Christian Socialism: The Promise of an Almost Forgotten Tradition

by Philip Turner, Stanley Hauerwas (Foreword)

Christian Socialism is a movement that arose in England in the mid-nineteenth century and continues into the twenty-first century. This form of socialism was aimed, in the first instance, not at institutional reform or the nationalization of the means of production but at what its proponents viewed as the moral rot that lay at the foundation of first industrial and then digital society. They opposed what we call neoliberalism and what was then known as political economy because supporters of these ideologies believed that moral convictions had no proper place in the operation of markets. This conviction rested upon the false belief that people are essentially selfish, competitive individuals seeking personal happiness. The aim of Christian Socialists was to replace this "rotten" moral foundation with another based on the view that people are social and cooperative by nature rather than competitive. Their goal was nothing less than a new society built not upon selfishness and aggression but upon social virtues such as equality, fellowship, cooperation, service, and justice. They did not deny the presence of selfishness; however, they believed that the social nature of humankind lies deeper than egotism and conflict, and they sought a society built upon this belief.

Genres: Politics, History, Religion, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theology, Christianity

238 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 7, 2021

About the author

Philip William Turner is an English author best known for his children's books set in the fictional town of Darnley Mills (1964–1977). Under the pen name Stephen Chance he is known for the Reverend Septimus Treloar mystery fiction series (1971–1979).

For his second novel and second Darnley Mills book, The Grange at High Force, he won the 1965 Carnegie Medal in Literature from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.

Born in British Columbia, Canada on 3 December 1925 to English parents from Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, Philip Turner was brought to England in 1926. He was educated at Hinckley Grammar School in Leicestershire and spent many school holidays exploring the East Anglian fens whilst staying with his grandparents.

He served his National Service from 1943 to 1946 as a Sub-Lieutenant Mechanical Engineer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He then resumed his education at Worcester College, Oxford, whence he graduated in 1949. He married Margaret Diana Samson in 1950 with whom he had two sons and a daughter.

He began writing religious pieces in the mid-1950s and also wrote several books for young adults under the name Stephen Chance. The first Septimus book, The Danedyke Mystery (1971), was adapted for television in 1979.

Philip and Margaret lived in West Malvern for 30 years until his death from cancer in January 2006. He is buried at St. Mathias Church, Malvern Link.

Reviews

[Jake Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Some of it was just too dry. Some of this could also be found in certain catholic social teaching. But this was a fun read nonetheless and makes a great case for Christian socialism and the historical rootedness of the system itself.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

“But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they laboured into the night over smug little treatises on the value of a planned political economy.” (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, p95)

If the term ‘Christian Socialism’ seems like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, that’s a great pity. A sad outcome of years of reductive, dualistic messaging brought about through the culture wars, on the back of McCarthyism and the Cold War, inter-tangling with issues of moralism that threatened conservative beliefs, and over-identification of some sectors of Christianity with the economic right. All this in more recent (online) times bolstered by the algorithm.

It’s probably worth stating here that there is nothing inherently Christian about capitalism, and indeed I think it would be fair to say that you have to work pretty hard to make an inherent connection theologically. It was largely culture and historical forces that brought them together (the ‘Puritan work ethic’ etc notwithstanding), and most powerfully (and influentially) within the context of the USA.

In what follows, I don’t want to come across as making an out and out attack on capitalism. I think there is probably a kind and benevolent form of that system. And for me to simply flip over to expounding the virtues of socialism, would be to again enact the tired and stultifying dualities that have infected public discourse, and therefore our thinking.

I’m no expert, but I suspect that the ‘kind and benevolent’ parts of a kind and benevolent capitalism will look a lot like things that have traditionally been associated with socialism (things like a public healthcare system). ‘Capital’ is good in terms of being resource or seed for growing something that might contribute to the greater good and human flourishing. But it’s not much good as an end in itself. ‘Social’ however is an inherently lovely word, if you put the baggage to one side for a moment. It speaks of community. So, ever the hopeful (and perhaps naive) idealist, perhaps a balance can be struck. And actually I have this inkling that ultimately the answer lies in something beyond the duality of ‘capitalism’ vs/and/or ‘socialism’.

That said, in what follows, I don’t mind at all if I come across as making an attack on any economic system that acts as an incubator for greed and avarice, that is founded on usury, that treats human beings as resources or statistics or numbers in an equation, which fosters competition over community, and where struggle and hardship are implicit in how the system functions. That kind of system reeks, and leads to suffering for many, in favour of the few, who inevitably rise to power where they are able to double-down on implementing systems that bolster their own position. ...And, by the way, I feel that making this kind of attack is very much in keeping with my Christian faith.

