polity
Copyright © Anthony A.J. Williams 2022
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First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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In June 2020 then-US President Donald Trump staged a photo-op outside Washington DC’s St John’s Episcopal Church. Amid the Black Lives Matter protests, which had engulfed Washington and other inner cities since the racist murder of George Floyd a week previously, Trump walked from the White House to the church building, held aloft a Bible for the assembled press, and then walked back again.1 Trump’s aim in this ‘religious performance’ was to signal his faith commitment and Christian credentials to a voter base of white evangelicals.2 Predictably, many of these – three-quarters of whom would cast their vote for Trump that November – were delighted with the president’s performance.3 One such, a Republican candidate for the Florida Senate, described scenes of joy as his family watched Trump on TV: ‘My mother just shouted out, “God give him strength! He’s doing a Jericho walk!” … My mother started crying […] she started speaking in tongues […] I thought, look at my president! He’s establishing the Lord’s kingdom in the world.’4 Encapsulated in this one example is all we know – or think we know – about the relationship between Christianity and politics.
Yet, not everybody was impressed with Donald Trump’s religious signalling. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, led the denunciations.
I just want the world to know, that we in the diocese of Washington, following Jesus and his way of love […] distance ourselves from the incendiary language of this President. We follow someone who lived a life of nonviolence and sacrificial love. We align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others […] Let me be clear: the President just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.5
A statement by the Episcopal bishops of New England also criticised Trump’s ‘disgraceful and morally repugnant’ actions, reaffirming the church’s mission to ‘serve our Lord Jesus Christ’s higher purpose: to extend love and mercy and justice for all, and especially for those whose life, liberty, and very humanity is threatened by the persistent sin of systemic racism and the contagion of white supremacy’.6 This is an entirely different interaction between Christianity and politics than the one many of us have come to expect.
The critical responses to Trump’s photo-op and the positioning of the church as an ally to the poor, the oppressed, and the mistreated are not an aberration or an anomaly. The Episcopalian bishops of Washington DC and New England, and others who spoke out, represent a long tradition of socialist and radical religion. The link between the (white) evangelical church of the United States and the economically neo-liberal, socially conservative agenda of the Republican Party should not be assumed to be the default setting for Christian political thought and action. The bishops’ intervention reminds us that many Christians have taken socially liberal or progressive positions. Many others have adopted left-wing, socialist critiques of capitalism and have sought a world in which laissez-faire individualism is replaced with a commitment to co-operation, collectivism and economic equality. In the pages that follow we examine this tradition, the Christian Left.
Despite theological variety – there are Christians of the Left from all denominations and theological traditions – all the movements and individuals considered in these pages share the characteristic that, at least in theory, they have drawn their radical or socialist views from the Bible, church teaching, and Christian history. The Christian Left does not see a commitment to co-operative, equality, social justice and liberty as an optional extra to the Gospel or as principles which Christians should only apply if, at some stage, they turn their attention to politics, but rather as the core of the Christian message itself. That God created the world and gave it to humanity – whether the Genesis account is understood literally or figuratively – proves that it is not for a few to own and exploit the natural resources of the world or oppress others with their privilege and dominant perspective. The prelapsarian world of the Garden of Eden was a place of co-operation and equality – ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?’ – as well as a situation in which everything was done justly and God’s children enjoyed perfect liberty.
The Exodus account – so crucial for theologies of liberation – was God breaking into history, bringing liberty to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. The Egyptian rulers and slave-owners are made to represent the capitalist class, the global centre, the one per cent, the white supremacists, the patriarchy. God chooses to identify rather with the exploited. The rest of the Old Testament bears witness to the freedom with which God sets his people free – the land laws of Israel, such as the year of jubilee, are designed to prevent those who have recognised the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man from slipping back into unequal, oppressive relationships with one another:
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.
You shall not oppress your neighbour or rob him. The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.
You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbour.
