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Christian Doubt and Hope in Early Socialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2016

Philip Lockley
Philip Lockley*
Affiliation:
Durham University
*
*St John's College, Durham University, 3 South Bailey, Durham, DH1 3RJ. E-mail: pjlockley@gmail.com.
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Abstract

The diverse forms of socialism which emerged in the nineteenth century had a complex relationship with both Christian beliefs and the Churches. Socialist movements are commonly remembered as anti-religious and anti-clerical. Doubt, forged in the familiar nineteenth-century ‘crisis of faith’, shaped not only Marxism, but also Owenism, the earlier social theories of Robert Owen. Church historians have long pointed to another narrative of socialism and religion in the Victorian era: the rise of Christian Socialism after 1848, led by F. D. Maurice, J. M. Ludlow, Charles Kingsley and others. Here, they recall a response to doubt with faith, and an answer to anti-clericalism with a new vision for the Churches’ social role. Yet socialism before 1848 had a more contested interaction with Christianity than this history assumes. By exploring the specific nature of Christian doubt among early Owenite socialists, then following how this doubt was answered by contemporary Christian supporters of Owen, this essay uncovers an alternative, noteworthy response to doubting Christianity – the nature of Christian hope in early socialism.

Keywords

Robert OwenJohn Henry Newmanco-operationChristian hope

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 52: DOUBTING CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH AND DOUBT , June 2016, pp. 364 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2016 

Socialism has been associated with doubting Christianity since its origins in the nineteenth century. Even before the central prophets of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were ever influenced by the sceptical works of David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, or developed their view of religion as ‘the opium of the people’, earlier forms of socialism were allied with doubt and opposition to religion.Footnote 1 In Britain and America, the first ‘socialists’ were followers of Robert Owen, the Welsh-born cotton-master and social theorist who presented a panacea for emerging industrial capitalism in a future communitarian and cooperative society.Footnote 2 Owen was among the most prominent freethinkers of his age, openly declaring all existing religions to be erroneous. The movements Owen initiated either took their cue from this assertion, or were perceived to do so in the public mind. In Cincinnati in 1829, Owen held an infamous debate on the evidence for Christianity with the co-founder of the Disciples of Christ, Alexander Campbell.Footnote 3 American Owenism soon evolved into an urban campaign for secularism. In Britain, Owenites likewise developed this country's earliest institutions of doubt, a network of Halls of Science promoting freethought, and in 1840, the first national campaign against socialism was initiated by an outraged bishop of Exeter. A decade later, as Owenism disintegrated, ex-Owenites founded the National Secular Society.Footnote 4

Church historians of the English-speaking world have long opted to narrate another story of socialism and Christianity in the nineteenth century, commonly beginning as Owenism ended and reaching well into the twentieth century. The tradition labelled Christian Socialism is dated in Britain from 1848, and the initiative of Frederick Denison Maurice, John Ludlow and Charles Kingsley.Footnote 5 It was revived by Maurice's Anglo-Catholic followers in the 1870s, then spread into Free Church denominations, before being taken across the urbanizing British and American empires of the Edwardian era.Footnote 6 In some places it combined with the parallel Social Gospel movement; in time it influenced William Temple and others to make the Christian case for welfare democracy in the wake of the First World War.Footnote 7

Fondly remembered by socially conscious Churches today, the Christian Socialist tradition seemingly offers a compelling counter to the tendency to socialist doubt, namely faith. A faith in humanity forged by a theology of the incarnation threads through the tradition up to Temple.Footnote 8 Faith in the Church as both an institution engaged with present society and a symbolic revealing of the divine society stands at the core of Maurice's theology.Footnote 9 Faith in the Kingdom of God above and beyond a materialist reading of history likewise characterizes the common theology of this entire tradition.

Maurice, Ludlow and Kingsley coined the term ‘Christian socialist’ to be deliberately provocative – to place side by side two terms already widely considered contradictory.Footnote 10 Despite the fact that the Communist Manifesto also appeared in 1848, the oxymoronic character of ‘Christian Socialism’ was widely assumed, in a British context, on the basis not of Marxist but of Owenite doubt. Church historians have rarely concerned themselves with the distinction between these two traditions of socialist doubt, nor have they adequately explored the ambiguous and contested relationship with Christianity which characterized the pre-Marx, pre-Maurice socialisms of the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s.Footnote 11 The intellectual and political bases of doubt and opposition to Christianity among Owenites shared some similarities with Marxists, but differed in other ways. There were, notably, also many Christian Owenites, a phenomenon frequently forgotten by scholars in thrall to the Maurice tradition. Through an exploration of the specific nature of Christian doubt among early Owenite socialists, and how it was answered by contemporary Christian Owenites, this essay ultimately uncovers an alternative, noteworthy response to doubting Christianity – the nature of Christian hope in early socialism.

