The English Catholic New Left: Battling the Religious Establishment and the Politics of the Cold War

Jay Corrin

doi:10.3390/socsci7040060

Abstract

In the 1960s there appeared in England a group of young university educated Catholics who sought to merge radical Catholic social teachings with the ideas of Karl Marx and the latest insights of European and American sociologists and literary theorists. They were known as the English Catholic New Left (ECNL). Under the inspiration of their Dominican mentors, they launched a magazine called Slant that served as the vehicle for publishing their ideas about how Catholic theology along with the Social Gospels fused with neo-Marxism could bring a humanistic socialist revolution to Britain. The Catholic Leftists worked in alliance with the activists of the secular New Left Review to achieve this objective. A major influence on the ECNL was the Marxist Dominican friar Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe, O. P. Slant took off with great success when Sheed and Ward agreed to publish the journal. Slant featured perceptive, indeed at times brilliant, cutting-edge articles by the Catholic Left’s young Turks, including Terry Eagleton, Martin Redfern, Bernard Sharratt, and Angela and Adrian Cunningham, among others. A major target of the Slant project was the Western Alliance’s Cold War strategy of nuclear deterrence, which they saw to be contrary to Christian just war theory and ultimately destructive of humankind. Another matter of concern for the Slant group was capitalist imperialism that ravaged the underdeveloped world and was a major destabilizing factor for achieving world peace and social equality. Despite their failure to achieve a social revolution “baptized by Christianity,” the English Catholic New Left broke new ground in terms of showing how a traditional religion with a highly conservative and sometimes reactionary history had the capacity to offer new paths forward and remain an inspiration to progressive thinking Christians trying to navigate the shoals of a post-modern world.

Highlights

There were a myriad of religious responses to the Cold War, and especially to what were seen to be the Communist challenges to Western culture
The celebration of a Catholic who was associated with guerrilla warfare to advance social justice was a hard sell, and this played into the hands of both liberals and conservatives, who portrayed the Catholic Left as dangerous extremists drawing on Communism in their support of violent revolution in the developing world
Peggy Duff claimed that the movement had “scared the politicians stiff” and brought together a coalition of forces with the establishment that crushed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)’s moral imperatives

Summary

Introduction

There were a myriad of religious responses to the Cold War, and especially to what were seen to be the Communist challenges to Western culture. The secular New Left’s Stuart Hall appreciated SDS’s breaching the liberal political consensus but noted the stark absence of any rational pattern or ideological scheme that could ground their rebellion (Hall 1967) Such ideological vacuity was not to be found with the English Catholic Leftists. What set the English Catholic New Left and their journal Slant apart from all Christian responses to Cold War issues was their withering attack on capitalism as the driving ethos of Western culture and its impact on foreign policy. These Catholic radicals joined in political combat with the British secular. They set a new mark concerning how far one could go within the construct of Catholic social philosophy, and they did so by pushing to the very limits of their creed by drafting an interdisciplinary intellectual construct that drew from classical sociological theory (Toennies, Durkheim and Weber), the cultural analyses of Raymond Williams, and Richard Hogarth and from the neo-Marxist writings of Leszeck Kolakowski and Georg Lukacs.

The Battle Begins

Conclusion