The nineteenth-century Anglican theologian John Frederick Denison Maurice is remembered as one of the leaders of the Christian Socialist Movement in Victorian era Britain. Believing that the only true foundation for socialism was Christianity, Maurice founded cooperative societies, critiqued the capitalist system, and competed against militantly secular leftists in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. To his followers, Maurice was a spiritual leader rather than a politician. “My business,” he wrote in 1852, “is not to build, but to dig, to show that economics and politics . . . must have a ground beneath themselves.” His understanding of socialism was as simple as calling the church to acknowledge that it had a social mission to the poor. Light on policy details but drenched in prophetic energy, Maurice preached for “the Kingdom of Heaven . . . to renew the earth and make it a habitation for blessed spirits instead of for demons.” Just don't ask him about the details.
Vaneesa Cook's new book, Spiritual Socialists, is a pioneering history of Maurice's spiritual progeny in America. Grouping a wide range of reform-minded Christians from World War I to the present as “spiritual socialists,” Cook examines “American leftists . . . who believed that the spiritual dimensions of the human condition needed more attention” in light of the prevalent “moral dearth of Marxist politics” that dominated the Left (3). Some spiritual socialists are household names—Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry A. Wallace—while others come into their own through Cook's carefully constructed and well-written narrative, including missionary Sherwood Eddy, pacifist A. J. Muste, educator Myles Horton, and historian and activist Staughton Lynd. They all shared with Maurice a vision for societal transformation but also a predilection to be spiritually rather than policy-oriented: to “dig” to the foundations rather than “build” a national movement.
Cook convincingly develops these Christians into a distinct religio-political tradition. Their uniting doctrine was the “kingdom of God,” a concept that performs so much theoretical and rhetorical work for spiritual socialists that Cook refrains from offering a precise definition herself. Rooted in the social gospel theology of Walter Rauschenbusch (and Maurice before him), the spiritual socialists’ kingdom of God is a vision of a fairer, more humane society based on the brotherhood of man; a metonym for the realization of leftist values including nonviolence, anti-capitalism, and racial harmony; and an eschatological striving rooted in the teachings of the Hebrew prophets and the Sermon on the Mount. For Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement, the kingdom of God eschewed electoral politics and was defined by “decentralized, communal, and progressive action” with no “external, alienating, and spiritually repressive intuitions” (86). For A. J. Muste, the kingdom was unequivocally pacifist. On the other hand, for Henry A. Wallace, who was secretary of agriculture from 1933–1940 and vice president from 1940–1944, it was precisely through electoral politics and victory in World War II that Americans would achieve “the realization of the teachings of Jesus, the appreciation of the Sermon on the Mount, the bringing of the kingdom of heaven to earth” (113).
For the most part, spiritual socialists did not expect the kingdom of God to arrive through the state. But spiritual socialists held out little hope for the kingdom of God arriving through the established churches either. Spiritual socialists by and large eschewed organized religion, or when they worked within existing structures, there was significant friction. A disenchantment with religious hierarchies pervades the biographies of many (though not all) of the people Cook profiles. Some of the most compelling parts of Spiritual Socialists document institution building undertaken to circumvent or reimagine established church and educational structures, from A. J. Muste's Brookwood Labor College (a union-oriented progressive school) to Sherwood Eddy's Delta Cooperative Farms (an interracial community of white and black former sharecroppers). At the same time, these independent leftists worked against Marxists who idealized “atheistic, materialistic” socialism (22). “All spiritual socialists,” Cook writes, “at one point or another, recognized and commented on their unique position between liberalism and the Left, and they felt misunderstood by both sides” (48). This shared loathing of the doctrinaire Marxists and liberals united the tradition.
The extent of interfaith spiritual socialism, especially given the tradition's diverse theological inspirations in the American context, could have been explored. For example, Cook writes that Jews are a minor part of the story of spiritual socialism because they “tended to make their moral claims in secular, ethical language,” but this assessment does not capture the wide range of Jewish voices that drew from the same religious wells, from the civil rights activism of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to the cultural values of television producer Norman Lear (12). The Christians in Spiritual Socialists share striking similarities in biographies and convictions with Jews like Rabbi Michael Lerner, who was a New Left activist and founded the magazine Tikkun in the 1980s on the premise that the American Left failed to appreciate the centrality of religion in politics.
Likewise, while Spiritual Socialists traces its twenty-first century legacies to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and Rev. William J. Barber's Poor People's Campaign, these two manifestations fit uneasily within the tradition's aversion to “centralized power politics” (Henry Wallace being a major exception) that encouraged “small-scale, local organization from the bottom up” (6). One wonders what Cook would make of communities such as the Bruderhof, founded by German theologian Eberhard Arnold and his wife, Emmy, in 1920 with a large presence in the United States beginning in the 1950s. Committed to nonviolence, communal living, and social justice, and dedicated to the kingdom of God as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, the Bruderhof has advanced spiritual socialist values better, perhaps, than Sanders's call for a political revolution. Cook's success is nowhere more evident than in the realization that spiritual socialism's legacies are varied and multifaceted in ways that deserve attention in future research.
Along with its scholarly contributions, Spiritual Socialists displays sympathy with the project of spiritual socialism on almost every page; in the conclusion Cook seeks to invigorate what she sees as a moribund left in an era of reactionary politics. Spiritual socialism's most lasting legacy, she concludes, was to speak a type of Maurice-digging truth to “a leftist world gone topsy-turvy, grounding secular radicals to a moral touchstone, to democratic principles, and, most importantly perhaps, to hope” (213). In their century-long pursuit of the kingdom of God, spiritual socialists certainly are exemplars of the Christian charge to hope for a more just future.
