taken as an argument in favour of equality of opportunity.58 If Scott Holland took aim at the inviolability of laissez-faire economics then Gore gave the same treatment to property rights. A society in which a wealthy few could amass more property than they needed, while others were excluded from the right to own property, was not functioning as it should – an argument which might appeal to conservative critics of neo-liberalism more so than socialists.59 Gore’s solution, however – a ‘redistribution of property’ – brings us back to socialism; such a redistribution was possible because, in Gore’s estimation, there is frankly no absolute right to property, only a qualified right to property based on whether property ownership benefits or serves any useful function for the community, an argument which would be echoed by R.H. Tawney a few years later.60 ‘Much,’ argued Gore, ‘that we are accustomed to hear called the legitimate rights of property, the Old Testament would call the robbery of God, and the grinding of the faces of the poor’; it was a violation of ‘the Christian idea of brotherhood’.61
Gore was ambivalent on whether he regarded himself as a socialist, suggesting that society would do well to take a few steps towards socialism without going the whole way.62 This argument, taken alongside Gore’s denial of absolute rights to property and Holland’s view that the state could and should bound the economy with regulations, suggests that their vision was one that today we would label as social democratic – not the abolition but the management of capitalism. The CSU was ‘definitely anticapitalist and indefinitely socialist’.63 The CSU however, though it did support important reforms, did not declare any firm programme for economic or political change, retaining a ‘non-committal attitude’ which, despite Gore and Holland’s awareness that this was an issue, ‘began to make the more radical Christian Socialists somewhat disillusioned’.64
Among those who left the CSU was Conrad Noel (1869–1942), who declared in frustration that the organisation was ‘forever learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth’.65 Noel was an Anglican priest who combined a high-church focus on the sacraments with a radical socialism in a manner similar to Headlam. He repudiated the Maurician idea that seemed to have taken hold in the CSU that Christian Socialism should be moderate and non-committal: ‘Christian Socialism […] is not, as some appear to think, a particular variety of Socialism, milder than the secular brand, but economic Socialism come to by the road of the Christian faith and inspired by the ideas of the Gospel.’66 Noel was one of the founders of the Church Socialist League (CSL), a third Anglican Christian Socialist organisation, which was far more radical and committed to socialism than the CSU, as well as being more working-class than both the GSM and CSU.67 He became best known as the infamous ‘red vicar’ of Thaxted, where he turned the parish into a centre of sacramental socialism, causing local and national scandal by hanging both the Red Flag and the flag of Sinn Fein inside the church building.68 In sermons, Noel raged against the system of ‘Christo-capitalism’, which exploited workers and co-opted the Gospel for its own ends; like Vida Scudder (see Chapter 4) he pointed to the Trinity as an example of the love and co-operation that should be practised on earth and, like Headlam, he lauded the Magnificat of Mary as a hymn ‘more revolutionary than the Marseillaise’.69
Noel and Headlam both held that a sacramental Christianity was the only legitimate basis for socialism; they looked down on low-church and evangelical Anglicans, reserving particular scorn for Nonconformists. Yet church socialism was not an exclusively Anglo-Catholic phenomenon, nor was it reserved for the established church. A key figure was John Clifford (1836–1923), President of the Baptist Union of England and Wales, who also served as president of the predominantly Nonconformist Christian Socialist League, as well as being active in the Free Church Socialist League. The declaration of this latter organisation expressed its commitment to socialism in a manner that, excepting the lack of sacramental emphasis, would have satisfied Noel or Headlam:
Believing that the principle of Brotherhood as taught by Jesus Christ cannot adequately be wrought out under existing industrial and commercial conditions, and that the faithful and commonplace application of this principle must result in the Socialization of all natural resources, as well as the instruments of production, distribution and exchange, the League exists to assist in the work of eliminating the former by building the latter Social Order.70
For Clifford, the ethical principles of Christianity required a collectivist rather than competitive order of society. There were, he noted, some advantages to competitive capitalism – men were motivated to work hard and innovate – but the system also encouraged ‘the crushing of competitors and thrusting aside of rivals’ rather than the ‘brotherly helpfulness’ summed up in the teaching of Christ.71 Collectivism was no guarantee against sin and vice, but it encouraged co-operation and mutual support rather than self-centred individualism; such a system, Clifford declared, ‘will abolish poverty, reduce the hungry to an imperceptible quantity, and systematically care for the aged poor and for the sick’.72
Another notable representative of Nonconformist socialism was Samuel E. Keeble (1853–1946), a Wesleyan Methodist minister and founder of the Wesleyan Methodist Union for Social Service along similar lines to the CSU. As well as being committed to social service, Keeble was a gifted student of economics and a prolific writer, producing many books and pamphlets on social and economic – as well as theological – issues. Chief among these was Industrial Day-Dreams (1896) in which he declared straightforwardly:
No system of industry which proceeds upon the principle of unscrupulous competition, of treating human labour as a mere commodity, and human beings as mere ‘pawns’ in the game of making money, as mere means to a selfish end; of taking advantage of one man’s poverty and necessity, and of another man’s ignorance; which sanctions the law of might, and not of right, and the principle of survival of the fittest for success in the scramble for material wealth – no such system […] can by any stretch of generosity be called Christian.73
While no slavish adherent of Marx – Keeble doubted the labour theory of value, for example – he nevertheless valued the insight of Marx and Engels on the systematic ways in which capitalism exploits the working class.74 Keeble did not believe that state ownership of industry should be the universal rule but, like Scott Holland, favoured a system in which both local and national government would regulate the economy to prevent such exploitation.75 This, he held, was required by ‘the great Christian principles of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man’.76 The Christian Gospel, Keeble explained, had two elements, individual and social, and ‘[t]he social gospel is as sacred and as indispensable as the individual gospel’.77
The men noted above are just a few examples of the many from various denominations and sects who embraced socialism – or something very close to it – and condemned capitalism as incompatible with the teaching of Christianity. The impact this had on the church – the Church of England in particular – is evident in the appointment of William Temple to the see of York in 1929 and then Canterbury in 1942. Temple (1881–1944) was a throughgoing socialist, who in his younger years made some strikingly radical statements, declaring, for example, that the capitalist system ‘is simply organized selfishness’ while socialism ‘is the economic realisation of the Christian Gospel […] The alternative stands before us – Socialism or Heresy.’78 Temple mellowed as he grew older – especially after his appointment as Bishop of Manchester – but he lost nothing of his determination to pursue economic and social justice. In 1924 Temple organised the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC), which included Christians from several different denominations and produced papers on a wide variety of economic and social questions. The conclusions of COPEC were perhaps overly cautious and conservative, but the conference nevertheless symbolised that Christian Socialism was growing and that the church was asserting its right to speak into social issues.79
Temple continued to assert that right, nowhere