Anyway, one of the tragedies of the culture wars’ reductive messaging is that the freedom of the word ‘socialism’ has in many ways been lost in popular discourse. It used to be a more open field, where we might have been able to talk about ‘socialisms’ (plural). By the addition of the word ‘Christian’, the term ‘Christian Socialism’ helps define things a little more specifically – albeit still with a wide scope. And from there we can zoom in even more. Which brings us to this excellent book by Philip Turner (PhD in Christian Ethics from Princeton University, retired Associate Dean of the Yale Divinity School).

What we have here is not a general survey of what ‘Christian Socialism’ might be. It doesn't discuss, say, the social activism of Dorothy Day, or the work of liberation theologians, or the social gospel as such, or any idea put forward by Stanley Hauerwas (although he wrote the foreword), or Mennonite communities, or the Quakers, or monasticism, or indeed Acts 4:32-35 (the early church).

Instead, it is an examination, critique and assessment of a particular movement that occurred in the Church of England in the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s. There were a few key figures in this movement – William Temple (archbishop of York (1929-1942) and Canterbury (1942-1944)) being the only one I’d previously heard of. They held differing and developing viewpoints on specifics, but there were common threads and an overall picture for us to consider.

Their work was counter to the ideology of ‘political economy’. That term has had several meanings over the years. In their context, political economy referred to an economic paradigm or system that simply runs like a machine, with cold, hard pragmatism, and which in the process rolls over such inconvenient notions as compassion and kindness. (“…an economic machine that operates by laws of supply and demand rather than human need and interdependence.” p81, page numbering comes from the Kindle version.) For the human players in this paradigm, the key trait is individualism, and the key activity is competition. These human drives are fuel for the system, and privilege and tyranny arise. You may recognise that machine. It’s still with us.

To quote the book:

“The chief project of the Christian Socialists was, therefore, to articulate, defend, and spread abroad a set of moral ideals that were to provide an alternative to the competitive individualism they associated with political economy. As previously noted, political economy, as popularly understood, enshrined a view of the economic system that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and is alive to this day in, among others, the works of Ayn Rand. At present, what Milton Friedman termed ‘neoliberalism’ has carried forward and enhanced the ideas of the laissez-faire capitalism associated with Adam Smith. To this day many hold the view that production and consumption form an autonomous system that runs by laws internal to it – laws that allow no space for moral considerations. It was against this position that the Christian Socialists leveled their critical ire.” (p71)

Their main theological basis was incarnational (both in terms of the incarnation of Christ and the imago Dei) and sacramental, meaning that humanity and the world are, through the work of God, made or revealed to be sites of encounter with the divine. (My definition.) Humans and the world are imbued with dignity in this way.

The following is what I understand to be a distillation of the concepts, and if not a definitive distillation of the thought of the historical English Christian Socialists per se, then one that I would personally nonetheless like to proffer for our own consideration:

Socialism as opposed to individualism; and how might we live in community rather than in competition? How might that manifest societally? And how might Christian ideas, principles, values, theologies and actions inform that?

“The overarching ideal of a Christian society is therefore a community knit together by love of God and love of neighbor in which human personality [the word ‘personhood’ might better communicate what they meant by ‘personality’] can develop to the fullest extent.” (p78)

“Duty and service to others are necessary ideals if social life is to prove fulfilling. Rights are necessary because people often fail in their duties.” (p87)

“Their ideal was a society held together by a common vision of life that made possible the fulfillment of the lives of the individuals that comprise its membership. Their purpose was to link communal vision with individual flourishing. To this end, they employed two ideals. To their minds, life lived in fellowship with and service to others leads to the flowering of personality and the development of character. These two, personality and character, constitute human flourishing in its fullness, they believed.” (p87)

“Temple goes on to offer Christians three derivative principles that ought to inform our fallible and flawed social, economic, and political judgments. These derivatives flow from primary principles whose contents he summarizes as ‘respect for every person simply as a person’ because they are created in God’s image. Reasoning from primary principles, Temple derives others as universally applicable aids to wise judgments. These are precisely those favored by Christian Socialists—Freedom, Social Fellowship, and Service.” (p102)

“Fully cognizant of the fact that the exercise of these principles takes place in a social context of limited resources and limited altruism, Temple insists we need an intellectual map that will allow people to weigh and balance these principles rightly. His view is that, within the changes and chances of social life, love and justice ought to regulate the order of the principles he has outlined.” (p103)

“Fellowship, community, cooperation, service, sacrifice, equality, duty, freedom, personality, character, and property constitute ideal forms of social vision that together comprise the Christian Socialists’ alternative to the competitive and autonomous social relations championed by advocates of political economy.” (p117)

Pretty good values all round I'd say.

“This account of the nature and destiny of humankind, no matter what its limitations and flaws turn out to be, provides a powerful rejoinder to the atomistic and competitive account of social relations proffered by the advocates of political economy and their latter-day neoliberal progeny.” (p117)

I want to acknowledge the problems with the word ‘duty’ (mentioned earlier) in our context. The concept of duty (and indeed ‘sacrifice’) has often been used by the powers‐that‐be to further agendas of empire and such. It’s no wonder given the vast loss of life via people ‘doing their duty’ (rightly or wrongly) during the 20th century that we’ve also lost positive feelings for the word. Perhaps it would be better termed ‘service’ or ‘serving’ – though that can still carry baggage. I think I’d rather frame it as ‘works of love’. (A term I've borrowed from Kierkegaard, who has a book of that title, published under his own name. Though in that context 'works of love' includes but transcends what we'd normally think of as mere duty.)

