Christian Socialism

CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM. Christian socialist groups in the United States, identifying themselves variously as “Christian socialists,” “revolutionary Christians,” “Christian abolitionists,” “Christian communists,” “Christian anarchists,” and “Radical Jesus Christians,” have intermittently played a large role in the Left. Christian socialists and Christian opponents of the American Empire have reached large audiences. Beyond the limits of leftwing religion proper, the prophetic sayings of Hebrew and Christian scripture have supplied useful texts for every generation of leftwing dissenters. The texts of other religions have added to the language of twentieth and twenty-first century Lefts. In this way, even secular Left movements have not escaped religious history or influence.

From the appearance of a communitarian diaspora of the Reformation in North American colonies of the eighteenth century, a kind of Christian socialism has appealed to the ancient roots of Christian communalism. An early scholarly text by an American socialist codified this view. Cyrenus Ward’s The Ancient Lowly (1890, 1902) offered massive documentation for the argument that Christianity grew up a “slave religion” until absorbed, in a highly distorted fashion, into the ideology of Empire. This volume, and the moralistic popularization of socialist ideas in The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) by Laurence Gronlund, constitute the two major intellectual contributions of American socialists in the nineteenth century. The small Marxist socialist parties themselves, made up overwhelmingly of secular immigrants, had little use for any religions except as metaphors of oppression. A wider sympathy for Christian socialist ideas among labor and radical movements came at the end of the nineteenth century but mostly with the twentieth century. Eugene Debs personally presented a Christ-like figure of sacrifice and faith, and Christian socialists themselves organized groups of his supporters, establishing a precedent for later generations.

Religious socialist ideas in North America also had another, vastly complicated as well as harsher history. European explorers and colonists arriving on the shore of the new world found hundreds of nations in established forms of society that could rightly be called religious/socialist. These communal, often matrilineal societies of Native Americans generally viewed property as something for use in a collective context and enjoyed the general absence of extremes of individualized wealth and poverty. Some early European explorers and missionaries even described these societies as utopias, with superior moral sensitivities and “civilization” to that of their own European homelands. In turn, some Natives considered particular utopians, such as the Pennsylvania Dutch colonists and unique individuals such as John Chapman/Johnny Appleseed, as most like themselves in their view of the natural habitat.

Christian missions, most often used by Europeans to weaken native resistance to conquest, actually prompted a handful of rebellious missionaries to build a scattering of socialized Christian communities together with Native Americans. With few exceptions, these attempts suffered violent destruction at the hands of other whites. To the conquest of the land, Europeans added the institution of chattel slavery. The reinforced ideological chains of race superiority inspired calls for justice based in the Hebrew scriptures and in the path of Jesus. These scriptures and stories became a kind of sustaining ground for the liberation/abolition movements of the following generations.

The Radical Reformation across much of Europe had fostered Christian socialistic or communistic uprisings and also quietist movements whose devotees sought only to live cooperatively, outside of the existing market economies. Some sections of these movements managed to make their way to colonial America, or later, to the new nation. The highly insular colonies they created wanted and tried to overcome the destructive elements of Christianity, urging and seeking to live among themselves as a reinstatement of the original Biblical impulses. Dozens, at times hundreds of large and small “utopian” Christian communities formed across the settled or semi-settled areas of the continent. Most were short-lived, but a relative handful, especially those based upon a religious foundation with a charismatic leader, prospered for decades and even generations. Whatever their other differences, these colonies shared the dream and reality of community ownership, work, and sharing as a way of faithful life in Christ.

Shakers, easily the most successful of the religious colonists, had been reviled and oppressed in England as largely working class, radical “shaking Quakers.” They arrived in the colonies in 1774, convinced that Christ had returned to earth in the form of their hard pressed mill-worker leader, Mother Lee. There, they set out to usher in the long-awaited “millennium” where justice and mercy would reign. They would eventually establish over twenty functioning, egalitarian Christian communities from Maine to Kentucky, to which they invited the public to visit and join. They practiced celibacy, but the religious and socialistic life they offered brought a steady stream of more than 20,000 adult recruits, along with many orphans sent to join them. Shaker communities prospered and became known for their singing and dance and for the quality of their workmanship, from architecture to skilled practices that would someday be known as “recycling.”

