The richest, most complex and most consequential tradition of Christian socialism is the British one, which was, and still is, mostly Anglican. Philip Turner, though straining out the complexity and much of the richness, offers an eloquent, thoughtful and compelling reminder that English Anglican socialism was once remarkably important and remains significant.
Christian socialism in England was not like Christian socialism anywhere else, with the partial and telling exceptions of select English former colonies. English Christian socialism boasted a line of highly respectable, aristocratic, Oxford-educated moralists, some of whom made bishop and most of whom were Anglo-Catholics prone to nostalgia for English Christendom. Turner, the retired Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, identifies Christian socialism with this select line of privileged figures, essentially recycling and updating, from a theological standpoint, the socio-political story that Maurice Reckitt told in the classic of this genre, Maurice to Temple: A Century of the Social Movement in the Church of England (1946). Rightly, Turner begins in the late 1840s with moral theologian Frederick Denison Maurice, who taught that cooperation is the moral law of the divine moral order and that ‘Christian Socialism’ names the mission of the church to reflect the beauty and ethical ideals of the divine order. Turner identifies Christian socialism solely with the fabled line of Maurice successors who rose even higher than they started: biblical scholar and bishop Brooke Foss Westcott, eminent bishop Charles Gore, the aristocratic cleric Maurice Reckitt, economic historian R. H. Tawney and eminent theologian and archbishop William Temple. He argues that the Christian socialists were politically naïve, but commendably critical of modern individualism and competitiveness; thus, they sowed the seeds of a still-promising Christian socialism imagined today by Rowan Williams and John Milbank.
Turner stresses that Christian socialists were idealists who believed that modern society was sick for prizing individualism, greed and competition instead of cultivating the ideals on which the health of a society depends: community, love, equality, fellowship, duty, service, personality, character, freedom and property. He contends that they did not concern themselves with public ownership or with structural policy reforms of any kind. He says it flatly: ‘Instead of structural change they sought to convey to the British public a normative view of life in society’ (p. 4). Christian socialism, Turner argues, was about restoring Christendom on religiously idealistic terms, preaching a public homiletics that sought to cultivate a cooperative public conscience. From Maurice to Temple to Milbank, the Christian socialists aimed to rebuild a Christian society based on normative Christian beliefs and practices – a society of ideals reflecting the holiness of God and revealed in the incarnation of Christ.
Turner adeptly elaborates the religious worldview underlying this tradition, showing its connection to the postliberal organic pluralism of Milbank. He lingers over the gap between the ideals of Christian socialism and Milbank's description of honour and gift exchange in postliberal society, commending Milbank's emphasis on the importance of virtue in a political system and the thesis of Milbank and Williams that postliberal Christian socialism rejects the secular rejection of divine transcendence.
The line of religious thinking that Turner equates with Christian socialism is recognisable on its own terms and does lead plausibly to his conclusion. However, the pathos that Turner attributes to it in his concluding chapter is partly self-fulfilling on his part, since he ignores radical aspects of the Maurice to Temple line – such as Gore and Scott Holland railing against imperialism; guild socialists Reckitt and Tawney fusing syndicalism, guild nostalgia and select doses of Council Marxism and Fabianism; and Temple refashioning guild socialism near the end of his career, prefiguring the Meidner Plan for Economic Democracy.
Moreover, English Anglican socialism was not only the line traced by Turner. It was also the Christian Socialist newspaper, brilliantly edited in the 1880s by Anglo-Catholic cleric Charles Marson and a band of others, who fused a fiery anti-imperialism with a call for public control of land, capital and all means of production, distribution and exchange. It was also the Church Socialist League, founded in 1906 and led by radical Anglo-Catholic clerics G. Algernon West, Conrad Noel and P. E. T. Widdrington. Here, Anglican socialism allied with the rising workers’ party movement that founded the Labour Party. It was also the movement for guild socialism that radicalised the labour movement from 1911 to 1923. Here, Christendom nostalgia was a factor in some streams of the movement, but the guild socialist opposition to state socialism was not temporising or reducible to tender feelings about ideals. It was radical socialist to the core, centred on the claim that the productive life of the nation should be organised and operated by self-governing democratic organisations embracing all workers in every industry and service.
It is certainly true, as Turner stresses, that the Anglican socialists were ethically based without apology, denying that any ideology should trump their religious ethic of cooperation and equality. But on that basis, some of them were militant anti-imperialists who said it should have been enough on Christian grounds or socialist grounds to produce anti-imperialists, but it seemed to require both. That is the core Christian socialism worth recovering.
