Читать книгу The Christian Left - Anthony A. J. Williams - Страница 11

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 local government is one of the things that bind the members of a locality together as neighbours as well as the means by which they may govern lovingly and 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) in which he declared straightforwardly:

No system of industry which 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