CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM

Nearly forgotten until quite recently, Christian Socialism has played a vital role in life and on the American Left. Several of the most popular and widely read U.S. theologians of the first half of this century were outspoken Christian Socialists, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) above all. While rarely holding high party (or union) offices, Christian Socialists have served to connect radical ideas with sections of the working class—especially the

poor and racial minorities—and with a wide stratum of intellectuals

William James, Sr, was the fist prominent American to argue (in 1848, that fateful year) that the goals of Christianity and socialism are identical. Christians heavily populated the utopian socialist settlements across the contirent. But with a few exceptions, abolitionism absorbed and drained the reform energies of ‘mainstream northern churches at midcentury In 1672 a group of Bostonians led by the Con‘gregationalist Rev. Jesse H. Jones founded the Christian Labor Union and published the first ‘wo Christian Socialist periodicals, Equity and the Labor Balance. These institutions had faded by 1879

During the 1880s, a large number of crusading. ministers joined reform and radical movements. The vast majority of the Social Gospel advocates opposed radical ideologies But a minority of New England Social Gospel1s, including Jones, spread the evangel of Christian Socialism. W. D. P. Bliss, a Massa~ chusetts Episcopal pastor, became a promirent figure in the New England Knights of Labor, and later editor of the Dawn: A Maga2ine of Christian Socialism and Record of Social Progress. The reform writings of Richard T- Ely, and the utopian burst of activity following the publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, helped ministers such as Bliss develop both public interest and Christian approbation for a cooperative, spiritually inspired solution to the “Social Question.”

Christian Socialism (intermixed with Bellamy nationalism, Britsh-inspired Fabian socialism, and radical offshoots of Christian Science) had a special appeal to women reformers repelled by the classstruggle doctrines of the ‘generally patriarchal immigrant socialist milieu.

Several of the most prominent women leaders of the day, including Woman’s Christian Temprance Union leader Frances Willard and Civil War-era Sanitary Commision leader Mary Liv‘ermore, publicly announced themselves for a cooperative solution. Vida Scudder, English professor at Wellesley College with extended ‘experience in the settlement house movement, ‘would continue these themes of class reconcilation in religious understanding for decades into the twentieth century In 1901 Congregationalist_ minister George D. Herron (1862-1925) played a lead~ ing role in the convention that united various rival factions of the Socialist Party. As the Worker, a contemporary socialist weekly, noted, his selection as temporary chair of the party “was unanimous and satisfactory to all parties.... He steered the convention through some threatening breakers during the opening and most trying hours. ...” One of the most effective agitators of the day, he did much to bridge the gap between presumably “atheistic” immigrant socialists and fre~ quently evangelical American radical re~ formers

Although Herron lost his public position and his ministry due to a divorce scandal, the ranks of American-born socialists, especially in the Plains States and the Southwest, filled with churched and unchurched Christians.

While much socialist rhetoric (including that of Eugene V. Debs) turned upon Christian ‘metaphors, organized Christian Socialism had.

a special role to play. The Christian Socialist, published by the Reverend Edward Ellis Carr in Danuille, then Chicago, Illinois, achieved a circulation of 20,000, including 2,000 ministers, and led to the formation of the Christian SoCialis Fellowship (1906-17) with twenty-seven chapters and 1,500 members. The Christian Socialist, devoting special numbers to various denominations, shrewdly played to its appreciative audience. But it also took moral posi tions advanced even for the socialist move= ment.

Of these, its antiracism was easily the most important. Nearly all the early black soCalists of note were Christian ministers, such as George Washington Woodbey (1854-2), a San Diego Baptist, contributor to the Christian Socialist, and former slave. One of Woodbey's converts, George Slater, achieved special prominence. Pastor of the Zion Tabernacle in Chicago and active in that city’s Socialist branches, he was elected to the executive committee of the Christian Socialist Fellowship and made CSF Secretary for the Colored Race. Slater published several popular social= ist pamphlets, notably Blackmen, Strike for Liberty, and also a prosocialist monthly, the Western Evangel Rev. Carr, accusing a Socialist Party national figure of moral turpitude, ran afoul of the organization. Expelled and then restored by the national party, he was expelled again by the immigrant-dominated Chicago party branches. In any case, much of the Christian Socialist milieu left the SP in order to support the First World War, while a small section of young Christian intellectuals became socialists a a result of their wartime pacifist commitments. The ranks of religious-influenced rural and semirural Socialists, their newspapers re= pressed through government action and their faith shattered by the precipitous degline of the SP, turned quiescent or joined the farmer= labor movements active during the 1920s,

But in a diminished SP—its militantly atheistic wing now a part of the Communist movement—the prestige of Christian Socialism grew relatively. Former Presbyterian min= ister Norman Thomas, the party’s perennial presidential candidate from 1928 onward, im= parted a spiritualistic or moral tone to even the most economic-political message. Around.

Thomas ranged such institutions as the World Tomorrow, a highly influential monthly drawing the energies of Christian pacifists and veteran travelers through the impoverished colonial world. At the local level, many Socialist branches gained the active participation of clergy, especially during the Depression and.

the years shortly before the U.S. entry into World War Il Especially in the South, where a handful of Christian Socialists and Commu nists such as Claude and Joyce Williams, James Dombrowski, and Howard Kester headed important political institutions, the message car~ tied a strongly interracial gospel

For the broader Christian public, the works of Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr exerted significant influence. Never joining the SP, Rauschenbusch argued vigorously for the idea (of socialism and sometimes for public support of the party. Niebuhr, an editor of the World Tomorrow, founded in 1931 the Fellowship of Christian Socialists and served as editor of its publication, Radical Religion. A prolific writer, teacher, preacher, and activist, he resigned from the SP in 1940 in order to support armed resistance to fascism but remained a socialist until 1948, Considered thereafter to be a theological mentor of the Cold War neoconservatism, he returned to dissent with belated opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam.

His successors at the Union Theological Seminary published Christianity and Crisis, an influential monthly that bridged the religious gap between Old and New Left, Meanwhile, fone section of Christian Socialists, led in part by former New Haven SP luminary (and ClO chaplain) Willard Uphaus, militantly opposed the Cold War and sought to guide Christian Socialism toward Soviet-American reconciliation. Others, dedicated pacifiss, participated in antiwar and anti-Bomb activities and organizations such as the Fellowship for Reconciliation, Christian Socialists, as individuals, played @ notable role in the civil rights and 1960s antiwar movements, but remained ideologically in the background. With the collapse of the 1960s movements, they assumed greater importance in the 1970s, around such campaigns as the United Farmworkers’ grape boyott and the empowerment of women clergy.

By the later 1970s, they had become key backers of Third World support movements such as the North American Committee on Latin America, Their prestige and ideological larity arose with the forceful appearance of liberation theology movements in Latin Amer~ ica, Africa, Asia, and the Philippines. Christians for Socialism (1974-83), a network of activists, never achieved wide support. But Christian Socialist ideas found their way into major denominational publications, and fairly dominated such Left-leaning journals as Sojourners, the Witness, and Christianity and Crisis. The Democratic Socialists of America has maintained a Religion and Socialism Commis sion, and published the newsletter Religious Socialism. See also: Liberation Theology; Pacifism; Peace Movements; Soviet-American Friendship; Spiritualism; Thomas, Norman: World Tomorrow Paul Buhle, John Cort REFERENCES.

Cort, John, Christian Socialism. Maryknoll, NY.

(Orbis Press, 1988, Quint, Howard H. The Forging of American Socialism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953,