practicing anarchist utopia at church camp

A year ago today, I wrote a post describing the difficult time I’d had that year attending a local “Reunion” (family camp) put on by Community of Christ. That reminded me of a post I’ve been meaning to write for months about this year’s much more positive experience at Reunion, so it’s time to get those thoughts out of my head and into a post.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve read a fair amount of anarchist fiction, and I’ve found that I like it. A lot. I don’t know that I’m ready to become a committed anarchist in the real world, but I love the way that anarchist fiction does two things: first, it dares to imagine a better world than the one we live in; second, it believes that human beings are capable of collectively creating this better world—and without being forced to do. One of my favorite imaginings in this genre of fiction comes from Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, where Shevek (the main character, from the anarchist moon Anarres) explains to some colleagues that in his home, everyone pitches in to take care of undesirable tasks like cleaning up waste (I can’t remember if this is human waste or industrial waste or something else… I really need to get a copy of this book so I can reference it for posts like this).

Shevek is a gifted physicist—this is the reason that he’s left Anarres, to meet with some other physicists working in a similar area—and he acknowledges that it would probably make for a more efficient society if he did physics all the time and there were a corps of professional waste-cleaners that were allowed to become experts in that area. As he explains to his colleagues, though, society on Anarres sees inefficiency as less problematic than forcing particular groups of people to be entirely responsible for undesirable jobs and tasks and allowing privileged physicists to keep doing their work without ever having to get their hands dirty. Shevek lives up to this throughout the narrative of the book, once taking off time from his academic career to do agricultural labor in the wake of a drought. (It helps that there’s something of a toxic academic environment on Anarres—LeGuin isn’t simplistic in her depiction of anarchism in this book).

I first listened to The Dispossessed in October 2024, and I’ve been thinking about this narrative detail ever since. I am very aware that there are things that I am good at and enjoy and things that I am not good at and do not enjoy. I am also very aware that many of the things that I am good at and enjoy are upper class, privileged pursuits (writing, reading, tinkering with websites) and that many of the things that I am not good at and do not enjoy (yardwork, cleaning bathrooms, home maintenance) are the sort of things that upper class, privileged people can pay others to take care of for them. When I work on campus, doing my teaching, research, and administration, I sometimes think about the folks who come by to empty our trash cans and who keep our classrooms and bathrooms clean. They get paid less than I do to make the work that I do possible.

The Dispossesed offers an alternate way of organizing our society, where I take breaks from my privileged academic work to make sure that necessary, less-privileged tasks also get done—and that people don’t get locked into undesirable tasks so that I can live my pretty cushy life. I like that idea a lot, and I think that it’s a society that’s worth working toward. When I’m really honest with myself, though, I have to admit that I don’t know if I really want to live in that world. I would rather read, write, and do research than clean bathrooms. I find myself appealing to the temptation of efficiency, saying that there are fewer people who can do my job than could clean bathrooms, and so wouldn’t it be better for society for me to contribute my gifts where they are most needed? Writing that makes me cringe, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a thought that does pass through my head.

This year, attending my mission center’s Reunion camp, I thought a lot about how this experience allows us to practice these kinds of anarchist utopias that don’t exist in the real world. We are all expected to step up to serve meals, clean bathrooms, and pitch in to pay the bills. I tried practicing that utopia while at camp this year.

It didn’t always go well. I didn’t enjoy cleaning the shared bathrooms, I often cleaned what I wanted to clean and skipped over other things that probably needed doing, and I grumped about the folks who didn’t seem to be pitching in. I made sure to pitch in enough money to cover my family’s time at camp, but I didn’t reach deeper into my pockets to help cover the costs for folks I know make less money than I do. I appreciate that LeGuin’s Anarres isn’t a perfect anarchist utopia, but I recognize that our Reunion fell short of even the (fictional) standard of that story.

I did feel, though, that Reunion gave me a chance to practice the kind of better world that I would like to see emerge on a broader scale on this planet. I feel like I got slightly better at living that anarchist utopia (even if I worry that I’ve backslid in the weeks since). The retired Community of Christ apostle Andrew Bolton has repeatedly (though I can only find this example, which isn’t as strong as some of the other comparisons I’ve heard him make) described Reunion as a taste of “Zion,” which is my faith tradition’s way of describing a quasi-anarchist utopia that we hope will emerge among humanity. I think he’s right.

• Community of Christ
• Reunion
• camping
• Jacques Ellul
• Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Dispossessed
• efficiency
• privilege
• anarchism