Therefore when we take any part in government by voting for legislative, judicial and executive officials we make these men our arm by which we cast a stone and deny the Sermon on the Mount. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. It is not by the poor test of numbers that righteousness can gain its deserved respect in the world. It is not by getting into places of worldly power and emolument, that Christians are to promote human welfare. It is not by fighting with carnal weapons, and wielding the instruments of legal vengeance, that they can hope to strengthen the bonds of moral restraint.
Majorities often decree folly and iniquity.
Power oftener corrupts its possessor, than benefits the powerless. The real power which restrains the world is moral power , acting silently and unostentatiously within and upon the soul. Ballou, Non-Resistance and Government. We must repudiate one of the two, either Christianity with its love of God and one's neighbor, or the state and its armies and wars. My idea of God was not an authority whom I obeyed like a monarch but a principle of good as laid down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which I interpreted in day by day decisions as the forces of the state came in conflict with those ideals. - Ammon Hennecy, Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.