(Leviticus 19:10–11, 13–15)
The prophets who followed – ‘fiery publicists of the description we should now call Socialists or Anarchists’, according to UK Labour Party founder James Keir Hardie – were fierce in their denunciation of Israel’s failure to measure up to this standard.7 ‘Woe to those who devise wickedness […] They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance’ (Micah 2:1a, 2). ‘But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream’ (Amos 5:24).
This ‘prophetic-liberating tradition’, as feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether referred to it, reaches its culmination in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.8 In the Christian Left understanding of the Gospel, Christ comes to proclaim and to inaugurate a new order in which economically and socially oppressive relationships are abolished, the first become last, and the world is turned upside down. ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’, sings Mary upon hearing the news of the miraculous conception. ‘He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty’ (Luke 1:46, 51–3). The British Anglo-Catholic Stewart Headlam regarded this Magnificat as ‘the hymn of the universal revolution’, ‘the Marseillaise of humanity’, the heralding of God’s Kingdom of righteousness and justice upon the earth.9 This Kingdom, those on the Christian Left argue, is not a distant eschatological promise – ‘pie in the sky when we die, by and by’ – but, as exemplified in Christ, something to be fought for and won in the here and now.
Christ – the lowly carpenter, Jesus of Nazareth – befriended the poor and the outcast, acknowledging the worth and dignity of those crushed and oppressed by the selfish and individualistic world. He warned his followers not to seek material gain – ‘You cannot serve God and money’ (Matthew 6:24) or, in the more familiar King James translation, ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon’ – but rather to love and to serve others as themselves (Matthew 22:39). The followers of Christ were not to lord it over their companions, nor to place burdens on each other, for they were to regard one another as brothers and sisters (Matthew 23:4–12). The Sermon on the Mount, in which Christ raises up the poor and the meek and the peaceable, is, according to Keir Hardie, ‘full of the spirit of pure Communism’.10 Christ’s radical, revolutionary mission is summed up, it is argued, in the synagogue sermon in which the liberative nature of the Old Testament year of jubilee is explained and applied: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18–19). ‘In the Bible,’ maintains Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, ‘Christ is presented as the one who brings us liberation […] Christ makes man truly free, that is to say, he enables man to live in communion with him; and this is the basis for all human brotherhood.’11
Christ’s death, in this understanding, was a result of his radical mission, which was opposed by the religious and political authorities of his day. Labour Party leader George Lansbury declared Christ to be ‘the greatest revolutionary force of His times’, ‘the lonely Galilean – Communist, agitator, martyr – crucified as one who stirred up the people and set class against class’.12 Theologian Robyn J. Whitaker, responding to Donald Trump, links the death of Christ to systemic racial injustice, describing Jesus as ‘a brownskinned Jew killed by the Roman State’.13 The folk singer Woody Guthrie summed up this perspective in his 1940 song ‘Jesus Christ’:
Jesus Christ was a man who travelled through the land
A hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, ‘Give your money to the poor’,
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.
When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what He did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
This song was written in New York City
Of rich man, preacher, and slave
If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.14
There are certainly questions arising from this summary of a Christian Left biblical theology, particularly from a theologically (but not necessarily politically) conservative perspective. An understanding of God’s absolute holiness and the sinfulness of people is absent, as consequently is an understanding of how the sinner can be reconciled to God. The substitutionary theory of the atonement, supported by two millennia of church history and a plain reading of the Bible – ‘that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures’ (1 Corinthians 15:4b) – has been replaced. In a justifiable attempt to broaden the scope of the Gospel beyond individual piety, the Gospel itself has arguably been pushed aside in favour of economic collectivism and social liberation.
It would be an anachronism to attribute the term ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ to movements active long before modern political ideologies began to develop throughout the long nineteenth century. The term ‘radical’, being less precise, can be employed more freely. In any case, those on the Christian Left can point to a long church tradition of collectivism and social conscience – we might use the term proto-socialism – to show that their position is no postmodern novelty. The collectivism recorded in Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:44–5; 4:32, 34–5) is seen as the first fruits of a new order of society, the application of Christ’s denunciations of selfishness and materialism, the immediate consequence of the ministry of the Holy Spirit which began at Pentecost; it was the realisation of brotherhood and justice. The church community represented not a disparate conglomeration of individuals but, as the Apostle Paul described it, a body of many members all working towards the same goal (1 Corinthians 12:12–27). In this community ‘[t]here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). These truths are reflected in the sacraments of the church, especially communion, which speaks of collective unity and togetherness.
