Are Anglicans Political Anabaptists?

A Neo-Anglican priest writes this at his page:

Since I became a Christian back in '97 I hear believers on occasion say stuff about returning to being a first century New Testament Church, to rediscovering the early church, etc etc.

Funny thing is most of them did not seem interested in surrendering political power, embracing potential persecution (even though it's an indisputable fact that the church booms under it), and returning to the way of peace soaked in love.

Instead it continues to seem repugnant among some to accept a non-Christian holding a political office here in America's secular government. Additionally there's quite frequently a knee jerk reaction of crying foul at the sight of perceived potential "persecution," and let us not forget the appetite for violence (gun rights, death penalty, war, etc.) that continues to grip the heart of many.

If we really wanna embrace the Jesus way... We have to let go of the American christian (intentionally lowercase) way.

Jesus doesn't conveniently fit in the right/left box... Nor should a Christian.

This is just such a huge birds nest of confusion that it's hard to know where to start unraveling it.  I'll start here, I guess:

First, why would any Anglican care about what free-church Evangelicals seeking to (re)create the "New Testament Church" think or say or do about anything?  We know the end of their unconsciously Harnackian experiment, and we want none of it.  All of Anglican divinity holds that the authority and interpretation of Holy Scripture is mediated to us through the Great Tradition.  We therefore look to the Fathers, Doctors and Divines of the Church for the answer of what and where the Church is, not the many millions of ecclesially rootless Evangelicals.  For Anglicans, Hooker provided the definitive methodology, and what's more, our Anglican Divines have, at least semi-authoritatively, spoken on such matters 

But our Neo-Anglican priest still has a bone to pick with it all.   If we are truly interested in being the early Church, he reasons, we will become, essentially, political Anabaptists.  The pacifistic and generally apolitical Anabaptists got the early Church right and most of us Anglicans have it wrong when it comes to matters of persecution, war, peace, guns, and the death penalty.  If we are truly interested being the true Church, we  will suffer persecution willingly, never take up arms, and never advocate state violence towards foreign adversaries and domestic criminals who commit capital crimes.   In so doing we will somehow manage to avoid "the right/left box" and be truly like Jesus.

What I find interesting every time I debate these young Neo-Anglican "Franciscans" is that when they start describing how their truly Jesus-like views transcend "the right/left box", it always ends up being something that strongly resembles the liberal-left's political worldview, which of course has dominated liberal mainstream Protestantism for nearly 100 years.  So the question is whether they are truly looking to the earliest centuries of the Church or to a worldview that is way more recent.  And foreign.

Our priest alludes to the fact that the early Church was pacifist.   What he conveniently fails to mention is the reason why it was pacifist, and as any number of tomes would inform him, it was pacifist not because it was devoted to a philosophy of pacifism per se.  Once the Church passed through the fires of Roman persecution and became the religion of the empire, she would go on to adopt in one form or another the Just War Doctrine of St. Augustine.  That doctrine entered into the stream of the Great Tradition and is why Anglicans such as C.S. Lewis and Nigel Biggar have argued that "Christian pacifism" is an ideology that is incoherent, dangerous and ultimately unscriptural.  (See the video here for the totality of Lewis' argument.)

Our priest also doesn't seem to notice the analogy we have from church history on the question of chiliasm. Just as a few of the earliest Fathers embrace some kind of pacifistic practice, a few actually taught chiliasm as a doctrine.  But the Church came to reject the chiliastic eschatology, just as surely as she rejected pacifism.  Just because something is very early does not mean it is necessarily correct.  The Church must judge. 

For those interested in what I have written on this matter here at OJC, here are links to my Christian Pacifism archive and my Christian Resistance and Praxis archive.