Socialist Doubts

Early socialist doubts in Britain and America followed a pattern set by the career and convictions of Robert Owen himself. Born in Newtown in mid-Wales in 1771 to an artisan family of limited means, Owen grew up in a context of customary affiliation to the established Church of Wales, with some contact with Calvinistic Methodism.Footnote 12 Religion probably exercised Owen from an early age, although his later autobiography dubiously foreshadowed a celebrated freethinking future by suggesting that at the age of eight he was already disturbed by the comparative claims and disagreements between world religions, and that he had rejected all religion by the time he was ten.Footnote 13 More likely, as Robert Davis has argued, Owen's suspicion of orthodox religion stemmed from his move during his late teens to Manchester.Footnote 14 Admitted to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1793, and thereafter an active member, Owen now moved in a climate of rational criticism of revealed religion extending out of eighteenth-century Arianism and Unitarianism.Footnote 15 Here, Owen encountered the ideas of William Godwin, Voltaire and other sceptical philosophes. By the time he secured control of New Lanark mills in southern Scotland in 1799, Owen was a classic Enlightenment deist, dismissing all beliefs contrary to reason.

At New Lanark, Owen carried out his celebrated experiments in improving workers’ circumstances to improve their characters, the test case for his developing theory of environmental determinism, that humans do good or bad entirely because of circumstances. Owen promoted temperance, cleanliness and order in his factory village; he excluded physical punishment from the workplace, ensured the quality and value of goods in the company store, and provided education for young children. As a result, crime, ill-health and absenteeism at New Lanark fell, and profits rose. Owen subsequently employed artful self-publicity to project lessons from his experiments as a wider social solution: his ‘new view of society’.Footnote 16 Religion was rarely mentioned in Owen's essays published under this title, yet, as Robert Davis has pointed out, the ‘moral psychology’ of the work was ‘profoundly irreconcilable with orthodox Christianity’.Footnote 17

By insisting that circumstances form human character, Owen implicitly denied the principle of free will, or individual responsibility for good or evil behaviour. In turn, this contradicted the conventional Christian understanding of sin as purposeful disobedience, whether conceived as original sin constraining the extent of human perfectibility in a fallen world, or the sins said to originate in the individual's will and responsible action. The broader logic of Owen's principle ‘that character is universally formed for, and not by, the individual' was that by changing people's circumstances – principally their poverty, but also their education and physical treatment – you could change the character of all humanity.Footnote 18 Owen's successive proposals for self-supporting communities, a rational school system and cooperative initiatives all developed from this dictum, so at odds with orthodox Christian teachings regarding the fallen yet autonomous human person, with the capacity to adopt an ethic of behaviour for themselves.

Owen avoided questions over his orthodoxy for some time, gaining considerable support for his plans among the English and Scottish aristocracy and Church figures, including, apparently, Charles Manners-Sutton, archbishop of Canterbury.Footnote 19 However, growing impatient with opposition to his plans, in a public speech in London during August 1817 Owen identified religion as both the principal obstruction to his success and the ultimate cause of human misery.Footnote 20 Religion was the reason, Owen declared, ‘so many countless millions . . . through each successive generation, have been the victims of ignorance, of superstition, of mental degradation, and of wretchedness’.Footnote 21 All existing religions ‘forced on the minds of men, deep, dangerous, and lamentable principles of disunion, division, and separation’; all religions appeared to Owen ‘united with much – yes, very much – error’.Footnote 22

Owen would look back on this speech as a turning point in his life.Footnote 23 He believed that he had stood up and pronounced ‘truth’, and in subsequent writings he adopted a triumphalist tone: now was ‘the Dominion of FAITH ceased; its reign of terror, or disunion, of separation, and of irrationality . . . broken to pieces’.Footnote 24 The coming society concerning which Owen would prophesy for the rest of his life was now linked explicitly to the removal of ‘irrational' elements of religion, the divisive influence of religious sectarianism and the broader hindrance caused by religious doctrines to the realization of socialism. Coupled with Owen's prior denial of human responsibility for sin, these form four principal doubts discernible among many early socialists who followed Owen into disbelief.