Other new communistic Christian communities organized themselves under a wide variety of theologies. Some few practiced varieties plural marriage. Most groups lived communally but in traditionally coupled marriages. Some of the most sturdy Christian socialist communities, self-limited and insulated from the outside world, clung to the exclusive use of their particular native European language and communal culture. Meanwhile, significant numbers of American Christians of various persuasions immersed themselves in the day-to-day projects against gender oppression, Black slavery, and wage slavery.

John Brown, who would testify in court to hearing God’s call to build a multiracial, guerrilla army for the final destruction of slavery, had earlier built an international wool producers’ cooperative and his family took shelter at points in a communistic collective community. Methodist preacher, proto-feminist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, inspired by Christian communalism in Northampton, Massachusetts, fought both slavery and gender oppression. Wilhelm Weitling, craft worker, sometime European communist leader and comrade to Marx, immigrated to the United States to promote is brand of revolutionary Christian communist revolution. Weitling himself joined, for a time, a commune in Iowa.

The Underground Railway, serving escaped slaves, gave radical Christians a new, exciting if also dangerous devotion. Former slave Frederick Douglass, originally converted as a Methodist, gradually took on broader forms of religious thought as did many others. By the 1840s and 1850s, Christians of many hues and many theologies moved into the accelerating struggles for abolition and women’s rights. After the war, some took up the cause of socialism. These various activists included Quakers, Congregationalists, newly emerging congregations of Unitarians, Spiritualists and the African Methodist Episcopal among others. As struggles within Christianity intensified, the largest American denominations, Baptist and Methodist, divided into separate denominations, North and South. Some splits resulted in Black-led churches, such as the AME, where leadership had better understanding of the evil and less obstacles in speaking of it. Some of the first openly Black socialists would emerge from those quarters.

Outspoken and avowed Christian socialists appeared in small numbers within the ranks of the Left during the 1870s-1880s. In 1872, a group of Bostonians led by the Congregationalist Rev. Jesse H. Jones founded the Christian Labor Union and published the first two Christian Socialist periodicals, Equity and the Labor Balance. These institutions had faded by 1879. During the 1880s, a larger number of crusading ministers joined reform and radical movements. The vast majority of the Social Gospel advocates opposed radical ideologies. Only a minority of New England Social Gospelers, including Jones, spread the evangel of Christian Socialism. W. D. P. Bliss, a Massachusetts Episcopal pastor, became a prominent figure in the New England Knights of Labor, and later editor of the Dawn: A Magazine of Christian Socialism and Record of Social Progress. The reform writings of Richard T. Ely, and the Utopian burst of activity following the publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, helped ministers such as Bliss develop both public interest in and Christian approbation of a cooperative, spiritually inspired solution to the “Social Question.”

Christian Socialism, intermixed with Bellamy nationalism, British-inspired Fabian socialism, and radical offshoots of Christian Science, had a special appeal to women reformers repelled by the class-struggle doctrines of the generally patriarchal, immigrant socialist milieu. Several of the most prominent women leaders of the day, including Woman’s Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard and Civil War-era Sanitary Commission leader Mary Livermore, publicly pronounced themselves as being for a cooperative solution. Vida Scudder, an English professor at Wellesley College with extended experience in the settlement house movement, would continue these themes of class reconciliation in religious understanding for decades into the twentieth century.

In 1901 Congregationalist minister George D. Herron played a leading role in the convention that united various rival factions of the Socialist Party. As the Worker, a contemporary socialist weekly, noted, his selection as temporary chair of the party “was unanimous and satisfactory to all parties.” Herron personally bridged the gap between the atheistic immigrant socialists and religious-minded American radical reformers.

Herron lost his public position and his ministry owing to a divorce scandal, but the ranks of American-born socialists, especially in the Plains States and the Southwest, filled with churched and unchurched Christians. While much socialist rhetoric (including that of Eugene V. Debs) turned upon Christian metaphors, organized Christian Socialism had a special role to play. The Christian Socialist, published by the Reverend Edward Ellis Carr in Danville, then Chicago, Illinois, achieved a circulation of twenty thousand, including two thousand ministers, and led to the formation of the Christian Socialist Fellowship (1906–1917) with twenty-seven chapters and fifteen hundred members. The Christian Socialist, devoting special numbers to various denominations, shrewdly played to its appreciative audience. It also took moral positions advanced even for the socialist movement.

