socialism, Christian
socialism, Christian. The belief that Christ's teachings led to socialism and that the church should actively promote social reform. After the collapse of Owenism and chartism, a group of middle-class Christian socialists, disturbed by the alienation of working people from organized religion, promoted co-operative socialism among working men from 1848 to 1854, led by F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and J. M. Ludlow. The movement was revived in the 1880s mainly by high-church Anglicans influenced by Maurice's liberal theology. Its main institutions were Stewart Headlam's Guild of St Matthew (1877–1909), the Christian Social Union (1889–1919) founded by the Oxford scholars Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland, and the Church Socialist League (1906–24) which drew upon the traditions of Yorkshire radicalism and the inspiration of Gore's monastic Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, and whose best-known propagandist was Conrad Noel. Non-institutional Christian socialism was also found among nonconformists, especially congregationalists.
John F. C. Harrison
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socialism, Christian