Radical and socialist Christians often accuse the institutional church of not living up to this grand creed, at the same time as noting the individuals and the movements that have. Samuel E. Keeble, the British Wesleyan Methodist, quotes freely from the early church fathers, first pointing to the words of Tertullian: ‘We who mingle in mind and soul have no hesitation as to fellowship in property.’ Cyprian is then quoted, commanding that Christians should ‘imitate the equality of God in the common gifts of nature, which the whole human race should equally enjoy’. ‘The unequal division of wealth,’ writes Ambrose of Milan, ‘is the result of egoism and violence.’15 Ambrose is also quoted by the American Catholic John C. Cort: ‘God has ordered all things to be produced so that there should be food in common for all, and that the earth should be the common possession of all. Nature, therefore, has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few.’16 Keeble refers to the warnings of Augustine of Hippo Regius about private property: ‘Let us, therefore, my brethren, abstain from the possession of private property, or from the love of it if we cannot abstain from the possession of it.’17 Augustine’s condemnation of economic injustice is, says Cort, ‘the cornerstone of Christian socialism’.18
Radical movements of the late medieval and early modern periods are also co-opted into this account of a radical tradition. The peasants’ uprisings of fourteenth-century England and sixteenth-century Germany, including figures such as John Wycliffe, John Ball and Thomas Muntzer, are held up as examples of prophetic opposition to the corruption of state and church, as is the Diggers movement of the seventeenth century, which declared the earth a ‘Common Treasury’ for all mankind.19 Denominational differences account for whether the precapitalist guild economy and the monasteries of Roman Catholic Europe, or the modernising zeal of the magisterial reformers – Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli – are held up as part of the back-story of religious socialism but, in either case, the social conscience and opposition to economic exploitation of Catholics such as Thomas Moore and Protestants such as Hugh Latimer are cited by way of proof that Christianity has not always gone hand-in-hand with the spirit of capitalism.
These movements are just some of those making up a thread of radicalism, which underpinned the American and French revolutions and informed the liberal and socialist ideologies that developed throughout the long nineteenth century. Radical movements were often secular in nature, such as the attempt of the French Revolution to depose Christianity and install in its place a state religion devoted to the worship of Reason, possibly in an attempt to fulfil the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract.20 Yet there was always a religious component, calling attention to a message of brotherhood, collectivism, equality, justice and liberty, which had seemingly been forgotten by both secular radicals and the conservative-minded established churches. These movements constitute both the prehistory and philosophical foundation of the Christian Left. The term Christian Left should not be taken to signify a mirror image of the US religious Right. Rather, the phrase is here used to encompass broad and disparate political-theological trends which may be summed with the terms radical and socialist. This, as we shall see, encompasses many different movements and ideological positions.
This book considers the Christian Socialism of the UK; the religious socialism of continental Europe; the Social Gospel, civil rights and black liberation movements, and ‘red-letter’ evangelicalism of the United States; the liberation theology of Latin America, as well as of Africa and the Middle East; feminist, womanist and LGBT+ theologies of liberation. Some of these focused more on economic socialism or social democracy; others on progressive, intersectional or identarian politics. Each movement is itself diverse, and there are many others outside the scope of these pages, which have made their own significant contributions. One of the things the author has discovered in studying radical and socialist Christianity is that there are always movements and individuals that are accidentally overlooked or not given the consideration they perhaps deserve. Some readers may be disappointed to find that movements or persons with which they are familiar have been omitted or neglected. As John Cort commented upon beginning his own account of Christian Socialism, ‘[i]n a book of this ambitious, arrogant scope, it is inevitable that much will be missed or neglected’.21 Nonetheless, this book provides a concise and accessible introduction to the key traditions of the radical and socialist Christian Left.