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'Socialism, Christianity and the 'return to religion?'
Religion and Socialism are very unpopular in Britain today, especially the latter. I
can’t think of any socialists left in the Labour Party since Tony Benn’s departure from
politics, and socialist ideas are no longer fashionable even among students. Radical
students mobilised themselves during the occupation movement two years ago, but
within the Kent group which I got to know fairly well (about 30 of them), only 4 or 5
identified closely with socialist or marxist thinking – the rest seemed to be
experimenting with a mixture of anarchist, feminist, environmental, LGBT and other
related ideas and concerns.
Suspicion of religion takes a different turn, characterised by incomprehension about
‘God-talk’, mixed with an unreasonably high expectation that the churches should be
‘doing something’ in the current economic crisis. Exactly what isn’t clear, but for
quite accidental reasons, the Anglican Church became drawn into the forefront of
public debate on the financial crisis in 2011. Instead of a crusade for social justice, or
a decisive church intervention along the lines of Faith in the City (1985), we seemed to
end up with little more than Giles Fraser’s resignation as Canon Chancellor of St
Paul’s. Actually, many more positive things were going on in faith circles than hit
the headlines: including responses to the Pope’s social encyclical Caritas in Veritate
(2009), debates with bankers and politicians at St Paul’s Institute in London, and
sermons from everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury down to impassioned
speeches from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.
My abiding impression is that the popular consciousness was especially touched by
the protests at St Paul’s, not least by recollection of Jesus’ famous act of turning the
money-changers out of the Temple. And on the steps of St Pauls, the deeper
realisation emerged that the time had come for people of all faith traditions and none
to rediscover the one thing that united them in a time of crisis: the need for
compassion. Compassion – the suppression of ego and a willingness to feel the other
person’s hurt – this is the golden thread that runs through and unites all the faith
traditions. It is central to both the Abrahamic religions and the Dharmic traditions,
Hinduism and Buddhism. It also forms one of the four precepts subscribed to by
British Humanists (BHA). I want to return to the inter-faith issue, but let’s stay with
the idea that in multi-faith Britain, many would agree that the presence or absence of
compassion is the acid test of a sustainable polity, in all religious and in some secular
perspectives. So the question arises as to whether or not market fundamentalism, as
a secular ideology, is its natural enemy.
Market fundamentalism is, of course, particularly strong in the US, where the ‘return
to “religion”’ is especially marked, and also in Britain, where it isn’t. We can
reconcile these different outcomes or historic situations by referring to the
compromise that the Enlightenment reached with religion, viz. that religion should
be confined to the private sphere with ‘public discourse grounded …[in] a common
rationality shorn of the metaphysical and ethical particularities of religious doctrine’.
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In protestant England, this had already been underway since the late 17th century as
R H Tawney and others explained, accompanying the rise of possessive
individualism. It’s proved difficult to track down a specifically protestant work ethic,
but most historians would agree with Tawney that the triumph of protestant values
swept away all traces of restriction or guidance in the world of business.
North American (US) society has remained stuck in this mentality. But in mid- 19th
century England, a movement gathered pace to challenge it: Christian Socialism.
1848 - the year of the Communist Manifesto – saw outbreaks of revolution across
Europe, and British society was in turmoil. On 10 April 1848, about 20,000 Chartists
assembled on Kennington Common to march on parliament, but the militarisation of
the capital and closure of the Thames bridges averted the expected confrontation.
One of the more significant outcomes was the invention of ‘Christian’ socialism by
F D Maurice and his friends, Charles Kingsley and J M Ludlow (re-invention, I
suppose, remembering the 1640s and the Levellers). It became a movement for
radical social reform, theologically grounded in the quest for the Kingdom of God on
earth. The founders of Christian Socialism were the first in England to use the
‘socialist’ label, though they saw themselves more as ‘communists’ in the biblical
sense of voluntary sharing. Socialism in 1850 had an atheistic ring. The early
Christian Socialists played leading roles in promoting early trade unions, working
mens’ colleges and the embryonic labour party (Ruskin, Octavia Hill, Keir Hardie) –
the days of the SDF and the ILP. Marxism also played a significant part, as did
Benthamite utilitarianism: social improvement achieved by programmes of legislative
reform.
I would argue that between 1880 and 1945, there existed a Christian and socialist
convergence in Britain, which since the 1980s has virtually disappeared. We’re left
with an enormous ethical void, with no defence against market fundamentalism.
During the 1880-1945 period, numerous Christian socialist organisations came into
being (see diagram below: which places these groups, rather impressionistically, on a
spectrum shading from political action and alignment to ‘ethical idealism’).
Up to the early 30s, the movement’s main achievements were felt within the
churches, bringing them ‘nearer to the working man’. But during the crisis-laden
interwar years, Christian socialists made much greater efforts to break out of the
churches and to integrate religion into a progressive politics after the Labour defeat
of 1931. Two overlapping tendencies emerged, both strongly committed to political
action:
 the first was embodied in the Socialist Christian League, consisting of socialistinclined Labour MPS and intellectuals, notably R H Tawney and William
Temple the future Archbishop of Canterbury, via the ICF (Industrial Christian
Fellowship), with which it merged;
 the second, largely unorganised, comprised lay people and clergy interested in
Marxist ideas but unimpressed by ‘the orthodox attitude of Communism to
Religion’.
