Communism failed. decisively. The Berlin Wall fell. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was torn asunder by the secession of numerous constituent republics. Reagan, Thatcher, and the free market system toppled Communism. China, while persisting in its repressive measures against religious and social dissidents, is rapidly accommodating itself to the global economy. This is the understandably universal metanarrative for the denouement of the struggle between capitalism and Communism in most nations. Applied Communism has been shown to operate with genocidal means to suppress internal dissent and as such is rightfully denigrated as no better than colonialism (whether practiced by capitalist democracies with imperial dreams or expansionist monarchies). Is a Marxist or socialist view of the world thereby discountable as entirely bereft of insight into the betterment of society or the role of applied faith for a Christian? This paper answers this question with a resounding “no.”
Christianity and socialism both pose radical worldviews for their adherents. In propagating a renewal of both views in “Christian Socialism,” I walk a very fine line between what twenty-first century Americans see as an increasingly conservative and imperialistic religious faith with a heritage of two millennia and a seemingly failed secular faith in the perfectibility of man that in two centuries has been thoroughly upstaged by democratic capitalism. So I promulgate a delicate proposition indeed. The complex dialectic I propose to navigate and perhaps even reify here was recognized and approached long before I was born. In 1920 a Cambridge University don placed side by side two seemingly contradictory statements on this issue.1 As a minister declared in lecture a century ago: “In their strictest sense Christianity and Socialism are irreconcilable.”2 In contradistinction, about five years later the official organ of the British Socialist Party proclaimed: “It is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion.”3 This article will – in a spirit of cooperation with my Revisions colleague and coadjutor in Christ John Montague – seek to present a fresh understanding of Christian Socialism, an understanding usable by college graduates in the twenty-first century.
It may be argued that this piece is the work of a dreamer, an idealist, of one who has no grasp for the dirty reality of international economies and human nature. Fair enough. There is no argument presented herein of a utopian belief in the perfectibility of men and women via redistribution of wealth or universal standards of education (apparently a view held by many American intellectuals). Nor does this article ignore or endorse genocidal “social leveling” by Communist regimes. A Yale Daily News columnist recently deplored the “bizarre preponderance of communist apparel” sported by prospective members of their Class of 2009 during their admit weekend. He found this “nothing short of disturbing.” “In eulogizing the symbols of communism,” he continued, “angstplagued teens, aspiring leftists and hipster poseurs celebrate a murderous ideology responsible for over 85 million deaths.”4 As stated before, the Christian Socialism I espouse has no allegiance to the militant secularism of applied Communism. Ask any of my friends; I seriously doubt any of them would claim I am a “hipster poseur,” though I undoubtedly have enough leftover teenage angst to be compared with the sorrowful young Werther.
This paper will seek to develop an argument in favor of Christian Socialism in a postmodern context by working within a clearly delineated dualistic framework. The first section will involve a loosely academic grounding of the historical rise of socialism in the Western world independent of Marxist influence and its advocacy of bloody revolutionary uprising to pit one social class against another. The second will be based on a more personal, evangelical Protestant reading of the New Testament.
Non-Marxist socialism as it arose in Britain and France and then crossed the Atlantic to the United States in the early– to mid-nineteenth century (in the shape of Fourierist utopian communities) was based on an antinomian Christian desire among perfectionist reformers. These reformers rejected the increasing societal competition posed by rampant capitalism in favor of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the communitarian practices of the early Christian church. French socialists “moved from [the] rational deism [of the French Enlightenment and Revolution] to Christianity” in the 1830s and 1840s. Their Christianity was “a democratic and a pragmatic morality, derived, in part, from artisan corporations, and seen as a vital base for fraternal association, which was their solution to the ills of society.”5 This civil religion – couched in terms of personal and communal faith within the context of close-knit communities that lived and worked together – echoed the concerns of British and American socialists regarding the problems posed by increasing individualism. “Christ was a proletarian ally” of early socialists “in the class struggle” according to a modern historian. Jesus the gentle carpenter – more than his fire-and-brimstone Old Testament Father – was adopted by gruff and grubby artisans as their patron in encouraging them to high standards of workmanship as well as dictating “the standards of personal conduct, the sense of fraternal brotherhood and responsibility, with condemnation of drunkenness, wife-beating, and so on.”6 Across the English Channel, British socialists voiced similar concerns and solutions in the burgeoning industrial cities. And hundreds of American reformers, fed up with the inequalities and unquenchable lust for gain that they saw running rampant in their own country, founded communitarian societies in upstate New York and the Midwest during the 1830s and 1840s.