Whatever the term, it’s largely about doing things for the common good – and I think that’s a value worth preserving. Us all going into lockdown during Covid is probably a good (though heightened) example of an act performed for the common good (though I acknowledge some have good reasons to feel negatively about that event).

I still feel disappointed that some churches cried ‘persecution’ about their right to gather, rather than seeing it as an opportunity to serve by suspending (for a limited time) the good of gathering as a church community for the greater good, medical health and wellbeing of the wider community. Of course, in New Zealand, that negative response was inflected by a suspicious belief about the supposedly nefarious agendas of a socialist-leaning government (see earlier comment re the culture wars).

In his examination of the historical, contextually specific Christian Socialism movement, Turner brings things forward with a discussion of two current thinkers: Rowan Williams and (in greater detail) John Milbank. Milbank posits the concept of a positive ‘postliberal’ paradigm, which might arise in the aftermath of neoliberalism (on the right) and a hyper-individualistic liberalism of competing rights (on the left), and which Turner sees as an excellent conversation partner with William Temple et al.

In this emergent paradigm, the Church has a potential role to play.

“Within the community of faith, an exemplary form of life built on exchange sustained and directed by love, honor, trust, and expectant waiting defines its calling. Love, honor, trust, and patience in turn make for just and fair exchanges of all social goods that lead in turn to good order and peace.” (p170)

Human life rooted in a common, but transcendent, good.

“That good is social in nature… Gift, common good, love, trust, honor, and exchange (rather than competition) are the building blocks of a ‘politics of virtue’.” (p170)

“I should like to add,” says Turner, “that it is in these relations [that is, ‘the complex exchanges between the many, the few, and the one’] also that what I have called the contributing virtues of humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, eagerness for unity, kindness, tenderheartedness, and forgiveness play a necessary part. These virtues give love a face and provide a check on the drivers of competitive exchange that govern liberal society.” (p174)

Note the importance of holding the concept of ‘gift’ in high regard. I highlight that because it’s a lovely concept, but also because it would be worth mentioning that, in addition to the Church being a place where this value can be fostered (as Turner and Milbank believe), another source can be indigenous cultures (and, without wishing to over-romanticise indigenous cultures, this is no doubt true of other core values of a life-giving socialism as well). (This idea, by the way, is explored, amongst many others, in The Gift by Lewis Hyde.)

That path of thought then puts me in mind of the potentialities (in my own New Zealand context) of a covenant like Te Tiriti, which was signed in a milieu of Christianity (with the assumption of Christianity in its truest and best-intentioned form) and Māoritanga. (The kind of stuff that might give an arch-pragmatist and ACT party neoliberalist like David Seymour nightmares.)

And speaking of Te Tiriti, I like this notion and the possibility that it might be applied in our New Zealand context:

“The postliberal assumption is that society is bound together more by mutual generosity and honor than contract and conflict.” (p148)

I think Turner does a marvellous job with this book, weaving a path through diverse and often difficult work, assessing problems and pitfalls, and making hopeful projections, including a smattering of his own excellent insights.

It includes much that speaks to our current context. Like this:

"Bishop [Charles] Gore [1853-1932] is concerned that concentrations of wealth mean that wealth is taken away from its proper use and devoted to the accumulation and exercise of power" (p127)

– Elon Musk, I’m looking at you.

Or this:

“Political and economic powers join in a criminal cabal guided neither by right nor by wrong but by what one can get away with. Indeed, capitalism, as presently constituted, consists of a union of political and economic power that, with no internal moral guidance system, becomes little more than a criminal oligarchy.” (p147)

- yeow!

And:

“These beneficiaries of financial speculation and aggression join hands to form a society of oligarchs – a new aristocracy that is defined by wealth rather than honor. The wealth of this increasingly small group does not trickle down. Rather, it trickles up and out of social usefulness. As time goes by, the winners in this economic struggle more and more blame the victims of their own greed. Indeed, they come to despise the indigent poor and regard their poverty and low social status as ‘their own fault’.” (p159)

- YEOW!

Great stuff. This book has the potential to open out thinking about what a Christian socialism might look like in a field of socialisms, and in a world desperately in need of the best of humanity, flowing down from a transcendent good. My writing here shouldn’t be seen as a total summary of the subject or the book. If any of it has piqued your interest, check it out for yourself.

[David Hindman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An utterly readable, honest and helpful review of a little known and neglected perspective from within the Christian community; a worthy antidote to the assumed value of liberal and capitalist views.