‘The Christian Left boasts a successful past – but does it have a future?’
“The season’s greetings to all who are remembering that Christ came ‘not to send peace but a sword’ against wrongdoing in all its forms.”
This was the pugnacious Christmas greeting once offered by James Keir Hardie, the Labour Party’s first leader and the man often viewed as the key figure in its creation.
“There can be no peace,” Hardie added, “so long as gaunt hunger stalks the land.”
There is no doubting Hardie’s radicalism. He viewed the Labour Party as the means by which a peaceful revolution could be carried out. The capitalist system would be eradicated once enough Labour MPs were elected to vote for its downfall and inaugurate what he called “a Co-operative Commonwealth”.
Yet he was also a man of sincere faith, who once wrote, “The impetus which drove me first into the Labour movement, and the inspiration which has carried me on in it, has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than from all other sources combined.”
The road to ‘45
Hardie exemplifies the Christian Socialist tradition that both shaped the Labour Party’s ideology in its formative years and led to its greatest triumph – the General Election victory of 1945.
This victory seemed most unlikely around a decade and a half earlier. The party almost didn’t survive the fall-out from Ramsay MacDonald’s decision to form a National Government coalition with the Liberals and Conservatives.
It was two Christian Socialists – firstly Arthur Henderson and secondly George Lansbury – who led Labour through this troubled time. “I am a Socialist,” said Lansbury, “because the Christian religion teaches us that love, co-operation, brotherhood are the way of life which will give us peace and security.” Lansbury’s deputy was a future leader, Clement Attlee.
Another Christian Socialist, R.H. Tawney, was the intellectual force behind the party at this stage. To believe in socialism, wrote Tawney, “it is necessary to believe in God”.
It was Tawney who helped Archbishop William Temple to shape the appendix to his key work Christianity and the Social Order (1942). Here the archbishop set out a blueprint for a post-war welfare state. Many took notice – including William Beveridge, who published the Beveridge Report that same year.
The ideas of Tawney, Temple and Beveridge were codified in the 1945 party manifesto Let us Face the Future, co-authored by yet another Christian Socialist – Jarrow MP Ellen Wilkinson. It isn’t just the party, but also the expansion of the welfare state and the creation of the NHS that “owes more to Methodism than to Marx”.
‘Prophetic-liberating tradition’
The Christian Socialism of the British Labour movement is just one of the many and varied Christian Left movements that have emerged around the world.
One of the most notable examples is the liberation theology of Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, who published A Theology of Liberation in 1971. Christians, says Gutiérrez, must follow God in taking the side of “the poor and oppressed over and against the pharaohs of this world”.
Around the same time as Gutiérrez was developing his ideas, in the United States James Cone published Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and a Black Theology of Liberation (1970).
Cone’s work demonstrates the portability of liberation theology. It applies not only to the economically marginalised, but to oppressed people of all kinds. This is why there have emerged Black, African, feminist, womanist, and a variety of LGBTQ+ liberation theologies.
Like British Christian Socialism, these liberation movements have their roots in Christian theology.
The American feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether views this as flowing from a scriptural “prophetic-liberating tradition” that is “the central tradition, the tradition by which the biblical faith constantly criticises and renews itself after its own vision”.
Tensions and questions
Debates within liberation theology from the 1970s onwards sought to move the focus beyond just one form of oppression to consider multiple, overlapping forms of oppression. This brings liberation theology into the same ideological space as the intersectional theory that undergirds so much of the contemporary Left.
But a tension remains. In the era of Hardie, Lansbury and Wilkinson, both Christian and non-Christian socialists could work together in fighting for economic equality and distributive justice. The same may not be true in an era where the progressive, identarian Left views Christianity and its traditional morality as the very source of oppression.
There is also the question of whether Ruether’s “prophetic-liberating tradition” is a true understanding of Christian theology and teaching.
In foregrounding freedom from oppression or the establishment of economic collectivism, the Christian Left appears to be offering a different message to the Christian Gospel.
For Hardie, the baby born in Bethlehem came to oppose social and economic injustice. Jesus was a “communist” and an “agitator” wrote George Lansbury; the one who brings economic liberation according to Gustavo Gutiérrez. The emphasis has shifted far from the New Testament, where “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15).
What future is there for a Christian Left that sits uncomfortably with both Christianity and the Left?
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