One such Owenite was the Newman brother most people have never heard of: Charles Newman, the middle brother between John Henry and Francis. Charles was first influenced by Robert Owen's ideas in the early 1820s, while John was securing his Oriel College fellowship and Francis – the subsequent Brethren missionary, then Unitarian classicist – was just beginning a brilliant student career.Footnote 25 Charles did not attend university himself, though he was not lacking in intellectual gifts. He worked as a clerk, and then as a tutor for periods, but showed signs of mental instability, and mostly lived off his brothers. Charles's career is not well known, partly because he lived much of it in seclusion, partly because his brothers wanted it that way. John declared Charles's life ‘aimless, profitless, forlorn’; Francis considered it ‘wasted . . . better left in silence’.Footnote 26

Evidence for Charles's views may nonetheless be pieced together from John's letters and writings.Footnote 27 As Frank Turner has noted, ‘[t]hroughout John Newman's life he measured much of his own religious thought against that of his younger siblings’, in Grammar of Assent even narrating a case of ‘three Protestants, one [who] becomes a Catholic, a second a Unitarian, and a third an unbeliever’.Footnote 28 From 1823 to 1825, John debated Charles's ‘irreligion’ in their correspondence, with Charles arguing principally from the ‘absurdity’ of beliefs regarding everlasting punishment, and people's obsession with sinfulness. The idea of punishing sin made no sense if sin was caused by circumstances. ‘Man is not so bad', Charles insisted to John; ‘your way of asking for grace is very round-about; so much machinery’.Footnote 29 In 1825, Charles attacked the Christian response to social problems: ‘I think Mr Owen for practical motives to action . . . beats St Paul hollow’.Footnote 30

John Newman varied his stance on his younger brother's beliefs, which he found ‘truly lamentable’.Footnote 31 In 1833 he refused to recommend Charles for a teaching post on account of his views, but relented the following year, composing a recommendation in which he pointed out that Charles was ‘not a believer in Christianity, but he had promised me he would neither directly or indirectly introduce the subject’.Footnote 32 For a brief period around 1837, Charles ‘returned to the Church’ (in John's words), but by 1841 John was writing that Charles was ‘going in his old way’ and had ‘given up religion. He is very intimate with the Socialists and now does not shrink from the name’.Footnote 33 In December Charles wrote unapologetically to John, explaining that ‘conventional society, or very religious society is no society to me’; he could no longer bear to live ‘among persons who do not aim at least among themselves at justice as a means toward well being in this life for themselves and others’.Footnote 34 For Charles, then, the believer in human goodness in improved circumstances, Christianity was to be rejected for obstructing the socialism which sought justice in this life, and not the doubted next.Footnote 35

I turn now to consider more briefly two rather different Owenite unbelievers. Emma Martin and Frances Wright were lecturers for the socialist and secularist cause on the two sides of the Atlantic. Emma Martin became a Particular Baptist at seventeen, after a middle-class upbringing in the Church of England in Bristol.Footnote 36 Keenly involved in chapel life, yet unhappily married, Martin developed her literary and public speaking skills to question the contemporary status of women from the perspective of Christian Dissent. In 1839, Martin went to hear the Owenite lecturer Alexander Campbell (not the Disciples of Christ leader) condemn the ‘evils of our present social system’, and was elated to hear him emphasize ‘the degraded condition of women’.Footnote 37 Yet when Campbell subsequently attacked Christianity and dismissed its compatibility with socialism, Martin was shocked, and immediately challenged Campbell to debate the claims and social system of Christianity. In the course of her preparations and the debates themselves, Martin discovered her own doubts overwhelming. Seeking to read the Bible ‘rationally’ presented her with ‘inaccuracies and inconsistencies’ difficult to defend.Footnote 38 Very publicly, Martin switched sides, and became one of the Owenites’ most formidable and notorious advocates.Footnote 39 Key elements of the early socialist vision were the emancipation of women from loveless marriages and domestic restrictions, which Owen's plan for life in community and the overturning of property law (and with it, conventions of women as property) would achieve.Footnote 40 For Emma Martin, ‘irrational' biblical Christianity's underpinning of conventional women's roles made it an obstacle to socialism, so necessitating its removal.

Frances Wright was born in Dundee, but achieved fame in the American Owenite movement, founding a model community for freed slaves in Tennessee, then establishing the first secularist Hall of Science in New York City in 1829.Footnote 41 A full decade before Martin, Wright came to much the same view of Christianity as upholding patriarchy and sexual conservatism and opposing socialism. In an infamous series of Popular Lectures, circulated widely in the United States, she advocated free rational enquiry ‘as a means of obtaining just knowledge’, turning this Enlightenment approach – after Owen – to critique the truth claims of revealed religion, and to condemn the social divisions and waste it caused.Footnote 42 Wright declared to the American Churches:

. . . you are now engaged in the pursuit of what is not knowledge. . . . you are now paying . . . towards the support of a system of error, which, from the earliest date of human tradition, has filled the earth with crime and deluged its bosom with blood, . . . [which] fills your country with discord, and impedes its progress in virtue, by lengthening the term of its ignorance.Footnote 43

For Wright, ‘idle speculations in matters of faith’ were the origin of so much ‘positive misery’, of ‘disputes and dissentions’, ‘unjust actions’ and ‘uncharitable feelings’.Footnote 44 Wright saw ‘free enquiry’ as leading to her own deist beliefs and open freedom of opinion in socialist community.

