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Spiritual
Socialists Religion
and the American Left
Vaneesa
Cook
Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019 Hardcover. 261 pages. ISBN 978-0812251654. $49.95
Reviewed by Benjamin Lynerd Christopher
Newport University, Virginia
There are few lonelier
places in America than on the Religious Left. To promote Christianity and
socialism at the same time is to court fire on multiple fronts, none heavier than
from the Christian Right, whose bourgeois orthodoxies have long dominated the
American church. This fact, of course, is a curiosity unto itself. Historical Christianity
has distinctly communitarian roots, from the agrarian laws of ancient Israel to
Jesus’s plain warnings about the corrosiveness of wealth. Paul offers the
gospel as freedom from the very dependencies on which capitalism thrives. Indeed,
for most of their history, Christians have, at least publicly. pitied the kind
of materialism and myopic individualism that marks the American church today. So, why are religious
conservatives such committed capitalists? Historians generally trace this proclivity
to the 1970s, when the Cold War, the welfare state, and the sexual revolution
united libertarians and religious conservatives in a reactionary electoral coalition.
I have long contended that the church’s embrace of free market ideology far
predates the New Right, and have spent years wrestling with the theological modus
vivendi that underlies this commitment. As far back as the 1830s, Alexis de
Tocqueville marveled at the extent to which American Christians had made peace
with commercialism and the small government ethos. In our fascination
with the Right, however, scholars have largely ignored the Religious Left,
treating communitarian Christians more like unicorns than as members of a movement
requiring historical scrutiny. Precious little is known about their beliefs,
much less about how they have operated as a group over time, navigating politics,
the church, and the intellectual life of the nation. Vaneesa Cook’s Spiritual
Socialists : Religion and the American Left, takes an essential step
in recovering the historiography of what is a vibrant, diverse, and yet highly
cohesive tradition. Her work also sheds light on why traction for this movement
is ever elusive – why, in her words, religious thinkers on the left will always
find themselves to be “activists in limbo.” Spiritual Socialists examines
a dozen or so figures over a pivotal stretch of American thought between the
1920s and the early 1970s. The survey covers a motley cast of characters,
including the labor activist A.J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, a Protestant
missionary, the Catholic journalist Dorothy Day, Pauli Murray, the first Black
woman to be ordained to the Anglican priesthood, and Henry Wallace, the American
vice-president during World War II. What binds these thinkers together is not
just the fact that they were all Christians with leftist inclinations, but that
their various agendas were informed by a particular understanding of
Christianity, what Cook calls “spiritual socialism.” Related to, though not
completely aligned with, the earlier “social gospel” tradition of Walter
Rauschenbusch, spiritual socialism emphasizes “community, cooperation, peace,
and individual dignity” in ways that set it apart not only from religious
conservates and libertarians, but also from New Deal welfarism and certainly
from the totalitarian programs of the Bolsheviks. Spiritual socialists seek,
above all, to redeem modern humanity from the soullessness of capitalism. As
Cook explains, they see “the whole person as a sacred agent of God,” and view the
trappings of the modern west as obstacles to what God intended for human life.
Their goal is to cultivate “the Kingdom of God on earth in small-scale
communities.” It is in straddling these macro- and micro-dynamics of this
vision that spiritual socialists diverge into so many disparate missions. Anyone who questions
the very legitimacy of a prevailing system faces the strategic dilemma of
whether to reform that system from within or to establish a new one altogether.
Puritans split over this question in the seventeenth century, as did socialists
in the nineteenth. It is hardly surprising that a movement blending Puritanism
with socialism should also grapple with these competing instincts. The
separatist wing of spiritual socialism took its brief flight with the Delta and
Providence Cooperative Farms in Mississippi, experiments in communal living that
Sherwood Eddy, a longtime missionary in Asia and the Middle East, established
in the 1930s, and which survived for nearly twenty years. Originally conceived
to compensate for the racial disparities in the federal government’s
Resettlement Administration, Eddy’s cooperatives were open to Black and White
farmers, and were egalitarian in their design. Compared to similar initiatives
in the nineteenth century (like Robert Owen’s New Harmony settlement in Indiana,
which lasted less than two years), the Delta experiments were remarkably durable.