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This second group or tendency became known as the Christian Left, and apart from
an outpouring of influential books in philosophy, history and politics, its vehicle
became Left News and the SCM. It was a popular-front type of grouping including
communists, socialists and Christians, such as John Lewis, Victor Gollancz, Karl
Polanyi, Joseph Needham, Reinhold Niebuhr, W H Auden and above all, the
philosopher John Macmurray. Several of its members joined the embryonic party,
Common Wealth, formed in 1942.
An interesting new book about this second tendency has just been published by
Vincent Geoghegan which quite rightly places John Macmurray’s writings at the core
of the Christian Left’s thinking. Macmurray moved from Oxford to become Professor
of Philosophy at UCL and then Edinburgh. During the 1930s and early 40s, his
thinking provided the foundation for a common understanding between Christians,
Marxists, and socialists, with the aim of building a post-war socialist world. One
important element was his dialectical, Hegelian understanding of Marxism - he was
one of the first people in the English-speaking world to read the 1844 Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts, encouraged by Karl Polanyi. But unsurprisingly, it was the
thinking and the politics of the first tendency, the Tawney-Temple-Beveridge axis
that prevailed, via the Labour Party, after 1945. Its goal was self-consciously that of
creating an ‘ethical state’. The Common Wealth Party, more internationalist in
intention, was pushed into a cul-de-sac when the wartime coalition ended, with an
economic programme that lacked credibility. It was Keynes, of course, who provided
the economic logic for the post-war settlement, from whom Temple took detailed
advice (see Christianity and the Social Revolution).
Although the Christian Left looks like one of the lost causes of history, interest in
Macmurray’s thought is being revived in some circles, alongside that of Polanyi, and
I want to briefly outline what he was trying to say and do, and also how he
communicated with his audience. He was one of the first philosophers to reach a
mass audience in the pre-television age, through radio. Thousands of people listened
to his broadcasts in the early 1930s, and ‘listening groups’ were formed for people
who couldn’t afford a wireless. Left News and the Left Book Club, slightly later, had
the same purpose of reaching out to thousands of people.
Macmurray’s mission was to challenge the egocentric starting point of modern
Western philosophy, from Descartes onwards. He was a thoroughgoing non-dualist,
indeed an anti-dualist, and sought to unify the disparate elements in earlier theories
of the individual – mind and body, reason and emotion, individual and ‘society’. But
society, he felt, was a response to functional needs and organic processes, whereas
community was created through human intention and free will, and was above all
personal. The unreal perception of the isolated self was replaced by recognition of the
self as agent, acting through the mutuality of personal relations. He once said: ‘All
meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action is for the
sake of friendship’.
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All of this, he felt, was implicit in an authentic understanding of what he called ‘the
Philosophy of Jesus’, found in a reading of the gospels stripped of successive layers
of Greek idealism and dualism. It was expressed in Jesus’ growing understanding of
his own mission: to inaugurate the coming of the kingdom of heaven, as a real
community of free and equal persons. Jesus laid down no idealistic blueprint, but
expressed what it might look like through acts of voluntary sharing, healing, and a
renunciation of violence, seen most obviously in his response to Jewish expectations
during the Roman occupation of Palestine. Most societies, Macmurray realised,
become secularised in time, and religion becomes an aspect of social life. But Jewish
culture made no distinction between the sacred and the secular, and Macmurray saw
Jesus as fully human, a son of man, who made no claim to infallibility, whose
understanding grew and changed.
It seems to me that Macmurray’s non-dualist thinking and rejection of religious
idealism provides a bridge between Christianity and other religions in today’s postsecular world, a world in which religion is returning in various ways. Habermas has
drawn attention to ‘the continued existence of religious communities in a continually
secularizing environment’, seen especially in Britain. The multiplication and growth
of different faith communities alongside the rise of the inter-faith movement since the
1980s has raised new challenges and opportunities. I think the most enduring legacy
of the interwar Christian Left lies in Macmurray’s non-dualistic philosophy, with its
rejection of those idealistic forms of religious understanding which separate the
Abrahamic faiths from the Dharmic traditions of the East.
Unfortunately, Macmurray was weak on Eastern religious practice, and was a
proponent of Christian hegemony, unlike some other members of the Common
Wealth group, such as Olaf Stapledon who was very sympathetic to other religions
and appalled by the idea of Christendom. Yet paradoxically, Macmurray’s
philosophy provides a possible bridge between the non-dualistic experience (advaita)
of the Vedic tradition, culminating in the Upanishads, and the consciousness of Jesus
as described in the New Testament (‘I and the Father are one’). Advaita is the final
awakening to reality – the ending of all dualism through the union of the realised Self
(atman) and Brahman. Although he didn’t use the term, Macmurray saw Jesus as a
kind of Bodhisattva, an enlightened compassionate being whom he accepted as
‘saviour and master, for myself and the world.’ But Macmurray’s anti-dualism was
not total, and it would be unwise to ‘wrench him out of context’, as happended once
before in the case of Tony Blair.
Now that we are moving from a world of unstable nation states to an even more
unstable globalised future, the need for mutual understanding between the world
religions is pressing. In the rapidly developing field of global history, the central
problematic is the alleged ‘Great Divergence’ between East and West, with an
implied question mark hanging over a possible reconvergence. The debate is
pursued mainly at the economic level, and we haven’t really got to grips with
cultural path-dependency. The religious dimension of this is much more important
now than we might have predicted a few years ago.
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From David Ormrod, ‘The Christian Left and the beginning of Christian-Marxist
dialogue, 1935-45’, in Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper and Raphael Samuel (eds.),
Disciplines of Faith. Studies in Religion, Politics and Patrriarchy, Routledge 1987