For a range of early socialists, then, doubts about Christianity spanned these four issues identified in Owen's thought: first, the denial of human responsibility for sin, then views of Christianity as divisive, as a hindrance to the coming of socialism and as ‘irrational'. After Owen articulated these views openly from 1817, he lost substantial support for his reform proposals, especially among an outraged Christian establishment. For decades after, Owen's ‘infidel' views branded him suspect in most church circles, a distrust which came to a head in 1840 when the arch-Tory bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, was apoplectic at Owen's presentation to the young Queen Victoria, leading him to denounce the socialist menace to the House of Lords.Footnote 45

Christian Owenites

Despite this history, a significant proportion of Owen's supporters in Britain and America in the 1820s and 1830s were Christians. Many looked beyond Owen's personal beliefs and reputation, and recognized something in his social system's communal or cooperative principles which squared with their persisting Christianity. Mapping the views of these diverse Christian Owenites on either side of the Atlantic reveals how each of the issues exercising Owenite doubts generated alternative Christian answers.

Beginning with Owen's environmental determinism and the denial of human responsibility for sin, several innovative responses were formulated. Some suggested that the Bible might endorse Owen's view of the power of circumstances to shape humanity. The most common proof text was Proverbs 22: 6: ‘Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old he will not depart from it’.Footnote 46 Others pointed to Job 10: 8–9 and Lamentations 4: 2 as ‘passages in Scripture favouring this view of man’, and describing human beings as being ‘like clay in the potter's hand'.Footnote 47

Some sympathizers, such as the Quaker, William Allen, endorsed attempts to frame Owen's doctrine as referring only to ‘the worldly character, not the religious’. Allen's Philanthropist journal declared it no ‘interference with religion, to say that the worldly qualities of man's nature are operated upon by worldly circumstances’. By this, the fallen human capacity to sin – the ‘worldly qualities of man's nature’ – was distinguished from a person's religious identity, their being a Christian in such circumstances. It was pointed out that Christian adherence equipped the human person with an impulse to overcome or avoid sin, yet the familiar refrain in the Lord's Prayer, ‘lead us not into temptation’, demonstrated that orthodox Christianity still presupposed a ‘dependence of conduct upon situation’. Christians do not pray for God to ‘prevent them from sinning . . . but to remove from them such circumstances as would work upon their nature to make them sin’.Footnote 48 The journal thus acknowledged a ‘truth’ in Owen's principles, yet adjusted this to the concept of ‘circumstances of temptation’, and the persisting need for people still to convert to Christianity. For Allen, changing circumstances was indeed a way of changing humanity, in the sense that such changes offered a means to aiding future human improvement by making it easier to be a better Christian.

Elements of Allen's argument were echoed by the Anglican philanthropist, John Minter Morgan, perhaps the leading Christian advocate for Owenism after 1817. Morgan composed, among other works, the admirably perspicuous Mr. Owen's proposed Villages for the Poor shown to be highly favourable to Christianity.Footnote 49 Morgan's writings in this period sought to make Owen's environmental determinism more palatable to Christians by insisting that sinful behaviour was promoted in conditions of human ‘error’, and that humans themselves had created many of these ‘evil' conditions: ‘they are our own errors alone that have impeded the amelioration of mankind'.Footnote 50 Morgan looked at contemporary British society and was shocked by the domestic cultures of ‘intemperance, brutality, ill-nature’, and ‘dissipating . . . amusements’.Footnote 51 Owen's social plans offered ‘a better system’ under which so many circumstances conducive to sin would be expelled. After such a ‘withdrawment of the mind from temptation’, Morgan contended, ‘our holy religion will have free course; since those obstacles which at present impede its progress will be . . . diminished'.Footnote 52 As they would surely promote ‘the more extended practice of genuine Christianity’, Owen's social proposals were therefore worthy of all Christians’ support.Footnote 53

