In 1928, G. K. Chesterton declared that “political questions . . . always are religious questions” (Illustrated London News, 7 April 1928). Jay Corrin explores this sacramental synergy and tension in twentieth-century British Roman Catholic thought by examining an “unappreciated but significant” group of pioneering Catholic New Left intellectuals who challenged the postwar church and British society to rethink their bedrock principles and structures in light of modern philosophical and social scientific developments (ix). In particular, he focuses on those authors affiliated with the journal Slant, who included luminaries such as Terry Eagleton and Brian Wicker, many of whom Corrin has interviewed extensively. Corrin makes a vigorous attempt to rehabilitate these writers while being admirably candid about their inability to alter the Catholic Church or British culture. But his analysis elides the fundamental reason for their failure: an accommodationist mindset that precluded radical subversion of secular ideologies.

To Corrin, Slant epitomized a radical Catholicism that was dissatisfied with the perceived timid reformism of progressive political and religious thought. The Catholic New Left hence chided neoclassical liberalism and Fabian-cum-welfare state bureaucratism, along with the New Theology, papal social encyclicals, and liturgical renewal associated with the Second Vatican Council. These literati instead desired an egalitarian church that would be the vehicle for creating a communitarian, humanistic socialist polity. As such, they drew heavily on the heritage of revolutionary sociology, particularly Marxism, and its echoes within the church, especially liberation theology. They consequently found themselves at odds with not only political and religious conservatives but also progressive heroes like Jacques Maritain, whose Thomism was dismissed as a supernaturalist distraction from the historical imperative of transformative social struggle. For the Slantists, then, religion was more important as an instrument for constructing a social order defined in secular terms than as a set of eternal truth-claims that entail political action yet ultimately transcend it. In rejecting Maritain's insistence on “the primacy of the spiritual,” the Catholic New Left affirmed Wicker's injunction to seek “first the political kingdom” (352).

This privileging of politique over mystique is key to understanding the Slantists' ephemerality. For all its putative radicalism, the Catholic New Left was participating in a modern discourse that accommodated secular ideologies. Conversely, traditional Catholics, most notably the distributists led by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and their heirs (such as Christopher Dawson and Barbara Ward), propounded a counter-modern cultural critique grounded in orthodox Catholic sociology that was a genuinely radical rebuttal of all modern categories, whether liberal or socialist. Corrin gestures toward some awareness of this difference when he laments the Catholic new left's ignorance of its distributist forbears (41, 364). Yet this myopia was the predictable result of a Slantist tendency to indiscriminately disregard pre-conciliar Catholics as triumphalist reactionaries. Corrin also mentions briefly the “most recent iteration of Christian revolutionary thinking,” the already more influential Radical Orthodoxy school, whose political radicalism derives directly from its theological orthodoxy (385). Indeed, it is precisely because movements like distributism and Radical Orthodoxy are based on “traditional (pre-Enlightenment) Christian values” that they supply a systemic counterstatement to all worldly philosophies (384). Their social criticism is thus a more distinctively Catholic and richer—even more revolutionary—response to the cultural crisis of late modernity than the alloyed conciliations of the Slantists.

Corrin has nonetheless made a valuable historiographical contribution by recounting an intriguing moment and movement in British Catholic intellectual life. But it is an exaggeration to conclude that “the Catholic New Left occupies a significant niche in the history of British Catholicism” (368). In the final analysis, the Slantists' efforts were otiose, for their eager embrace of post-Christian paradigms as normative vitiated their prophetic aspirations. Scholars seeking a more profound grasp of how twentieth-century British Roman Catholics grappled with intertwined political and religious questions are therefore best guided by another query, one posed by Robert Speaight, whom Corrin quotes (339): “Isn't it time that we should return to Chesterton?”