Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Abstract

In June 2020, the Federalist ran a piece titled “You Can Be a Christian, You Can Be a Marxist, but You Can't Be Both” (The Federalist, June 11, 2020). For many Americans, on both the Left and Right, this likely rings more or less true. When Christian conservatives rail against the Movement for Black Lives, sojourn for the stranger, social justice in churches, not to mention care for the poor, American Christianity can appear hopelessly co-opted by racism, nationalism, and capitalism. At the same time, many Christians perceive progressive politics to be godless, or at least fatally materialist.Spiritual Socialists offers an encouraging reminder that these assumptions about progressivism and Christianity are not, and never have been, true. In eloquent prose, Vaneesa Cook traces a lineage of faithful socialists from World War I to the present, folks who pressed for social reforms not despite their spiritual convictions but because of them. In so doing, she also uncovers a uniquely religious power within American socialism.Or something like that. Though Cook takes pains to define and categorize “spiritual socialists,” definitional clarity eludes even if inspiration does not. “Spiritual socialists were serious socialists,” Cook writes, less interested in “incremental, piecemeal reforms” than in “the long-term overhaul of an immoral, fundamentally flawed system” (6, 12). Yet Cook is not interested in American socialism: “Most spiritual socialists did not herald the Socialist Party,” much less join (16). “Spiritual socialists” are also are not “Christian socialists” who, Cook says, are “too tied to class struggle and Marxist analysis” to fit the bill (14). They are not social gospelers, which denotes “Progressive Era politics” or is an “overly broad and inclusive term” (14). Maybe spiritual socialists are Christian radicals? Cook says no. “Neither were spiritual socialists mere ‘religious radicals,’ ” she writes, “threading their way through the rise and fall of the American left, and serving as prophetic voices” (6). Cook ascribes this “problem of imprecision” to the spiritual socialists themselves, who, in an effort to “connect with as many people as possible,” resisted theologically or politically narrow definitions and “purposefully kept it vague” (14). However loosely the lines are drawn, the cast of characters Cook has assembled—namely Sherwood Eddy, A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day, Myles Horton, Henry Wallace, Staughton Lynd, Pauli Murray, Cornel West, and William Barber—share a radical vision of the Kingdom of God on earth and show “that religion could be revolutionary and not reactionary” (6).Before getting to them, another brief remark on categorization. Though the definition of “spiritual socialists” is broad—and could encompass a global community of faithful—Cook's work focuses exclusively on Christians. Though they represent various denominations, from Quaker to Catholic, the major figures of Spiritual Socialists, are all Christian, cameos by Gandhi notwithstanding. They are also nearly all white, though Pauli Murray figures prominently in the final chapter, and Cornel West and William Barber garner a few pages. Spiritual Socialists presents such riveting portraits of those espousing human dignity in God and in community that one wants more.Spiritual Socialists recovers “the importance of subversive, slow moving social movements that operate at a cultural register less evident” (19). Tracing lives of resistance through war, the Red Scare, the rise and fall of the New Left, the conservative ascendance, Cook challenges prevailing declension narratives surrounding the American religious Left. This allows the book to assert the historical significance of small and to privilege individual stories. Indeed, the litany of people seeking the Kingdom of God on Earth in their daily work and communities, from Sherwood Eddy on Delta Cooperative Farm to Dorothy Day on Charles Street, from Myles Horton at Highlander to William Barber in Durham, is the book's strength. These believers not only possessed intellectual commitments but also embodied “socialism as a decentralized, religious way of life,” as “direct action in one's community” (17).Yet even in the “little way,” Cook's spiritual socialists face besetting questions: What is the relationship between the individual and society? Between spiritual depravity and material deprivation? How ought Christians engage in politics? Social change? Cook mines their words, writings, and actions for answers. On some points they disagree—pacifism, the role of the state—but they each conclude, movingly, that Christianity has something, and something radical, to say about how to live.Aside from identifying, as Horton put it, “islands of decency” throughout history, this small frame allows Cook to address a perplexing and significant historical question—that of failure (169). Failure, or the question of it, hovers throughout the book. After all, Henry Wallace lost his bid for the presidency; the student movement for Black freedom fractured; the wealth gap is larger than ever. But “if immediate revolution, on moral terms, proved intractable,” Cook asserts, spiritual socialists “could remain faithful to the process of long-term, constructive revolution. . . . But they had to have hope for the long haul” (208). Dorothy Day described it as invisible chain threading through history; Pauli Murray said it was “like running a relay” (149). If Murray was right, Spiritual Socialists is a description of the race so far. If Marxists must measure outcomes materially, spiritual socialists have a longer historical scope and a durable, even teleologically certain hope. This analysis serves as a gentle reminder to historians not to pronounce success or failure on our terms and from our limited vantages.A capacious scholarly survey, Spiritual Socialists would be a welcome addition to undergraduate and graduate courses on American religion, US intellectual history, or the modern United States. It would be an especially interesting companion to works on the American religious Left (Jack Jenkins's American Prophets; Heath Carter's Union Made, The Pew and the Picket Line, and On Earth as It Is in Heaven [forthcoming]; Charles Marsh's classic Beloved Community; and, particularly given the similar emphasis on biography, the edited collection Can I Get a Witness?) as well as those on radical movements, civil rights, and intentional communities.Given its lively style, Spiritual Socialists would also appeal to general readers, particularly progressive Christians. It might offer hope, as Cook writes (quoting Ignazio Silone), that “Christianity, given that its most basic principles of love, compassion and communion are fully enacted, can provide a ‘new place to begin’ ” (177).