Vaneesa Cook, Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left by Vaneesa Cook David Mislin Vaneesa Cook, Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) In this bold, incisive book, Vaneesa Cook makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the American “Religious Left.” She argues that the most effective movements of the political left in the twentieth-century United States were thoroughly suffused with religious values. Specifically, the decades between 1920 and 1970 witnessed the emergence of a “religious approach to radicalism,” the hallmark of which was a commitment to a small-scale approach of community building (3). Rather than the “state-centered political program or economic system” advocated by communists and other secular leftist movements, Cook’s subjects urged “a democratic and spiritual method of molding communities into the Kingdom of God on Earth” (61). Thus, “through community building and direct action, they offered an alternative to secular Communism and religious conservatism” (3). In five chapters, Cook chronicles this spiritual project from the disillusionment that followed World War I, through the Great Depression, World War II, the Red Scare of the early Cold War, and finally to the Civil Rights movement and the emergence of identity politics. Tracing the influences, life, and work of figures such as A.J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, Dorothy Day, Henry Wallace, Staughton Lynd, Pauli Murray, and others, Cook builds her case that religious [End Page 121] commitment was crucial for the success of the American left. The book’s subjects recognized that “religious values had the power to inspire members of a community to exercise their best virtues, to keep their base instincts in check, and to live out their highest ideals” (64). Cook’s study makes a compelling argument that religion has profoundly shaped American society, not merely guiding radical politics but being inextricably embedded in them. Through the efforts she examines, “the American Left” cultivated “a moral foundation and language that made religion and radicalism congruent” (9). Beyond highlighting the crucial role of religion in political activism, this recognition reframes the chronology of leftist politics in the United States. Alongside the decade’s conservatism, the 1920s witnessed a range of innovation in socialist community-building. The religious nature of their radicalism also allowed Cook’s spiritual socialists to come through the Red Scare largely “unscathed” and able to offer a socialist “vision of moral social change” at the height of the Cold War (3). Though most of Cook’s subjects are familiar to scholars, she presents them in novel ways. In particular, she urges a reinterpretation of the pacifist commitments that have long been the focus of scholarly interest in figures like Muste. Cook urges the importance of viewing such pacifism not as an end in itself but rather as one component of the campaign to build God’s kingdom on earth. Moreover, she deftly uses their pacifism as a means to explore divisions among her subjects on the relationship between means and ends. World War II prompted disagreement about the precise issue of violence and the ideal society. Day and Muste opposed involvement in the conflict on the principle that “means must always match the ends” and war “shattered the entire” effort to build the Kingdom of God. Others, like Eddy and Wallace, argued that a “temporary resort to violence” was needed to “protect the seeds of the Kingdom from being trampled underfoot by Fascist soldiers” (98–99). This disagreement reflected larger debates about individual transformation versus institutional change and the accommodation of competing views within radical movements, all of which Cook examines in the book. Given Cook’s seeming wish for this book to bring history to bear for the contemporary Religious Left and its leaders like William J. Barber, III, there are some issues that might have been more fully addressed. One admirable characteristic of her subjects was their frank acknowledgment of the monumental scope of their task. Unlike the frequently naively optimistic Social Gospel reformers with whom Cook contrasts her subjects (though perhaps too starkly in the case of Walter Rauschenbusch), these were people who recognized that “socialism as a spiritual project … could take millennia to achieve” (5). [End Page...