Many early supporters of Owen's cooperative trading recognized his theory as an antidote to divisive competitive capitalism, and cast this as a more harmful social division than religion. Cooperation was often viewed as exemplifying explicitly Christian ‘friendship and brotherly love’, with one contributor to the Co-operative Magazine resenting Owen's ‘religio-phobia’ because ‘the Christian religion most expressly commands and most continually inculcates, as the first thing necessary, the practice of our System’.Footnote 54 At a mass meeting of the Sheffield Co-operators in May 1832, the Revd Christopher Blencow Dunn, curate of Cumberworth, near Huddersfield, proposed cooperation as a remedy for ‘all the moral, political and commercial abuses and disorders’ of the present.Footnote 55 Secretary of the relief committee in Denby Dale – a region of the Yorkshire West Riding woollens industry desperately affected by falling piece-rates and an erratic trade cycle – Dunn described the ‘beneficial effects’ cooperation had already produced. ‘It has united in the bonds of brotherly love thousands of industrious fellow citizens’, Dunn asserted; ‘it has raised the laborious and useful classes in their own estimation, as well as in the estimation of others’. Conscious of Owen's reputation, Dunn stressed ‘the morality of our doctrines. There is nothing in co-operation which is at all disgraceful, demoralizing, or illegal'. Dunn knew of ‘no institution’ beside cooperation ‘which, in its nature, is so essentially religious, being a practical development of the whole system of pure and primitive Christianity. It anticipates the establishment of a condition of social equality, in which there will exist a community of interests, a community of happiness, and a community of wealth.’Footnote 56

Dunn's suggestion that cooperation and shared property were an outworking and completion of Christianity was echoed in responses to Owen's community plans, providing a counter to the view that Christianity delayed socialism. One writer in The Economist – ‘a periodical paper explanatory of the New System of Society projected by Robert Owen’ – eagerly declared: ‘the earthly triumph of Christianity would be the establishment of the new system of society’.Footnote 57 In the United States, Owen's earliest publicists were mostly Quakers, whose Owen-inspired ‘New York Society for Promoting Communities’ declared its object: ‘to convince the pious of all denominations, . . . to institute and establish in every religious congregation, a system of social, and equal, and inclusive rights . . . and privileges to all real and personal property’.Footnote 58 The New York Society likewise evoked Old Testament prophecy and a coming millennium: ‘we have reasons to believe, that by a growth in the virtues of social love and affection, each shall be enabled to love one another as one's own self, and thus introduce that gospel state of “peace on earth and good will to men;” “every man seeking not his own, but his neighbour's wealth”’.Footnote 59

A leading figure in the Society for Promoting Communities was Dr Cornelius Blatchly, a physician struck by growing social distress in New York City, whose earlier work on the Causes of Popular Poverty (1817) had contrasted contemporary property ownership in the United States, which produced an ‘excess of riches in the hands of the few’, with the biblical model of land ‘for general use and benefit and not for individual aggrandizement’.Footnote 60 For Blatchly – like other Christian sympathizers with early socialism – the truly Christian approach to property was represented by the Jerusalem church holding ‘all things in common’ in Acts 2 and 4.Footnote 61 The future of Christianity would see the ‘restoration’ of such ‘pure and perfect communities’, and thus a realizing of the divine intention for human society so quickly forfeited by the early Church.Footnote 62

Back in Britain, Morgan's analysis of references to ‘the plan of a Community of Goods’ in New Testament writings, led him to conclude ‘that it was either itself a Divine suggestion, or at least considered by the apostles and the first converts as a necessary consequence of the doctrines that had been revealed to them’.Footnote 63 The subsequent demise of this ‘plan of life’ from the Church was no indication that it had been found ‘impracticable’; rather its ‘departure affords no better argument against the primitive practice, than is presented by any other corruption of Christianity against its genuine doctrines’.Footnote 64 James Smith, a former Church of Scotland minister, likewise declared ‘community of goods . . . the true Christianity’, explaining to an Owenite audience that the passages in Acts were ‘the prophetic glance which the founders of Christianity themselves gave of the future destiny of the church’.Footnote 65 ‘If priests and legislators knew their own interests’, Smith insisted, ‘they would establish the social system of communities at once. If they understood Christianity, they would see that they are nothing but the Christian millennium about to be fulfilled'.Footnote 66

Millennial beliefs were just one of a variety of recognizably Romantic forms of religion common among Christian Owenites, which represented a distinct response to Owen's ‘Enlightenment’ dismissal of revealed religion.Footnote 67 James Smith became the leading Owenite of this trend, producing The Shepherd (1834–8), a journal discussing prophecy, millennialism and how socialism could be sympathetic to spiritual experience.Footnote 68 From this period of the 1830s, mysticism and the soul's experience attracted increasing attention as an alternative to materialism, with doubts voiced about the absolute influence of physical circumstances. It was for the socialist to choose to lead a moral life, a choice which concerned their own individuality and recognized the character of the soul as subject to the work of God. ‘Circumstances may deform, but cannot form the character’, a work on religion and Owenism now declared:

. . . circumstances are to the individual, what the soil and the atmosphere are to a plant; they may facilitate or obstruct the expansion of his powers and the unfolding of his character, but the energy that triumphs over all circumstances, and gives maturity to the noblest sentiments, comes from a deeper source.Footnote 69

Among the Owenites attracted to the varieties of ‘sacred socialism’ which emerged was Alexander Campbell, the once-sceptical lecturer.Footnote 70 Campbell adopted the mystical communitarianism of James Pierrepont Greaves, whose Surrey ‘Concordium’ set the path of socialism back towards the monastery.Footnote 71 A regime of uncooked, vegetarian food, cold baths and celibacy sought to purify both body and soul from sin and make moral beings for a harmonious future.