Of these, its antiracism was easily the most important. Nearly all the early Black socialists of note were Christian ministers, such as George Washington Woodbey, a San Diego Baptist, a contributor to the Christian Socialist and himself a former slave. One of Woodbey’s converts, George Slater, achieved special prominence. Pastor of the Zion Tabernacle in Chicago and active in that city’s Socialist branches, he was elected to the executive committee of the Christian Socialist Fellowship and made the fellowship’s Secretary for the Colored Race. Slater published several popular socialist pamphlets, notably Blackmen, Strike for Liberty, and also a pro-socialist monthly, the Western Evangel.

Hard times arrived after 1910. The Reverend Carr, accusing a Socialist Party national figure of moral turpitude, ran afoul of the organization. Expelled and then restored by the national party, he found himself expelled again by the immigrant-dominated Chicago party branches. In any case, much of the Christian Socialist milieu left the Socialist Party in order to support World War I. The ranks of religious-influenced rural and semi-rural Socialists, their newspapers repressed through government action and their faith shattered by the precipitous decline of the Socialist Party, turned quiescent or joined the farmer-labor movements active during the 1920s.

A small but vital section of young Christian intellectuals became socialists as a result of their wartime pacifist commitments. Within a badly diminished Socialist Party, its militantly atheistic wing by 1920 a part of the Communist movement, the prestige of Christian Socialism grew considerably. Former Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas, the party’s perennial presidential candidate from 1928 onward, imparted a spiritualistic or moral tone to even the most economic-political message. Around Thomas ranged such institutions as the World Tomorrow, a highly influential monthly drawing the energies of Christian pacifists and veteran travelers through the impoverished colonial world. At the local level, many Socialist branches gained the active participation of clergy, especially during the Depression and the years shortly before the US entry into World War II. Especially in the South, where a handful of Christian Socialists and Communists such as Claude and Joyce Williams, James Dombrowski, and Howard Kester headed important political institutions, the message carried a strongly interracial gospel.

For the broader liberal Christian public open to moralistic socialist appeals, the works of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr exerted significant influence. Never joining the Socialist Party, Rauschenbusch argued vigorously for the idea of socialism and sometimes for public support of the party. Niebuhr, an editor of the World Tomorrow, founded the Fellowship of Christian Socialists in 1931 and served for a time as editor of its publication, Radical Religion.

A prolific writer, teacher, preacher, and activist, Niebuhr resigned from the Socialist Party in 1940 , but remained a socialist until 1948. During the decade thereafter, he became a central figure of rightward-drifting liberalism, describing Communism as a “demonic religion.” Leading an intellectual drift toward neoconservatism, Niebuhr embraced the Cold War, scorned Islam along with Arab Nationalism. and for a time, warned that the emerging civil-rights struggle was moving too fast. In the final phase of his life, he offered a belated and partial opposition to the US war in Vietnam. His successors at the Union Theological Seminary for decades continued Christianity and Crisis, an influential magazine co-founded by Niebuhr and John Bennett, sought to bridge the religious gap between an older social democracy and the theologically-minded activists and thinkers of the post-New Left.

Meanwhile, one section of Christian Socialists, led in part by Willard Uphaus, former New Haven Socialist Party luminary and so-called “chaplain” of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, militantly opposed the Cold War and sought to guide Christian Socialism toward Soviet-American reconciliation. Others with religious links, including followers of the Catholic Worker among a wider field of dedicated pacifists, participated in anti-war and anti-Bomb activities. Organizations such as the Fellowship for Reconciliation.

Christians who quietly considered themselves anti-capitalist or felt themselves educated by experiences within the Left had meanwhile assumed crucial roles within the Civil Rights movement at large. Martin Luther King, Jr., himself, was quietly known to be a close reader of the Daily Worker in his Boston College undergraduate days and for good reasons: the reportage of interracial activism in those pages had no rival. As popular civil rights struggles in the South emerged, pastors and other Christians found themselves radicalized, no matter the weight of McCarthyism and the perceived need to keep radical views silent. King and others connected US racism, if cautiously in open discussion, to the worship of war and empire. Several of King’s key aides, with known leftwing backgrounds, had to resign, thanks to pressure from the FBI, also from conservative or fearful black leaders. King’s own radical Christianity broadened, during the 1960s, first into the anti-war movement and then to the call for a rainbow “Poor People’s Campaign” to shut down the US capital in the summer of 1968.

Washington would be closed, in this strategy, until the war ended and the demand for “jobs or income now” for the poor had finally been won. Murdered in April 1968, King was only one of a long list of other revolutionary leaders jailed or assassinated in this period. For the moment at least, the grand socialistic vision of the Poor People’s campaign fell back, even as the struggles continued to intensify and the cities exploded in spontaneous rebellions.