In the summer of 1887, long after the dozens of Fourierist communes had fallen apart due to economic failure or outside criticism of their “free love” practices, a young Johns Hopkins graduate student named Woodrow Wilson wrote an essay he entitled “Socialism and Democracy.” Wilson (Princeton 1879) was responding to his dissertation advisor Richard T. Ely’s 1886 book The Labor Movement in America, and argued that the development of a socialistic impulse in a democratic state was a radical but not a revolutionary step. “It is only a[n] acceptance of the extremest logical conclusions deducible from democratic principles long ago received as respectable,” Wilson wrote. “For it is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost, if not quite, one and the same.” Wilson would move away from this position over the next decade, but he nevertheless had made his point that socialism could be viewed as the logical next step in a Whiggish view of the inevitability of human progress and the egalitarian impulse in American democracy. Wilson was the Southern son of a minister and a Calvinist, and by no means a social radical. Having made these academic – if dated – points, I will shift from an academic to a more exegetical stance.7
The most frequent comment I hear about socialism from contemporary evangelicals – after “But it doesn’t work” – is that help for the poor must be voluntary to count as stemming from one’s sense of Christian charity or love for those less (financially) fortunate than oneself. Laudable as this stance is in principle, in practice there is a powerful cultural force at work in America that keeps many evangelicals from making a real difference in the lives of the poor. That force, eloquently explained a century ago by sociologist Max Weber as the “Protestant [work] ethic,” has pervaded this “nation with the soul of a church” since its revolutionary founding. It has been sustained for the past two centuries by the conscious domination of the white middleclass. This work ethic leads to the assumption that it is easy to reach a comfortable standard of living and that anyone who fails to enter the middleclass is lazy and therefore unworthy of their help, and it has lulled many church communities into belief in a “health and wealth” gospel. Brought up both Asian and middleclass – a double dose of this work ethic – I recognize the value (dare I say virtue?) of hard work and sense of responsibility before God and family to earn one’s daily bread by the sweat of one’s brow. As a responsible citizen and a committed Christian, it would be irresponsible for someone of my upbringing to ignore the Apostle Paul’s exhortation that those who are unwilling to work should not expect to eat. But in a society where the wage gap between executives and workers continues to widen, and where the cultural belief that the wealthy should “give back” to society has degenerated to the point that Enron and similar scandals are no longer surprising, something is amiss.
As Jim Wallis of Sojourners and God’s Politics reminds us, the Old and New Testaments are replete with thousands of injunctions to care for the poor. In contrast, there are only a few references to homosexuality as a sin and one tenuous passage with regard to abortion. I have my own theory about American evangelicals’ historical tendency to focus on some external sin or group of sinners, thereby avoiding their own hypocrisies and besetting sins – the plank in their own eyes – but that is an argument for another time. We ought to be content with our wages, so long as they are enough to live on; a worker is worth his wages. John the Baptist preached in favor of a voluntary redistribution of wealth as pleasing to God, that “He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none.”8 The most poignant instance of Jesus’ anger remains his forceful clearing of the temple in Jerusalem for turning a house of prayer into a “den of thieves,” where profit is the god of choice.9 In our global economy in which profits exert a growing influence over business decisions that affect increasingly more people, we must ask ourselves whom we will serve: God or Mammon. We cannot serve two masters. After all, according to the parable, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven … strong words indeed, however interpreted. “Comfortable” is a deadly state by Christ’s lights, but it seems to be the watchword of many American evangelicals. We are called to lay up treasures in heaven by the way we love our neighbors and use the goods which we have been entrusted as stewards. This is the opposite of the rich fool who thought building larger storehouses for his multiplying possessions would ensure a long and happy life but who died and was called before the Judge that same night.10
I am all too familiar with G.K. Chesterton’s essay warning against the dark pall that would fall if socialism were to gain sway over Europe. A real and ominous successor to Communism with its own brand of oppression is festering in Europe’s crowded, jobless, and frustrated cities. I do not fear the darkness, for I know One who is the light of the world. As one who has been born again, I do not fear any “terrible mediocrity” or the “dragging down” of all people into shared misery in some zero-sum economic denouement caused by social leveling. In my mind, if everyone were made equal on an economic basis, it would bring out the true differences between Christians and non-believers—if there are any – about what is important in life. I call for Christians who can presently only conceive of socialism as something dead and/or threateningly unchristian to take a closer look at those least able to compete in the market economy. Is it just laziness, or are there other, cultural factors at work? And how, as a Christian, can you relate to your poorer neighbors? I ask at least that you would consider the words of Christ to “feed my lambs,” and ask yourselves if your society – if you yourselves – are effectively caring for “the least of my people” through our rampantly capitalistic society. I call for you as a Christian to think and live in a Christian manner, to do unto your neighbor as you would have him or her do unto you with the resources and talents God has placed at your disposal. The sixth chapter of Matthew – and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount more generally – forms the core of this Christian Socialist’s worldview, and uphold my firm belief in the importance of seeing other people as better than myself, their needs more pressing than my own.
This article was originally published in the Summer ’05 issue of Revisions, The Inaugural Issue.
- Charles E. Raven, Christian Socialism: 1848–1854 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1920), 1. [↩]
- Rev. Frederick William Bussell, Christian Theology and Social Progress: The Bampton Lectures for 1905 (London: Methuen and Co., 1907), 324. [↩]
- Socialist Party of Great Britain, Socialism and Religion (New York: Socialist Educational Society, 1911), 6. [↩]
- Keith Urbahn, “Radical Un-Chic: Think Before You Wear,” in Yale Daily News (April 20, 2005). [↩]
- Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 39. [↩]
- Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx, 41, 50. [↩]
- Woodrow Wilson, “Socialism and Democracy,” c. August 22, 1887, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966–94), V, 559–63. See also John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 83–85. [↩]
- See Luke 3:7–17. [↩]
- See Matthew 21: 12–14. [↩]
- See Luke 12:13–21. [↩]
