The Christian Left. Anthony A. J. Williams

proceeds upon the principle of unscrupulous competition, of treating human labour as a mere commodity, and human beings as mere ‘pawns’ in the game of making money, as mere means to a selfish end; of taking advantage of one man’s poverty and necessity, and of another man’s ignorance; which sanctions the law of might, and not of right, and the principle of survival of the fittest for success in the scramble for material wealth – no such system […] can by any stretch of generosity be called Christian.⁷³

      While no slavish adherent of Marx – Keeble doubted the labour theory of value, for example – he nevertheless valued the insight of Marx and Engels on the systematic ways in which capitalism exploits the working class.⁷⁴ Keeble did not believe that state ownership of industry should be the universal rule but, like Scott Holland, favoured a system in which both local and national government would regulate the economy to prevent such exploitation.⁷⁵ This, he held, was required by ‘the great Christian principles of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man’.⁷⁶ The Christian Gospel, Keeble explained, had two elements, individual and social, and ‘[t]he social gospel is as sacred and as indispensable as the individual gospel’.⁷⁷

The men noted above are just a few examples of the many from various denominations and sects who embraced socialism – or something very close to it – and condemned capitalism as incompatible with the teaching of Christianity. The impact this had on the church – the Church of England in particular – is evident in the appointment of William Temple to the see of York in 1929 and then Canterbury in 1942. Temple (1881–1944) was a throughgoing socialist, who in his younger years made some strikingly radical statements, declaring, for example, that the capitalist system ‘is simply organized selfishness’ while socialism ‘is the economic realisation of the Christian Gospel […] The alternative stands before us – Socialism or Heresy.’⁷⁸ Temple mellowed as he grew older – especially after his appointment as Bishop of Manchester – but he lost nothing of his determination to pursue economic and social justice. In 1924 Temple organised the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC), which included Christians from several different denominations and produced papers on a wide variety of economic and social questions. The conclusions of COPEC were perhaps overly cautious and conservative, but the conference nevertheless symbolised that Christian Socialism was growing and that the church was asserting its right to speak into social issues.⁷⁹

      Temple continued to assert that right, nowhere more so than in Christianity and the Social Order (1942), an exploration of the Christian principles that should underpin the post-war reconstruction of society. Temple declared that the capitalist system was not condemned merely on the selfish say-so of those who did not benefit from it, but precisely because, in favouring a small class of wealthy people and exploiting the rest, such a system outraged the principles of justice.⁸⁰ No individual should be subject to exploitation because – contrary to what appearances would suggest – all people are equal, for ‘all are children of one Father […] all are equal heirs of a status in comparison with which the apparent differences of quality and capacity are unimportant’.⁸¹ Temple echoed Gore – and, indeed, his friend Tawney – in asserting that property rights were not absolute, as well as Scott Holland in his argument that ‘[l]aw exists to preserve and extend real freedom’. Here, Temple also asserts a positive conception of liberty: freedom, he argued, ‘must be freedom for something as well as freedom from something’.⁸² A system that produces material benefits, even where those benefits are not absolutely restricted to the wealthiest class, is nevertheless condemned insofar as it does not conform to the principles of justice, equality and freedom.

These arguments are at the level of principle rather than practical policy. While Temple was relentless in his view that the church must speak into social issues, he denied that it was the proper role of the church to advance specific policies. Nevertheless, he was persuaded to include in his work a section on what sort of policies might be derived from the principles he was advocating, a section which gained the support of both Tawney and William Beveridge, who was at that time preparing his own contribution to post-war planning.⁸³ The government, according to Temple, might do well to acquire land for the building of houses; it might increase the support given to families, perhaps in the form of food or coupons for the purchase of clothes; schools should supply food and milk to all pupils; public works funded by the state would benefit all of society as well as providing jobs for the unemployed.⁸⁴ These suggestions were intended by Temple as illustrations, sometimes called middle-axioms because they bridge the gap between the levels of principle and of practical policy. What is striking, however, is the extent to which Temple’s proposals actually were put into practice by the 1945–51 Labour government, thereby demonstrating the significance of the church socialism, which began with Stewart Headlam and the Guild of St Matthew, for the shape of our politics to this day. Temple, sadly, did not live to see it; he died in 1944. His death, notes Dorrien, may be viewed as ‘the symbol of a passing age’.⁸⁵

Christianity and Labour

The Labour successes of 1945 demonstrate for us that Christian Socialism was not solely restricted to the church. James Keir Hardie (1856–1915) is regarded as the founder of both the Scottish Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and latterly the Labour Party itself. Hardie’s poverty-stricken upbringing left him with a hatred of both capitalist exploitation and hypocritical Christianity, yet he himself had a religious commitment that was expressed in his membership of the Evangelical Union. ‘The only way you can serve God,’ asserted Hardie, ‘is by serving mankind. There is no other way. It is taught in the Old Testament; it is taught in the New Testament.’⁸⁶ The same themes are evident in Hardie’s thought that can be observed in the varieties of church socialism considered above. The Gospel, in Hardie’s estimation, declared that all people were children of God and consequently brothers and sisters to each other; capitalism stood condemned because it prompted competition and strife rather than the familial co-operation which should be the outworking of this spiritual reality.⁸⁷ For Hardie, socialism was ‘the application to industry of the teachings contained in the Sermon on the Mount’. While Hardie allowed that the Sermon did not specify state socialism with its aims of owning and managing industry, it nevertheless provided the principles for this form of collectivism by denouncing property and the selfish pursuit of individual wealth. Striking something of a Marxist note, Hardie argued that it would be ‘an easy task to show that Communism, the final goal of Socialism, is a form of Social Economy very closely akin to the principles set forth in the Sermon on the Mount’.⁸⁸ This, for Hardie, is exemplified in the common ownership practised in the Acts of the Apostles; the earliest Christians could not bear to have differences in wealth and the ownership of property cause divisions in a community characterised by brotherhood and consequently by equality and co-operation.⁸⁹

      Hardie’s Marxism, though, was inconsistent. He appealed to Marx to support his own political activism, arguing that the policy and methods of the ILP and the Labour Party were in keeping with those laid down by Marx and Engels, and was happy to refer to Marxist analysis in order to denounce capitalism.⁹⁰ Yet he was no systematic Marxist, his biographer Bob Holman suggesting that ‘Hardie read some Marx and selected bits which fitted with his own views of an ethical and peaceful socialism’.⁹¹ Hardie’s assertion that the teaching and arguments of Jesus Christ were the basis of his socialism must be taken seriously; anything else, even the theories of Marx and Engels, was an optional extra. In this Hardie stands as representative for the labour movement and the mainstream British Left, which holds to a non-Marxist ethical socialism of which Christianity was a key component. This differs from the social democratic parties of Europe – the German SPD being the chief example (see Chapter 3) – which, whether orthodox or revisionist, absorbed an anticlericalism and, indeed, an atheism that remained a minority position in the early days of the Labour Party.

As such, Hardie was joined by other Christian Socialists. Hardie did not live long enough to see it, but the first Labour cabinet of 1924, headed by James Ramsay MacDonald, included Christian Socialists such as Philip Snowden