In other spiritual quarters, Christian radicalism blossomed. In May 1968, nine religious men and women, including Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, broke into the Selective Service Offices in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned hundreds of draft records so as to protest the ongoing American slaughter in Vietnam. Less than a year later, another nine religious protesters entered and vandalized the offices and files at Dow Chemical in Washington, releasing a statement that condemned corporations for exploitation, and killing for profit. Increasing numbers of religious militants, inspired by the Berrigans, took their activities “underground,” joining the thousands of morally outraged Americans resisting the draft.

The momentum for revolutionary change dulled by the middle 1970s and more definitively after 1980, in the face of conservative retrenchment. Under the surface of apparent calm, radicalization continued for many persons of faith. Their participation in the struggles against racism, war, sexism, homophobia, and more, along with inspiration from international solidarity. bore in many the fruits of deeper understanding, leading them toward a reflection upon socialism.

The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 prompted many religious radicals in the peace movement to re-focus and to rediscover the threat of globalized nuclear weapons. They were especially alarmed at US policies that armed for a “first strike” preemptive destruction of the Soviet Union or China. Christian activists demanded negotiation between the powers and pushed for de-escalation by the United States. Supported by activists from Riverside Church in New York City, the anti-nuclear movement brought a million persons to Central Park on 12 June 1982, in one of the two largest single-site demonstrations in US history. Socialists and other peace minded Christians also began direct contact and tours in the USSR to meet Christians there in the hopes of establishing bridges to peace. New discussions between secular Marxists and radicalizing Christians began, and increasingly Christian liberationist perspectives were voiced by US theologians and pastors.

Christians for Socialism (1974–1983), small in size and with a brief organizational life-span, offered a living network to such activists. Christian socialist ideas had meanwhile found their way into major denominational publications, and fairly dominated such Left-leaning journals as Sojourners, the Witness, the Other Side, and Christianity and Crisis. At least a handful of US Left publications besides those by religious groups themselves took note of Christian responses to the struggle for fundamental change. In 1984, Monthly Review published a special issue on Religion and the Left, updating the Christian-Marxist dialogue, and integrating Black and other liberation theologies, along with radical Biblical commentary for the consideration of secular and religious revolutionaries alike. By the middle 1980s, the Democratic Socialists of America published the newsletter Religious Socialism (RS). as an expression of its Religion and Socialism Commission. In later years, RS became the oldest surviving religious socialist publication in North America.

Even as the Vietnam war ended, Latin American wars of liberation threatened the US empire. Resistance posed by Christian socialists and anti-imperialists re-emerged as the solidarity efforts aiding revolutionary movements in Central America. In 1978, a successful socialist revolution that included many Christians took power in Nicaragua. President Jimmy Carter, an ardent Christian liberal, declined to recognize the new Nicaraguan government, and in 1981 President Reagan began his determined efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government and to support right wing governments in nearby nations. The US- supported “Death Squads” assaulted communities of the indigenous, and bragged that they would “destroy socialism,” precipitating a flood of refugees flowing toward the North. In response, radical Christians organized a church based “Sanctuary Movement” to aid the new refugees from terror and to educate congregations in the criminal nature of US foreign policy.

In 1983, a group of radicalized Christians in Nicaragua vowed to place their bodies in areas about to be attacked by US funded attacks “Contras.” US Christian volunteers had already become active in remote villages, as human shields against Contra terrorists. Under the leadership of Rev. Mike Clark of the newly formed Witness for Peace, thousands risked their lives in these war zones. Less dangerous fact-finding tours of the revolution were organized by several groups, and during the next decade, more thousands of US citizens visited. Many of the visiting Christians came home with socialist sensibilities.

Radicalized Christians also responded vigorously to a call from Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of the Radical Christian publication Sojourners. In 1984, he appealed for Christians and others to publicly pledge to civil disobedience, the day after any direct invasion of Nicaragua by the United States. In the campaign that followed, an estimated 100,000 Americans signed up. Thousands took part in in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience and protests in all fifty states, as the United States appeared to move closer to an outright invasion. Groups working in the campaign included the Inter-Religious Task Force for Central America, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, the American Friends Service Committee, among others. The invasion never came. Intelligence sources within the US government would later identify the churches as the greatest threat to US foreign policy during this period.

