Cold War Transgressions: Christian Realism, Conservative Socialism, and the Longer 1960s

Mark Edwards

doi:10.3390/rel6010266

Abstract

This essay examines the convergence of the Protestant left and traditionalist right during the 1950s. Reinhold Niebuhr and the World Council of Churches challenged Cold War liberalism from within. As they did, they anticipated and even applauded the anti-liberalism of early Cold War conservatives. While exploring intellectual precursors of the New Left, this essay forefronts one forgotten byproduct of the political realignments following World War II: The transgressive politics of “conservative socialism.” Furthermore, this work contributes to growing awareness of ecumenical Christian impact within American life.

Highlights

This essay remembers two interrelated forerunners of the 1960s New Left
Both movements came to believe that a genuine conservativism respectful of Burke had to be built on a foundation of distributive justice—such as that found in trans-Atlantic Progressivism and the New Deal
New Left historiography underscored the impossibility of portraying trans-Atlantic Progressives in any kind of monolithic way, since radical liberal efforts to decenter Cold War liberal “bigness” often resembled, if not drew directly upon, the communitarian strands running through Jane Addams, John Dewey, and others [14,15,16]

Summary

Introduction

This essay remembers two interrelated forerunners of the 1960s New Left. The young, white “radical liberals” of that era distanced themselves from the Old Left by rejecting the organized working class as a force for distributive social justice [1,2]. In advancing participatory democratic alternatives to the Cold War liberal state and society—before the New Left—Christian Realists and traditionalist conservatives transgressed familiar categories of left and right. Christian Realists, traditionalists, and even the New Left looked to Burke for support for their varied communitarian sensibilities. In doing so, they exposed the dangers of reading backwards the current liberal-conservative binary—itself a result of the Cold War culture wars [19]—to make sense of twentieth-century American politics. This essay shows how liberal and ecumenical church leaders dared their nation to live up to its democratic professions It does not lionize the Christian Realists nor minimize their limited perspectives on race, gender, and sex equality. Realists constituted an original moral minority—rejecting “corporate evangelicalism” [30] and calling upon Americans to conserve human dignity and potential through the decentralization of corporate capitalist political economy

Christian Realism

Discussion

Conservative Socialism

Conclusions