Related ideas circulated within contemporary Transcendentalism in New England, as the philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott also critiqued Owen's materialist doctrine of circumstances with a theory of ‘spiritual circumstances’ in his own community experiments.Footnote 72 Alcott and other Transcendentalists shared an interest in Coleridge's idealism and Romantic concepts of organic development with the ‘sacred socialists’, and the two groups were closely aligned through friendships and correspondence networks.Footnote 73 For Alcott, whose early interests centred on educating children to be open to God, it was clear that ‘wisdom and happiness’ could be determined by environment, but it was unwarranted to assert that circumstances had ‘the transcendent importance which they receive in the theory of Mr Owen’.Footnote 74 To grant such power to circumstances was a ‘one-eyed philosophy’, one of the ‘half-visaged theories of materialism’. Only when combined with God-given free will to ‘form and modify institutions’ for a better future would an awareness of the influence of circumstances allow human beings to meliorate their own and others’ ‘outward condition’.Footnote 75 Alcott's own interest in living in an ascetic community stemmed from this belief in overcoming the unhappy effects of ‘external nature’, an intention which Alcott equated with ‘the purpose of Heaven’ and the next stage in the intended development of humanity, when:

. . . the faded image of Humanity is to be restored, and Man to reappear in his original brightness. It is to mould anew our Institutions, our Manners, our Men. It is to restore Nature to its rightful use, purify Life; hallow the functions of the Human Body, and regenerate Philosophy, Literature, Art, Society. The Divine Idea of Man is to be formed in the common consciousness of this age.Footnote 76

Conclusion

As is clear from Alcott's reflections on what ‘is to be’, from the preceding discussion of socialists preparing their souls and bodies for forthcoming harmony, and from all the ideas of fulfilling the Christian millennium, restoring the early Church's ‘pure and perfect communities’, anticipating conditions of social equality and happiness and planning society to facilitate the overcoming of sin, these Christian early socialists were commonly concerned with the future: an imagined, better future. Of course, all socialisms are ultimately about imagined futures. They are envisaged from within the present and project forward in time to when current conditions of injustice and inequality will be no more, or when marginal existing experiments in communal or cooperative living will be made universal.Footnote 77 In this way, socialisms, however doubtful over doctrines, retain an obvious point of prospective interaction and overlap with future-thinking in Christian eschatology, or, as some would term it, theologies of hope.Footnote 78 The socialist tendency to doubt Christianity is perhaps paradoxically accompanied by an inherent hopefulness about the future which is open to recognition and reclamation by Christians.

It was with hope that early nineteenth-century Christians sympathetic to Owenite socialism most commonly answered or avoided the doubts of their fellow socialists. Owen's determinist views of circumstances and sin were sometimes squared with a biblical perspective, yet also reshaped into the prayerful hope of realizing social circumstances which led ‘not into temptation’. During the 1820s and 1830s, Christians living with the early effects of capitalist competition recognized this economic order as the greater cause of social division, and cast their Christianity on the side of the hope of future social unity. Looking towards a fulfilment of Christianity's communal ethic, in a millennial age or an evocation of the primitive Church, they considered their religion a hopeful direction, not an obstruction to socialism. Furthermore, significant numbers of socialists were left unpersuaded by the Enlightenment rationalist accounts of human existence offered by Owen or Frances Wright: religious experience remained a palpable factor in their lives. Several developed a more Romantic social ethics, taking account of a divine immanence and involvement in the world, and placed their hope in grounding individual choice and character in the soul and their God-given free will.

Thus, in contrast to the familiar Christian Socialist tradition of conventional ecclesiastical history, which so consistently proffered ‘faith’ as the counter to socialist doubt, Christians engaged by an earlier socialism claimed the alternative antonym of hope from within the dynamic of socialism itself, and turned it to their own Christian purpose – the purpose of imagining a more Christian future.

Footnotes

This essay was researched, written and presented as a paper while the author was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.

1 On Marxism and modern theology, see Jones, Gareth Stedman, ‘Religion and the Origins of Socialism’, in Katznelson, Ira and Jones, Gareth Stedman, eds, Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2010), 171–89.

2 The major studies of Owenism include Harrison, J. F. C., Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London, 1969); Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem (London, 1983); Claeys, Gregory, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989); Royle, Edward, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium (Manchester, 1998). A more recent collection of essays is Thompson, Noel and Williams, Chris, eds, Robert Owen and his Legacy (Cardiff, 2011).

