The Christian Left. Anthony A. J. Williams

Magnificat and in the life and teaching of Christ, as a ‘revolutionary’ creed with which the church can and should seek to remodel society. If taken seriously, the Christian message ‘destroys alike the arbitrary power of the few and the slavery of many’.¹¹⁴ Political historians Matt Beech and Kevin Hickson conclude that, ‘for Tawney democratic socialism is only possible because it flows from his Christian faith’.¹¹⁵

Tawney’s socialism is based on an ideal of service. At its most basic this is a call for a spirit of co-operation rather than competition, based on the concept of brotherhood. ‘A well-conducted family,’ argued Tawney, ‘does not, when in low water, encourage some of its members to grab all they can, while leaving others to go short. On the contrary, it endeavours to ensure that its diminished resources shall be used to the best advantage in the interests of all.’¹¹⁶ Here, Alan Wilkinson suggests, Tawney is drawing upon the Pauline image of the body (1 Corinthians 12:12–26; Romans 12:4–5) to say that all members of society are members of one body – each has its own function, but all must co-operate. More deeply, Tawney’s ideal of service is a call for the economy to be based on function rather than functionless property rights. He excoriates those who defend the rights of landowners who provide no service or function to merely receive payments for the use of their land – for example, the owners of coal mines who profited from the activity on their land through the payment of royalties, but play no part in the mining or distribution of coal, nor even the planning and management of the work. ‘Such rights,’ he says, ‘are, strictly speaking, privileges. For the definition of a privilege is a right to which no corresponding function is attached.’¹¹⁷ In place of an acquisitive society, which allowed such profiteering shorn of any contribution to the common good, Tawney advocated a ‘Functional Society’, which would aim at ‘making the acquisition of wealth contingent upon the discharge of social obligations’ and in which ‘the main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions’.¹¹⁸

Tawney was not opposed to state ownership if it allowed industry to be conducted in a spirit of service and with an eye to function rather than an eye to profit, particularly as state ownership need not necessarily involve direct state management.¹¹⁹ The key thing for Tawney was to cultivate a sense of professionalism, in which all workers – whether manual labourers or managers – would make service rather than profit their aim. Such a sense could be cultivated by professional associations or guilds: Tawney cites the creation of guilds in the building trade which were organised, he said, ‘for the discharge of professional duties’.¹²⁰ A society in which workers co-operatively maintained ‘the standards of their profession’ was, for him, ‘the alternative to the discipline which Capitalism exercised in the past’.¹²¹ Tawney’s hope to replace amoral profiteering with a professional commitment to service for the common good has similarities with the ‘civil economy’ advocated by Adrian Pabst (see Chapter 2). Tawney also shares with radical orthodoxy and Blue Labour that his critique of capitalism is effectively a critique of liberalism, for having replaced an ideal of community-minded service with self-centred individualism; as such, it shares some points in common with a conservative critique of liberal capitalism. In modern society, Tawney argues, ‘men recognize no law superior to their desires’, having instead adopted an individualism which ‘appeals to the self-assertive instincts, to which it promises opportunities of unlimited expansion’.¹²² Tawney’s view – set out famously in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, published in 1922 and dedicated to Charles Gore – was that capitalism was a product of modernity, of an individualism linked to the Protestant Reformation.¹²³ The solution then was not to look ahead and discard the past as progressivism is apt to do, but rather to recover and restore the ideals of a former age characterised by service and community-mindedness.

      Tawney, despite this overlap with conservatism, was most certainly a socialist. In another of his key works, Equality, published in 1931, he urged a socialist vision committed to tackling the inequalities caused by capitalism. Tawney did not suggest that all individuals are naturally equal to one another, as though ‘all men are equally intelligent or equally virtuous, any more than they are equally tall or equally fat’, but that ‘it is the mark of a civilized society to aim at eliminating such inequalities as have their source, not in individual differences, but in its own organization’.¹²⁴ Equality of opportunity, argued Tawney, was an illusion in a society that systematically excluded whole classes of people from educational opportunities, the highest-paying jobs, and all positions of power and influence; it was necessary to seek equality of outcome, or at least to minimise inequality of outcome. Without this ‘the phrase equality of opportunity is obviously a jest, to be described as amusing or heartless according to taste’.¹²⁵ It was not in Tawney’s view necessary to observe a strict equalisation of incomes, even if such a thing were possible; rather, the aim was ‘the pooling of [the nation’s] surplus resources by means of taxation, and the use of the funds thus obtained to make accessible to all, irrespective of their income, occupation, or social position the conditions of civilization, which, in the absence of such measures, can only be enjoyed by the rich’.¹²⁶ It is this vision that Tawney commended to the Labour Party, and which the party set about putting into practice at the end of the Second World War.

Conclusion

      It was F.D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley and John Ludlow who provided the theological grounding for the Christian Socialist vision, expounding the universal Fatherhood of God and the consequent brotherhood of all people, as well as asserting co-operation to be the natural outworking of these spiritual truths. The next generation of church socialists expanded this political theology into a recognisably socialist or social democratic vision of a whole society characterised by equality, co-operation and democracy.¹²⁷ Unlike European socialism, which, following Marx and Engels, remained largely opposed to religion as a reactionary force and a form of false consciousness, this Christian Socialist vision also had adherents in the Labour Party: James Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, John Wheatley and others. After two unsuccessful terms in office the Labour Party, guided by figures such as William Temple and R.H. Tawney, finally succeeded in translating this vision into a programme of real social and economic change.

Notes

      1 1. Chris Bryant, Possible Dreams: A Personal History of the British Christian Socialists (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), pp. 81–2.

      2 2. James Keir Hardie, ‘Labour and Christianity: is the labour movement against Christianity?’, in Labour and Religion: by Ten Members of Parliament and Other Bodies (London: n.p, 1910), p. 49.

      3 3. Bryant, Possible Dreams, p. 41.

      4 4. John C. Cort, Christian Socialism: An Informal History (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2020 [1988]), p. 159.

      5 5. Bryant, Possible Dreams, p. 37.

      6 6. Gary Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism (Yale CT: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 43.

      7 7. Cort, Christian Socialism, p. 161.

      8 8. Jeremy Morris, ‘F.D. Maurice and the myth of Christian Socialist origins’, in Stephen Spencer, ed., Theology Reforming Society: Revisiting Anglican Social Theology (London: SCM Press, 2017), p. 5; Bryant, Possible Dreams, p. 43.

      9 9. Morris, ‘F.D. Maurice’, p. 5

      10 10. F.D. Maurice, ‘Tracts on Christian Socialism, Tract 1 (1850)’ in Ellen K. Wondra, ed., Reconstructing Christian Ethics: Selected Writings of F.D. Maurice (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 196.

      11 11. Ibid., pp. 202 and 205.

      12 12. Alan Wilkinson, Christian Socialism: Scott Holland to Tony Blair (London: SCM Press, 1998), p. 18.

      13 13. Jeremy Morris, F.D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 135 and 146.

      14 14. Ibid., pp. 146, 158 and 67.

      15 15.