Still, the co-ops struggled to maintain profits after World War II, as well as to
live up to their own goals. “Implementing idealized concepts such as
cooperation and equality,” Cook notes, “proved difficult from the outset.” It was
ultimately impossible to shield these communities from the pressures of racism
and classicism that raged everywhere else. At the other end of
the spectrum is Henry Wallace, arguably the highest-ranking socialist in
American history. For Cook, Wallace epitomizes all of the compromises that shadow
a radical reformer working within the system. His vision for a socialistic revival
was never a secret to the American public. As Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of
Agriculture in 1934, Wallace published Statesmanship and Religion, which
openly asserted the futility of the New Deal in the face of America’s deeper
spiritual problems of greed and exploitation, calling for a recovery of
agrarian justice in the mold of Hebrew antiquity. And yet, Wallace could be an
Old Testament prophet one day and a Democratic insider another. In time, Cook
explains, “Wallace was willing to accept the New Deal and reformed capitalism as
temporary measures to lay the groundwork for the Kingdom, just as he was
willing to accept war against Fascism as a temporary fix for protecting that
groundwork.” Wallace’s single term as vice-president, which happened only
because of his esteem among midwestern farmers, was a height of influence that
neither he nor any anti-capitalist would ever replicate in American politics. Wallace
was demoted to Commerce Secretary in 1945, resigned in 1946, and ran as a
progressive, anti-segregationist candidate in the overcrowded presidential
field of 1948. The inside game, it turns out, poses its own challenges to spiritual
socialists in America. Much of Cook’s
analysis explores the varieties of activism that lie somewhere between the
Delta Farm and the machinery of party politics. In different ways, those
extremities represent spiritual socialism at its most grandiose. Most activists
in this tradition, for reasons that fit well with the movement’s philosophy, have
instead targeted their efforts at American civil society, seeking to change how
people understand the Kingdom of God by interacting with them in schools,
churches, workplaces, and through the written word. A.J. Muste and Dorothy Day embody
this incremental approach. Ordained in the Dutch
Reformed Church in the early 1910s, Muste’s early ministry in Washington
Heights, New York, exposed him not only to the pathologies of American
industry, but also to the activism and ideology of Walter Rauschenbusch. By the
start of World War I, Muste was connecting the dots in his own mind between globalized
capitalism, the exploitation of workers, and war, all of which he came to believe
were rooted in sins of greed and aggrandizement that the Dutch Reformed, along
with the American church more generally, were choosing to ignore. Muste left
the ministry and became an advocate of organized labor, helping to coordinate the
textile mill strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1919. The strike vaulted
Muste to prominence within the movement, and in 1921 he was offered the
directorship of the Brookwood Labor College in New York, a position he held
until 1933. In Cook’s account, Brookwood typifies the under-the-radar nature of
spiritual socialism. Never aligned with any particular union, and never
admitting more than about forty students at a time, the college under Muste’s
leadership aimed to foster a certain moral sensibility within the labor
movement at large, promoting racial integration, cooperation between skilled
and semi-skilled workers, and social services provided by unions. Its most
visible initiative was its theater program, the Brookwood Players, which traveled
the Northeast with productions of various plays that explored working-class
themes. Suffering from declining finances during the Great Depression, the
college shut down in 1937, but its impact (and Muste’s) on the labor movement came
to be felt as its graduates climbed the union ranks and promoted its values. Dorothy Day was a
single mother in 1920s New York when she converted from atheism to Catholicism.
Almost immediately disillusioned with the church’s lack of civil consciousness,
Day searched the scriptures for an understanding of Christianity’s social
dimensions. In 1933, Day co-founded with the Lasallian theologian Peter Maurin the
Catholic Worker, a newspaper dedicated to highlighting the spiritual poverty
of capitalism, whose proceeds funded “houses of hospitality to feed and shelter
the urban poor.” Of the various initiatives Cook profiles in this book, the
Catholic Worker is the only still in existence today. Though sometime at
odds with the Vatican, and though often rebuking American Catholics for their hyper-materialism,
the Catholic Worker was primarily a Christian answer to its Communist
counterpart, the Daily Worker, New York’s leading Marxist publication that
ran from 1924 to 1958. Indeed, in addition to deploring Stalinism, the Catholic
Worker consistently refused to get sucked into supporting the broader
agenda of the American Left on issues ranging from abortion to state-run welfare,
which it perceived as impersonal and godless. In her pacifism, however, Dorothy
Day was steadfast, a stance which brought her into a close friendship with A.J.
Muste in the 1960s, and which occasionally led to precipitous drops in subscriptions
for the Catholic Worker, which she edited until her death in 1980. Cook devotes an
illuminating chapter to the spiritual socialists’ interaction with the Civil
Rights movement. The star of this chapter is Pauli Murray, who began his career
in the 1940s as a civil rights lawyer before becoming a priest in the Episcopal
Church in the 1970s. A great many figures on the Religious Left promoted racial
equality as far back as the 1920s; what is more, Civil Rights leaders like
Martin Luther King shared many of socialists’ concerns about the corrosive effects
of capitalism on society; and on the principles of nonviolence protest, the two
movements were in perfect harmony. Still, Cook highlights several points on which
the movements diverge, including King’s faith in the federal government as an
agent of structural change. Advocates of Black power and Black liberation
theology, of course, also shared this skepticism, but their focus on exclusively
racial empowerment made them unacceptable to the agenda of spiritual socialists,
particularly Murray. Taken together,
Cook’s portraits of these assorted figures reveal an important feature of the
Religious Left at large. Other than its antipathy toward capitalism, the
defining characteristic of spiritual socialism is patience – a belief that God,
not humanity, will ultimately advance the Kingdom and its perfect justice. Its advocates
exhibit a strange indifference toward the kind of deliverable achievements that
most other movements, right and left, depend on for their viability. They also
resist the kinds of political compromises and cultural sloganeering that could generate
a much larger following – indeed, which has turned the Christian Right into a
powerhouse over the past century. Spiritual socialism is micro-focused by default.
“Their tradition,” Cook insists, “must be traced along a much longer arc of
continuous struggle for socioreligious renewal.” This would be exasperating for
most activists and their financial backers, and it certainly helps to account
for the relative solitude that persists even today on the Religious Left. However,
for true believers in the Kingdom of God, Cook’s historiography should only
confirm what they already hold to be true – that God is committed, in his own
time, to redeeming the fallen world. His people are responsible simply for keeping
up the work, not for ensuring the results.
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