Socialist-minded Christians also involved themselves in other solidarity work around the globe. During the mid-1980s, they helped organize and stand with thousands in civil disobedience and boycott movements against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Activist Christians also played central roles in Palestine solidarity work, organizing tours, local speakers, demonstrations and boycotts supporting a just peace in the conflict. Educational work and actions continued with other revolutionary movements and nations, including especially Venezuela. At the Mexican border, long-standing veterans of anti-imperialist struggle such as Rev. John Fife organized and rendered direct and militant assistance, ranging from an emergency supply of water in the desert to counseling and welcome for refugees and the poor.

The Maryknoll Fathers played a leading role in many support campaigns, a dramatic change of the Maryknolls from the extreme Right of Catholic Orders, generations earlier, to the extreme Left. On the home front, their Orbis Press became the leading outlet of Liberation Theology thinkers, whether by US writers or Latin Americans.

Religious groups often became active responders to the consequences of the dark forces moving across the United States in the 1980s-1990s. As conservatives and neoliberals collaborated to de-regulate capital, to weaken unions and to roll back forms of government social relief for the poor, the homeless and chronically hungry, new forms organization emerged. In 1986, five million people joined hands in a human chain across the United States to raise awareness of the increasingly desperate conditions.

Radical Christians also continued the labor support that had first surfaced in the United Farm Workers’ grape and wine boycotts led by Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta during the 1960s-1970s. Huerta would later become a vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America. The model of Chavez’s mobilization of Catholic faith, using nonviolence, ecumenical solidarity, and community organizing in the practice of building the power of farmworkers, remained as useful as ever. During the most intense period of the deindustrialization in the US heartland, faith-based workers and pastors organized as Denominational Ministry Strategies, and led militant actions trying to stop the destruction of steelworker jobs in the Monongahela Valley, near Pittsburgh. This struggle, joined by Staughton Lynd and others, led to the defrocking and jailing of radical pastors and to other punishments by conservative clerics.

By 1984, the direct nonviolence tactics taught by King emerged again in the long and bitter United Mine Workers strike at Pittston Coal. In several locations of Appalachia, mass civil disobedience became a primary strike weapon. Striking miners and allies wore “camo" shirts emblazoned with the Biblical call to “Overcome Evil with Good,” and were arrested by the hundreds. In major urban areas from New England to the West Coast, churches began to lead in new community and faith-based organizing networks uniting religious, labor and other organizations. Not Christian Socialist as such, they nevertheless promoted and built cooperative land trusts, housing, and worker-owned businesses as alternatives to a collapsing local capitalism.

If the early 1960s had seen the rise of a new wave of struggle for Women’s Liberation, the latter half of the 1970s and the next decades saw thousands of radicalized women push their way into the ministry’s mainstream denominations. With the decline of these denominations, the women together with their allies often became the majorities of newer clergy. Enriching their institutions spiritually as they helped to shift them leftward politically, speaking out for gender equity, anti-racism, anti-capitalist values, and the full inclusion of persons who identified as LGTBQ, they helped many churches to turn the corner away from older hide-bound patriarchal and subtly racist practices. The inclusive Metropolitan Community Church of New York, founded as a new denomination by gay leadership from Pentecostal roots in 1968, a year before the Stonewall Rebellion, helped to generate dialogue and inclusive actions within multiple mainstream Protestant denominations.

Meanwhile, the dilemma of mainstream Christianity, pressed anew by the “anti-gay” ideology heightened in the AIDS epidemic, demanded a radical witness. One of the strongest actions flashed back to the Biblical scene of Jesus overturning tables in the temple, as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), disrupted a Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York in 1989, with the support of some 4500 demonstrators. Through gut wrenching struggle, the movement for inclusion and full equality advanced. By 25 April 1993, in of largest demonstrations of any kind in the United States to date, the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation drew an estimated million participants. Through the process, LGBTQ Christians themselves developed the “queer theology” of the “outsider-ness,” the radical call of faith among all who experience oppression.

Radical Christians responded to an increasingly ravenous capitalism. The new wars of empire and the defeat and the destabilization of any alternatives seemed to be mirrored by American culture veering toward hyper-individualization. At the end of November 1999, a loose coalition of socialists, anarchists, churches, unions, environmental groups surprised the world with the “Battle of Seattle” obstructing the grand celebratory meeting of the new global World Trade Organization. The city was brought to a standstill by creative decentralized organizing, education, and fluid civil disobedience in the Martin Luther King, Jr., tradition, wrestling with authorities for control of the streets. The action set the establishment on its heels and opened a much more public debate on the destruction of life involved in the new world capitalist order, nowhere more perhaps than among the liberal and progressive churches.

