The Christian Left. Anthony A. J. Williams

responsibly, thereby demonstrating their neighbourly commitment to one another. ‘The Municipality is sacred to us. It is our only instrument by which to fulfil the commandment of our Lord – “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”.’⁵⁰ Yet, Holland adds, there is another instrument that can achieve even more – the state itself. Given Holland’s view of the interconnectedness of the national and international economy, it is the state by which Christian love may be demonstrated to all the inhabitants of a nation and to those in other nations. ‘We invoke the State, then. We call upon it to relieve our individual conscience by doing for us what we are powerless to do for ourselves.’⁵¹ This, argues Holland, is not an abdication of responsibility but the recognition of a practical reality – economic relations have grown into such a complex system that the structures of local and national government must be brought into play in order to establish the social ethics of Christianity. It might not be necessary for the state to do all the things that socialists desire, but some regulation of the economy is necessary in order to enshrine love for neighbour. ‘Law is liberty’, declares Holland. ‘Why do we fail to see this?’⁵²

      To twenty-first-century readers Scott Holland’s invocation of the state sounds troublingly authoritarian, the slogan ‘Law is liberty’ alarmingly Orwellian. Holland, though, has nothing so sinister in mind. His view here is, for example, of factory legislation, which frees workers from the exploitative demands of their employers, or welfare reforms, which set individuals at liberty from the fear and the threat of destitution.⁵³ This is a positive conception of liberty, which to be sure may lend itself to an authoritarian agenda – but such was not Holland’s agenda. Individuals had inalienable rights. Local government kept a check on national government, and viceversa. Democracy ensured that the state served the people rather than the people serving the state.⁵⁴ There was no reason that legislating Christian ethics would lead to authoritarianism; rather, it would lead to ‘a Kingdom of earthly righteousness and social happiness […] The Holy Jerusalem descends from heaven to Earth: the City of God.’⁵⁵

Scott Holland’s friend and colleague Charles Gore took a similar view of laissez-faire capitalism. It was a ‘profound revolt against the central law of Christian morality, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”’, he said, adding: ‘There are few things in history more astonishing than the silent acquiescence of the Christian world in the radical betrayal of its ethical foundation.’⁵⁶ Gore emphasised that human beings were made equally in the image of God; the exploitation which characterised the capitalist system served therefore to damage and corrupt this image in whom it should be reverenced.⁵⁷ He argued that society must provide for every person the ‘equal right to realise himself’, which might be taken as an argument in favour of equality of opportunity.⁵⁸ If Scott Holland took aim at the inviolability of laissez-faire economics then Gore gave the same treatment to property rights. A society in which a wealthy few could amass more property than they needed, while others were excluded from the right to own property, was not functioning as it should – an argument which might appeal to conservative critics of neo-liberalism more so than socialists.⁵⁹ Gore’s solution, however – a ‘redistribution of property’ – brings us back to socialism; such a redistribution was possible because, in Gore’s estimation, there is frankly no absolute right to property, only a qualified right to property based on whether property ownership benefits or serves any useful function for the community, an argument which would be echoed by R.H. Tawney a few years later.⁶⁰ ‘Much,’ argued Gore, ‘that we are accustomed to hear called the legitimate rights of property, the Old Testament would call the robbery of God, and the grinding of the faces of the poor’; it was a violation of ‘the Christian idea of brotherhood’.⁶¹

      Gore was ambivalent on whether he regarded himself as a socialist, suggesting that society would do well to take a few steps towards socialism without going the whole way.⁶² This argument, taken alongside Gore’s denial of absolute rights to property and Holland’s view that the state could and should bound the economy with regulations, suggests that their vision was one that today we would label as social democratic – not the abolition but the management of capitalism. The CSU was ‘definitely anticapitalist and indefinitely socialist’.⁶³ The CSU however, though it did support important reforms, did not declare any firm programme for economic or political change, retaining a ‘non-committal attitude’ which, despite Gore and Holland’s awareness that this was an issue, ‘began to make the more radical Christian Socialists somewhat disillusioned’.⁶⁴

Among those who left the CSU was Conrad Noel (1869–1942), who declared in frustration that the organisation was ‘forever learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth’.⁶⁵ Noel was an Anglican priest who combined a high-church focus on the sacraments with a radical socialism in a manner similar to Headlam. He repudiated the Maurician idea that seemed to have taken hold in the CSU that Christian Socialism should be moderate and non-committal: ‘Christian Socialism […] is not, as some appear to think, a particular variety of Socialism, milder than the secular brand, but economic Socialism come to by the road of the Christian faith and inspired by the ideas of the Gospel.’⁶⁶ Noel was one of the founders of the Church Socialist League (CSL), a third Anglican Christian Socialist organisation, which was far more radical and committed to socialism than the CSU, as well as being more working-class than both the GSM and CSU.⁶⁷ He became best known as the infamous ‘red vicar’ of Thaxted, where he turned the parish into a centre of sacramental socialism, causing local and national scandal by hanging both the Red Flag and the flag of Sinn Fein inside the church building.⁶⁸ In sermons, Noel raged against the system of ‘Christo-capitalism’, which exploited workers and co-opted the Gospel for its own ends; like Vida Scudder (see Chapter 4) he pointed to the Trinity as an example of the love and co-operation that should be practised on earth and, like Headlam, he lauded the Magnificat of Mary as a hymn ‘more revolutionary than the Marseillaise’.⁶⁹

      Noel and Headlam both held that a sacramental Christianity was the only legitimate basis for socialism; they looked down on low-church and evangelical Anglicans, reserving particular scorn for Nonconformists. Yet church socialism was not an exclusively Anglo-Catholic phenomenon, nor was it reserved for the established church. A key figure was John Clifford (1836–1923), President of the Baptist Union of England and Wales, who also served as president of the predominantly Nonconformist Christian Socialist League, as well as being active in the Free Church Socialist League. The declaration of this latter organisation expressed its commitment to socialism in a manner that, excepting the lack of sacramental emphasis, would have satisfied Noel or Headlam:

      Believing that the principle of Brotherhood as taught by Jesus Christ cannot adequately be wrought out under existing industrial and commercial conditions, and that the faithful and commonplace application of this principle must result in the Socialization of all natural resources, as well as the instruments of production, distribution and exchange, the League exists to assist in the work of eliminating the former by building the latter Social Order.⁷⁰

For Clifford, the ethical principles of Christianity required a collectivist rather than competitive order of society. There were, he noted, some advantages to competitive capitalism – men were motivated to work hard and innovate – but the system also encouraged ‘the crushing of competitors and thrusting aside of rivals’ rather than the ‘brotherly helpfulness’ summed up in the teaching of Christ.⁷¹ Collectivism was no guarantee against sin and vice, but it encouraged co-operation and mutual support rather than self-centred individualism; such a system, Clifford declared, ‘will abolish poverty, reduce the hungry to an imperceptible quantity, and systematically care for the aged poor and for the sick’.⁷²

      Another notable representative of Nonconformist socialism was Samuel E. Keeble (1853–1946), a Wesleyan Methodist minister and founder of the Wesleyan Methodist Union for Social Service along similar lines to the CSU. As well as being committed to social service, Keeble was a gifted student of economics and a prolific writer, producing many books and pamphlets on social and economic – as well as theological – issues. Chief among these was Industrial Day-Dreams (1896)