SOCIALISM, CHRISTIAN

Christian Socialism was the name given to a variety of religious groups during the nineteenth century in western Europe who tried to apply Christian teachings to solve social and economic problems resulting from industrialization. Only in England, from the 1850s through the 1920s, did groups formally use the name "Christian Socialists." Informally, observers at various times applied it to Christian social activists in France, Belgium, and Germany. In 1850 a number of Anglican Christians, that is, members of the Church of England, created the Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations along with its journal, The Christian Socialist. This marked the first widely known use of the term. This group was inspired, and led for a time, by F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, John Ludlow, and Edward Vansittart Neale. At the time, the Anglican Church usually had little to say about the terrible conditions of workers, beyond advocating charity on the part of the wealthy. The Christian Socialists believed that Biblical teachings justified workers' associations and governmental regulation of labor. Taking the medieval guilds of independent artisans as their inspiration, they supported producers' cooperatives more than they did true labor unions. While strongly encouraging workers to form associations, they usually hoped that educated middle-class Christians would play a leading role in these groups. The goal of the workers' associations would be social solidarity in place of antagonism between workers and the upper class.

Neither these Anglican leaders nor any of the activists elsewhere called Christian Socialists advocated government ownership of private property. In this sense, they were never truly socialist in the Marxist sense. Nonetheless, the advocacy for workers' associations and government action appeared radical among Christians in the nineteenth century.

The Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations and its journal soon ended in the mid-1850s, but their ideas and example continued. In 1889 a small but influential group of Anglican clergy and laypeople organized the Christian Social Union and its journal, The Church Socialist; this organization lasted until 1919. A similar Church Socialist League was founded by Baptists and other "nonconformists," that is, Protestants outside of the Church of England, in 1886, although some Anglicans were active in it; its organizers had begun publishing Christian Socialist in 1883. These groups abandoned the nostalgia for workers' associations or producers' cooperatives modeled on medieval guilds. Instead, through the Labour Party, they supported labor unions and workers' political action to gain unemployment insurance, pensions, and state-supported housing. The more radical, still largely Anglican, Church Socialist League, founded in 1906, which began publishing The Church Socialist in 1912, advocated this program most clearly. They helped create within the British Labour Party an openness to Christianity and a resistance to anti-clericalism that had no counterpart among socialist parties in France, Germany, Italy, or elsewhere in continental Europe. The most famous leader of this tendency was Philip Snowden (1864–1937), a Methodist weaver's son and member of the Free Church Socialist League, founded in 1909, who became a cabinet member in Labour Party governments in the 1920s and 1930s.

Some French Catholics in the 1840s who supported democracy and aiding workers were called Christian Socialists. Their most important leader, Philippe Buchez, like many of the British Christian Socialists, called for the creation of associations in which workers could provide insurance, regulate their trades, and advocate for better conditions. This wave of activism ended in the harsh struggles between Left and Right in the years following the Revolution of 1848 in France.

The intellectual basis of Catholicism as a social doctrine that provided an alternative to socialism is best seen, for example, in Juan Donoso Cortés's Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism, published in 1851: "Liberalism cultivates only individuality, even isolation. Socialism … reacts against the prospect of savage competition with … regimentation and collectivism." Catholic Christianity, Donoso Cortés argued, offered a third way. Social solidarity on Christian principles could protect workers without destroying liberty. Most "social Catholics" in the mid-nineteenth century concerned about the plight of workers, however, were still more inclined toward providing charity than creating organizations of workers that took account of their economic grievances. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul and other organizations offered food, clothing, and education. Catholic groups of workers, such as those inspired by Adolph Kolping, a German priest, beginning in 1846, were to be social, religious, and nonpolitical. Wilhelm von Ketteler, bishop of Mainz, Germany, in his 1864 work titled The Workers'Question and Christianity, went further and called for state recognition of workers' associations and the need for these groups to make political demands. Only gradually did social Catholics give up the dream of re-creating the supposedly harmonious craft guilds of the pre–French Revolutionary period. Arthur Verhaegen, a sponsor of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, helped found a Catholic labor union federation in Ghent, Belgium, in 1891. As he declared, "Charity is not enough to guarantee what is right. Next to it one must have justice." Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum, promulgated in 1891, called on Catholics to solve economic grievances. Without advocating labor unions specifically, the pope provided an intellectual basis for their support. Catholic labor unions were usually allied with Christian Democratic political parties, which also began in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria, and France in the 1890s. The Christian unions in Germany were exceptional in including both Protestants and Catholics. In the Netherlands, conservative Calvinists, under the leadership of a future prime minister, Abraham Kuyper, and the Anti-Revolutionary Party, provided the only example of Protestant Christian Democracy and organized their own labor unions. While called Christian Socialists by their opponents on both left and right, that is, by Marxist socialists or anarchists and by conservative Catholics, Catholic labor activists almost never used this term themselves. Yet it was frequently used to attack them. Verhaegen, who was of aristocratic descent, was sometimes mocked as the "Red Baron" for his allegedly left-wing sympathies. Catholic unions, although much smaller than those of the socialists, ensured that Christian Democratic parties would not be exclusively middle class and rural. As a result, Christian Democracy joined socialism as the most important political movements in much of continental Europe in the twentieth century.

See alsoCatholicism, Political; Socialism.

bibliography

Primary Source

Fremantle, Anne, ed. The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical Context. New York, 1956.

Nitti, Francesco. Catholic Socialism. 3rd ed. Translated from the 2nd Italian ed. by Mary Mackintosh. London, 1911.

Secondary Sources

Backstrom, Philip N. Christian Socialism and Co-operation in Victorian England: Edward Vansittart Neale and the Co-operative Movement. London, 1974.

Berenson, Edward. Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852. Princeton, N.J., 1984.

Brose, Eric Dorn. Christian Labor and the Politics of Frustration in Imperial Germany. Washington, D.C., 1985.

Jones, Peter d'A. The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late Victorian England. Princeton, N.J., 1968.

Kalyvas, Stathis N. The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Misner, Paul. Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War. New York, 1991.

Reckitt, Maurice B., ed. For Christ and the People: Studies of Four Socialist Priests and Prophets of the Church of England between 1870 and 1930. London, 1968.

Strikwerda, Carl. "A Resurgent Religion: The Rise of Catholic Social Movements in Nineteenth-Century Belgian Cities." In European Religion in the Age of the Great Cities, 1830–1930, edited by Hugh McLeod, 61–89. London, 1995.

Carl J. Strikwerda