The Christian Left. Anthony A. J. Williams

Tawney in the early twentieth century – but these were the achievements of a Christian reformer rather than a Christian Socialist. Maurice protested that his view of co-operation as a present reality, embodied by the church, which needed to be recognised in society rather than of co-operation as a future objective which needed to be created did not mean he was less of a socialist than Owen or Fourier – yet insofar as it kept him from actually trying to establish co-operation, this is exactly what it did mean.³⁰ Ludlow was regretful that he deferred to Maurice’s cautious approach and continued political activism for many years, serving as a member of the executive committee of the London Christian Social Union from 1891–1903. Henry Scott Holland described how Ludlow ‘retained to the last his democratic faith in the people, his passionate pity for the poor and downtrodden, his fiery cry for righteousness’.³¹ Maurice, however – always more a theologian than a political or economic theorist – did provide for the next generation of Christian Socialists a theology of God as universal Father and the consequent brotherhood of all people, which would be the lasting foundation of Christian Left thought.

Church socialism

It was Stewart Headlam more than anybody else in the next generation of Christian Socialists who acknowledged his debt to Maurice. In his estimation Maurice and the others revealed ‘the theological basis of Socialism, by showing how essentially Christian it was […] They brought into the world of thought all the suggestion which is contained in that most pregnant phrase, “Christian Socialism”.’³² It was not, argued Headlam, that Maurice was responsible for a new form of socialism, but rather that he demonstrated that socialism was inherently Christian regardless of whether socialists recognised the fact. Given Maurice’s intention to battle against the ‘unchristian Socialists’, Headlam may here be overstating his case; he certainly overstates it in the assertion that Maurice wanted to go further than any ‘mere co-operative store or association of workmen’.³³ Nevertheless Headlam viewed his own Guild of St Matthew (GSM) as continuing the work of Christian Socialism. As noted above, the basis of the GSM was more thoroughly socialist than Maurice, or indeed than any organisation that came before in British politics. It was not therefore when it came to practical politics or socialist theory that Headlam was indebted to Maurice, but rather in theology. Headlam’s socialism was based on the foundation laid by Maurice – as Headlam phrased it, ‘the fact of the Fatherhood of God, implying as it does the Brotherhood of men […] as children of one God we are all united in one common Brotherhood’.³⁴

      Headlam was an eclectic mix of opinions and preferences – yet somehow he shaped them into a coherent perspective. He was an aesthete who founded the Anti-Puritan League as a protest against the drabness of Victorian Christianity, lauding instead art and music, dancing and theatre. Keir Hardie later recalled, ‘[a]s a Scotsman and a Nonconformist, I well remember the shock it gave me that the leading member of the Guild divided his attention fairly evenly between socialism and the ballet’.³⁵ It may have been this taste for theatrical show that inclined him towards Anglo-Catholic liturgy rather than what he regarded as the severity of low-church and Nonconformist worship. For Headlam the sacraments were the indispensable foundation of socialism; he described baptism as ‘the Sacrament of Equality’ and Holy Communion as ‘the Sacrament of Brotherhood’, adding that ‘these two are fundamental, the one abolishing all class distinctions, and admitting all into the Christian Church, simply on the ground of humanity; the other pledging and enabling all to live the life of brotherhood’.³⁶ Such a perspective was simply not possible, Headlam averred, on the basis of a Christian theology that drew distinctions between saved and unsaved, redeemed and lost, elect and reprobate, and which offered the sacraments only to those accounted part of the first set of categories. Headlam’s theology was the basis for socialism because it was universal – God was the Father of all, all people were brothers and sisters – and the indiscriminate administration of the sacraments was a picture of that fact.³⁷

In his idiosyncratic Anglo-Catholic way Headlam viewed the Eucharist as being central to worship, not the reading and preaching of the Word. Nevertheless he was not shy about turning to the Bible to offer arguments in favour of socialism. The parable of the sheep and the goats, argued Headlam, in which Christ judges the world in righteousness, commending those who provided for the poor and needy and condemning those who failed to do so, ‘seems to compel every Christian to be a socialist’.³⁸ Headlam saw that Christ often warned against the love of money, the pursuit of wealth and the selfish misuse of property, all while urging his followers to behave as brothers and sisters by sacrificially providing for one another: ‘All those ideas which we now express vaguely under the terms solidarity, brotherhood, co-operation, socialism, seem to have been vividly present in Jesus Christ’s teaching.’ For Headlam then, Christ was ‘a radical reformer’, ‘a Socialistic carpenter’, the ‘revolutionary Socialist from Galilee’.³⁹ Headlam discovered the same socialist ideals throughout scripture, New Testament and Old, a key example being the common ownership of the earliest Christians recorded in Acts of the Apostles. These first-century believers were, according to Headlam, ‘in the simplest sense of the word communists’ – and the same should apply today.⁴⁰

      The GSM was soon followed by a similarly minded organisation, the Christian Social Union (CSU), founded in 1889 by Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918) and Charles Gore (1853–1932). The CSU was more vague in its commitment to socialism than the GSM – according to Gary Dorrien ‘purposively vague – Christian socialism in the broad sense of Maurician Christian idealism, not a political programme’ – but did have a definite purpose, Scott Holland explaining that policies must be found to prevent Christians flitting between the amoral principles of political economy and conscience-driven attempts at providing charity.⁴¹ It was also alleged that the CSU was founded in order for Anglicans to commit to Christian Socialism and social reform without having to work alongside Headlam.⁴² The CSU was less sectarian than the GSM – it was exclusively Anglican but membership was not restricted to Anglo-Catholics.⁴³ It was also more devoted to research than activism, with Scott Holland describing the process:

      We form Reading Circles. We gather round the study of this or that qualified and adequate book. We meet to talk it round, and through, and over […] At the end we, perhaps, can manage to formulate certain conclusions, certain definite issues, which have resulted from the talks. Those can be reduced to print, and circulated. Our experiences are recorded; and we can go on to the next book.⁴⁴

The scathing response from those who remained members of the GSM: ‘Here’s a glaring social evil; let’s read a paper about it.’⁴⁵ Holland in turn mocked Headlam and his GSM colleague Henry Cary Shuttleworth (1850–1900) as ‘Headlong and Shuttlecock’.⁴⁶

      It is probably fair to say that Scott Holland and Gore were rather more radical than their pedestrian method of social analysis suggests. Scott Holland rejected Marxism and lauded Christian reformers such as Lord Shaftesbury, but he nevertheless viewed socialism as being an extension of Christianity; socialism, he insisted, gives voice ‘to pleas and claims to which Jesus Christ alone could give value and solidarity […] It tells of the Fatherhood of God, bringing Peace and Goodwill: of the universal brotherhood of men’.⁴⁷ This socialist Christianity had been lost because of the fear of those who benefited from laissez-faire capitalism that religious morals and ethics would place limits on their ability to make a profit.⁴⁸ Yet such limits were the necessary consequence of an economic system that enshrined the Christian principle of love for neighbour; love of neighbour, Scott Holland asserted, was not merely an act of charity but the requirement of justice, for your neighbour ‘might be some stranger lying by the roadside, unknown and unnamed, who had been nothing to you, and whom you might never see again. Nevertheless, if he was there, and you happened to be going that way, and could do anything for him, that was enough. He held you fast by a moral claim.’⁴⁹ Furthermore, in an increasingly globalised economy there was no person upon the face of the earth who was not your neighbour.

Holland did not shy away from the conclusion that the state must be involved in this process. He begins by focusing on the municipality, arguing that