3 Debate on the Evidences of Christianity . . . between Robert Owen, of New Lanark, Scotland, and Alexander Campbell, of Bethany, Virginia (London, 1839).

4 Royle, Edward, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester, 1974).

5 Norman, Edward, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge, 1987).

6 d'Alroy Jones, Peter, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1968); Phillips, Paul T., A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940 (University Park, PA, 1996).

7 Grimley, Matthew, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England (Oxford, 2004).

8 Atherton, John, ed., Social Christianity (London, 1994).

9 Morris, Jeremy, F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford, 2005).

10 Vidler, Alec R., The Church in an Age of Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1971), 97.

11 Several Christian Owenites are briefly discussed in Binyon, Gilbert, The Christian Socialist Movement in England (London, 1931), 40–51.

12 Davis, Robert and O'Hagan, Frank, Robert Owen (London, 2010), 11.

13 Owen, Robert, The Life of Robert Owen, Written by Himself, 2 vols (London, 1857), 1: 3–5, 16.

14 Robert A. Davis, ‘Robert Owen and Religion’, in Thompson and Williams, eds, Owen and his Legacy, 91–112, at 92–3.

15 Fraser, E. M., ‘Robert Owen in Manchester, 1787–1800’, Transactions of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 82 (1937–8), 29–41. Until 1799, the Literary and Philosophical Society met in an outpost of rational dissent, Cross Street Chapel, the later stronghold of Manchester Unitarianism: Watts, Michael, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), 477.

16 Owen, Robert, A New View of Society (London, 1813).

17 Davis, ‘Robert Owen and Religion’, 95.

18 Owen's ‘doctrine of circumstances’ was likely influenced by William Godwin's idea of ‘necessity’, which understood human actions to be determined or necessary within a set of circumstances, leaving no room for a separate power of will, although Owen never explicitly acknowledged this: Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2 vols (London, 1793), 1: 283–317.

19 According to the ODNB, Manners-Sutton ‘briefly flirted with Robert Owen's plan’: ODNB, s.n. ‘Sutton, Charles Manners- (1755–1828)’, online edn (2006), at: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17964>, accessed 12 August 2014.

20 Robert Owen, ‘Address Delivered at the City of London Tavern, August 21 1817’, in idem, A New View of Society and Other Writings, ed. Gregory Claeys (London, 1991), 191–203.

21 Footnote Ibid. 199.

22 Footnote Ibid. 199–200.

23 Owen, Life of Robert Owen, 1: 160–2; W. H. Oliver, ‘Owen in 1817: The Millennialist Moment’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt, eds, Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), 166–87.

24 Footnote Ibid. 177.

25 On Francis Newman, see Hempton, David, Evangelical Disenchantment (New Haven, CT, 2008), 41–69.

26 Svaglic, Martin J., ‘Charles Newman and his Brothers’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 71 (1956), 370–85, at 370; see also O'Faoláin, Seán, Newman's Way (New York, 1952), 74–8. A recent but slanted study of Charles and ‘the idea of socialism’ appears in Short, Edward, Newman and his Family (London, 2013), 115–39.

27 Nowhere near the same quantity of evidence exists for Charles's life and thought as for John and Francis, not least because John bought up letters and burned them for fear of blackmail: Svaglic, ‘Charles Newman’, 370.

28 Turner, Frank M., John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT, 2002), 111. Newman, J. H., An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London, 1870), 238.

29 John Newman, Journal entry, 9 August 1823, quoted in Svaglic, ‘Charles Newman’, 375.

30 Charles Newman to John Newman, 23 February 1825, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 1: Ealing, Trinity, Oriel, February 1801 to December 1826, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall (Oxford, 1978), 212.

31 Svaglic, ‘Charles Newman’, 376.

32 Newman, John, ‘Memorandum on Charles Newman’, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 4: The Oxford Movement, July 1833 to December 1834, ed. Ker, Ian and Gornall, Thomas (Oxford, 1980), 131–6, at 134.

33 Ward, Maisie, Young Mr Newman (New York, 1948), 360; John Newman to Thomas Mozley, 5 March 1841, in Letters and Diaries, 8: Tract 90 and the Jerusalem Bishopric, January 1841 – April 1842, ed. Gerard Tracey (Oxford, 1999), 55.

34 Charles Newman to John Newman, 3 December 1841, in Letters and Diaries, 8, ed. Tracey, 362. Charles had ‘often wished I could find some religious party of similar aim’, but seemingly never did.

35 Charles was later an ally of the leading socialist freethinker George Jacob Holyoake. His articles for Holyoake's Reasoner were republished posthumously as Essays in Rationalism (London, 1891).

