’s ascendance. The founder of Anvil’s legwork quickly became a communal asset.
“I’d share them with other Christian anarchists and they’d be like ‘how did you get this, I’ve never seen this before’. I realized that this was information that people want but they don’t know that it’s out there,” said Anvil’s founder.
Somewhere down the analog rabbithole, the founder came across the 2000’s version of A Pinch of Salt by Keith Hebden. That lucky find opened up a whole new world of Christian zinestership, and another level of urgency to the work.
“I realized he’d revitalized an earlier zine from the 80’s, and when I got scans of those they would reference other publications that were active at the time,” they said. “All these magazines were circulating in the same movements and communities — from the U.S and the U.K to South Africa and India.”
Though the collection was years in the making — and still frayed by “a ton of loose ends” — The Anvil Library’s official online presence launched this year, and the original community-building ethos of the founder’s early enthusiasm remains the Library’s charism. In fact, the typical connotations of the word “archive” are anathema to the Library’s mission, which could be called anti-archival, where information is recovered and distributed, rather than stored and guarded.
“Archives set the tone and direction for what is deemed as acceptable and worthy of being preserved,” they said. “Archives therefore serve as repositories of knowledge, but also as fields of power.”
By its own admission, knowledge is power, but Anvil’s focus moves beyond the mere preservation of information toward what Anvil’s founder calls “memory making” — which they hope to democratize with their curatorial approach. Though the library does concern itself with a radical Christian response to the broader culture, it specifically pursues a prophetic remembering of Christianity itself, something which progressive Christianity tends to avoid in its own self-treatment.
Regarding such self-treatment, Anvil’s founder said that discussions of pivotal movements and figures in Christian social justice history “typically center on the Who and Why…distancing these people from their deliberate risks and strategies. The Anvil Library hopes to highlight the What and How.”
Anvil’s founder alluded to the relative lack of attention paid to Dorothy Day’s grave misgivings about the Catonsville Nine’s action to exemplify how radical movements and their figureheads are posthumously hagiographized. The myth-making of activism often off-loads the messy realities of organizing in time and space, but this is exactly the sort of information which might prove most useful to future generations of resistors. Anvil’s focus on the difficult details of living discipleship finds expression in The Young Lord’s “People’s Church” action. After repeatedly asking East Harlem’s First Spanish Methodist Church to open their unutilized space for the Young Lord’s community programs, the Lord’s decided to occupy the church and proceed with breakfast as usual. Mayhem ensued, but as Young Lord’s New York State Chairman, Felipe Luciano, told that Church’s congregants: “Man, [Jesus] didn’t have as much patience as the Young Lords are having. He actually went into a church and beat them!” Luciano’s dosing-them-with-their-own-medicine approach is one of the Library’s chief inspirations.
Anvil’s founder told me, “Though The Young Lords were not a Christian organization…they used the church’s own belief system to hold it to account.” They continued, “By better understanding their actions…we can be better equipped to understand our own embeddedness in Empire and imagine new ways of resisting.” This recalibration is especially relevant in the United States today, as we face down the Goliath of Project 2025, and the “fascist creep” which is starting to look more like an onslaught. Anvil’s concern with tactics is the prerequisite for substantive resistance, and a high priority for those searching for repertoires of resistance against right-wing aggression.
But Anvil’s focus on Christian tactics on the left is especially crucial, as our ideals notoriously fail to materialize. Eric Martin’s seminal book The Writing on the Wall: Signs of Faith Against Fascism, offers a devastating case-study of what happens when the church fails to “imagine new ways of resisting.” The book grapples mostly with Martin’s time in Charlottesville during the Summer of Hate, and its most painful chapter conveys the limp and lethal quality of much progressive Christianity. Martin recounts his and his co-organizers’ partial complicity in the brutal attack on Emily Gorcenski and others on Aug. 11, 2017, when the security of the Church they were gathered in failed to admit the group despite them begging for help. Rather, Martin’s group, Congregate Charlottesville, psyched themselves up by singing “This Little Light of Mine,” completely unaware that Gorcenski and her friends were being doused with mace and lighter fluid at the same moment. In The Writing on the Wall, Martin — a Catholic — eviscerates the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ craven 2017 pastoral letter on race, “Open Wide Our Hearts,” and goes a long way toward critiquing Christianity’s lazy defense of non-violence as the idolatry of civility. Ultimately, The Writing on the Wall is more a traumatized reckoning than a liberatory declaration. The author concludes that he has “no program for this seeing, and we as a Church and a nation certainly don’t either.”
What then does a Christian anti-fascism look like? That is precisely the question which Anvil — though not directly tackling — provides us the raw materials to address. In the Autumn/Winter 1988 issue of A Pinch of Salt, we learn about the mutual-aid work of Nicaraguan mothers in Matagalpa whose children were killed by contras. They build houses, have a sewing co-op, and work land. We are told that for them the “meaning of Christmas is very acute,” as so many of them entered that Christmas grieving their children — including one woman whose daughter’s head and legs were cut off. Perhaps most instructively, from the Winter 2009 issue of the South Pacific Christian Anarchist’s zine we receive a breakdown of how exactly a teacher, a farmer, and a Catholic priest broke into the Waihopai spy base, punctured the conspicuous balloons with sickles, and turned the tide of popular opinion against the installation.
For those of us who hope to resist and testify with integrity and imagination, these are the sorts of resources we cannot do without — the hard-won lessons of saints-gone-by-but-always-with-us that constitute a sacred tradition. Lessons hallowed by the countless hands through which they’ve passed, and to which we owe the work of our own hands.
Jeromiah Taylor is a Catholic writer and activist living in Wichita, Kansas
Photo by FreeProjectPhoto at Morguefile.com