The attacks of 9/11 gave the State an opportunity to consolidate its security forces from top to bottom even as environmental crises battered the world in frightening new ways. Sections of conservative Christians hastened toward apocalyptic expectations. Meanwhile, progressive Christians struggled to cope at the local level, as best they could, with the approaching effects of the Great Recession, with grinding poverty alongside previously unheard of amounts of public bailouts provided for banks and corporations.

In, September 2011, the Occupy Movement exploded across the nation. Grassroots participatory assemblies seized central urban districts, condemning the increasing economic polarization and corporate control of the government. Occupations became schools of struggle and experiments in democracy for a new generation. Radical churches and Christian socialists but especially theology students participated eagerly, offered food and drink to crowds, offering open air radical worship assembly events during some of the occupations.

Two years later, in 2013, in North Carolina, weekly protests began with civil disobedience mass events on “Moral Mondays,” under the leadership of Rev. Dr. William J. Barber in North Carolina. The “New Poor People’s Campaign” that followed successfully revived the radical arc of Dr. King almost half a century earlier. If Barber disinclined to endorse socialism openly, he urged a radical religious critique of capital. Barber cheerfully acknowledged his own roots in African American historical resistance, including that of Black socialists, and those schooled in social gospel and liberation theologies.

By the middle of the 2010s, a multitude of urban rebellions catalyzed around the caught-on-video beatings and murders of African Americans at the hands of police, leading to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement. Millions of diverse Americans hungry for some kind of fundamental change showed themselves unafraid of the authorities. Radicalizing churches could sometimes be recognized by the rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners hung on their entrances. In 2015, Bree Newsome, daughter of a Baptist preacher, scaled up the flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House, ignoring police orders, and tore down the state-displayed Confederate flag. “In the name of Jesus,” she preached, “this flag has to come down.” Her action and her reasons cracked open and intensified a national debate, as hundreds of actions to remove racist monuments from public places in the days, weeks and months that followed.

In 2016, in a remote area of North Dakota along the Missouri River, remnants of indigenous tribes whose communal life had been fractured by the capitalist conquest of the continent centuries earlier, made a historic stand. Based explicitly on their own deep spirituality, the Standing Rock Water Protectors brought together many surviving tribes across North America, and with tens of thousands of other allies. They waged a historic battle to oppose an environmentally dangerous pipeline project, occupied their own land to block access by the corporations, and re-established communal democratized community life and wealth in the face of state violence, and sub-zero temperatures on the plains. This action offered the most glaring expose of the destructive intent and power of capitalism. The tribes’ own very lives, together with the commitments of their allies, included a renewed sense of the power of the spiritual core of struggles for justice.

The tribes also renewed the search for a different definition of property. A daily life that began with prayer and continued with shared communalism, made visible again the reality and wealth of “the commons” whose memory persisted beneath the surface of property deeds and lawsuits and the invasions of armored vehicles. Near the end of the occupation, five hundred or more representatives of various US Christian churches gathered before the tribal elders to publicly confess and repent of the sins of their Christian institutions from the time of the European invasion. They asked for forgiveness and offered solidarity. In this remarkable and historic moment, the struggle for the commonwealth on the common land was beginning to come full circle. The actions of Donald Trump’s administration, openly racist, had revealed to Christian socialists the true face of their opponents.

In all these struggles, a kind of awareness and language emerged, and activists embraced new variants of Christian socialism. During a century and a half of experience and Biblical reflection, and under constant struggle, familiar trajectories of Christian Socialism had resurfaced. DSA’s regular podcasts and discussions included “Seven Signs You May Be a Religious Socialist,” with themes that might have been heard or felt, not so greatly changed, generations earlier. The Institute for Christian Socialism, “founded on the conviction that the socialism of the Gospel is irreconcilable with capitalism,” offered scholarship and regular publication in its on-line Bias Magazine: The Voice of the Christian Left. The Magificast, a weekly Christian communist podcast and discussion Christians “to participate in the struggle for emancipation from the system of capitalism.” A range of similar experiments in Christian Socialism were being pursued in the second decade of the twenty-first century, including the Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, and the Christian Left.

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