36 ODNB, s.n. ‘Martin, Emma (1811/12–1851)’, online edn (2004), at: < http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/45460>, accessed 13 June 2014; Schwartz, Laura, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women's Emancipation, England 1830–1914 (Manchester, 2013).

37 Martin, Emma, A Few Reasons for Renouncing Christianity, and Professing and Disseminating Infidel Opinions (London, 1840), 4–5.

38 Schwartz, Infidel Feminism, 81.

39 Martin's career is discussed extensively in Schwartz, Infidel Feminism.

40 The classic study of Owenism and early feminism is Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem.

41 Footnote Ibid. 65–70; Eckhardt, C. M., Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge, MA, 1984).

42 Wright, Frances, Course of Popular Lectures (New York, 1829), 85–105.

43 Footnote Ibid. 101.

44 Footnote Ibid. 102.

45 On this episode, see Royle, Victorian Infidels, 65–9; Harrison, Robert Owen, 216–19.

46 The Economist, no. 7 (10 March 1821), 108.

47 Morgan, John Minter, Hampden in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1834), 17.

48 ‘A New View of Society . . . Essays first and second’, The Philanthropist 3 (1813), 93–118, at 115.

49 Christianus [Morgan, John Minter], Mr. Owen's proposed Villages for the Poor shown to be highly favourable to Christianity (London, 1819). Morgan remains an understudied figure, although I intend to correct this in a future article on ‘The Church of England and Early Socialism’. Until then, the most extensive study remains Armytage, W. H. G., Heavens Below (London, 1961), 130–44, 209–23.

50 Philanthropos [Morgan, John Minter], Remarks on the Practicability of Mr Robert Owen's Plan to Improve the Condition of the Lower Classes (London, 1818), 38–9.

51 [Morgan], Owen's proposed Villages, 9–10.

52 Footnote Ibid. 10–12.

53 [Morgan], Remarks, 39.

54 Brighton Co-operator, 1 November 1828; Co-operative Magazine, December 1827, 534.

55 Sheffield Courant and Advertiser, 18 May 1832.

56 Footnote Ibid.

57 The Economist, no. 42 (10 November 1821), 256.

58 Blatchly, Cornelius, An Essay on Common Wealths (New York, 1822), 1–3.

59 Footnote Ibid. 3.

60 Cornelius Blatchly, ‘Some Causes of Popular Poverty’, appended to [Thomas Branagan], The Pleasures of Contemplation (Philadelphia, PA, 1817), 176–206, at 199–201.

61 Acts 2: 44–5; 4: 32.

62 Blatchly, Essay on Common Wealths.

63 [Morgan, John Minter], ‘An Inquiry respecting Private Property and the Authority and Perpetuity of the Apostolic Institution of a Community of Goods’, Monthly Repository 16 (1821), 88–101, at 91.

64 Footnote Ibid. 89.

65 Smith, James, ‘Lecture on a Christian Community’, in Claeys, Gregory, ed., Owenite Socialism: Pamphlets and Correspondence 1832–1837, 10 vols (London, 2005), 4: 200.

66 Footnote Ibid. 199.

67 David Bebbington has identified the increased interest in apocalypticism and the millennium in early nineteenth-century Evangelicalism as ‘a symptom of Romanticism’: Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), 80–5. On the use of millennial rhetoric by Owen and secular Owenites, see especially Harrison, Robert Owen, 92–139.

68 On Smith's Shepherd and his principle of ‘practical mysticism’, see Lockley, Philip, Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England (Oxford, 2013), 240–52.

69 Morgan, John Minter, Colloquies on Religion, and Religious Education (London, 1837), 10.

70 Marwick, W. H., The Life of Alexander Campbell (Glasgow, 1964).

71 See Latham, Jackie, Search for the New Eden (London, 1999).

72 Francis, Richard, ‘Circumstances and Salvation: the ideology of the Fruitlands Utopia’, American Quarterly 25 (1973), 202–34; see also Rose, Anne, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850 (New Haven, CT, 1981).

73 Alcott visited the Surrey Concordium, and several English sacred socialists joined Alcott's Fruitlands community in Massachusetts: see especially Latham, Search, 187–221; Francis, Richard, Fruitlands (New Haven, CT, 2010).

74 Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, A. Bronson Alcott, MS Journals 7, fol. 29 (23 April 1834), quoted in Francis, ‘Circumstances and Salvation’, 206.

75 Footnote Ibid. 206–7.

76 Alcott, A. Bronson, The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture (Boston, MA, 1836), 4.

77 On socialism and imagined futures, see Philip Lockley, ‘Transatlantic Reputations: Protestant Communalism and Early Socialism’, in idem, ed., Protestant Communalism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Basingstoke, forthcoming 2016), ch. 7.

78 Moltmann, Jürgen, Theology of Hope, transl. James W. Leitch (London, 1967).

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