Page, Kirby

PAGE, KIRBY (1890-1957). A Disciples of Christ minister, Page campaigned for pacifism and democratic socialism from a Christian perspective. He was born in Hamlet, Texas, and graduated from Drake University before becoming an ordained minister. Page evangelized to Allied soldiers during World War I with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), traveling to war zones and then to the Far East alongside legendary YMCA leader Sherwood Eddy. Together they established the pacifist Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, which merged in 1928 with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR).

By that time, Page had succeeded six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas as editor of the Christian socialist journal, The World Tomorrow. Page would go on to write more than forty widely-circulated books and pamphlets and spend half of each year traveling to speak to student, church, and social groups. His efforts led former FOR executive secretary and Christian Century editor Harold Fey to argue that Page was the most influential American pacifist between the two world wars.

That pacifism was absolute, and absolutely dictated by the Gospels, Page insisted. “The Christian in Belgium or in England in 1914 should not have gone to war, in my opinion, since war is violently unchristian,” he wrote The Sword or the Cross, Which Should be the Weapon of the Christian Militant? (1921). “Even if his country had been conquered by Germany, he would have confronted the same situation which Jesus faced, and like Jesus he should have sought to get rid of the oppressor by other means than the sword.”

To Page, the Bible delivers a similarly uncompromising economic message, which points directly toward democratic socialism. “When the Lord’s Prayer is prayed with insight it becomes a petition for the abolition of capitalism and the supplanting of the existing economic order with a society which is consistent with the religion of Jesus,” he wrote in Individualism and Socialism in 1933.

Page acknowledged that Christians had been the chief proponents of both warfare and capitalism. The first step toward redemption was to own up to their misdeeds. “Religious people must be brought to a vivid realization of their awful guilt in sanctioning and supporting an economic system that is the direct antithesis of their religious ideals,” he said.

U.S. slavery provided a shameful precedent for this Christian buttressing of capitalism. But Page argued that the end of slavery also provided a template for redemption via socialism, through the same kind of collective, faith-based advocacy some Christian abolitionists exercised. “If the moral approval of religious people were withdrawn from the system of individualism, it could be quickly transformed,” Page said. “Just as the churches belatedly called slavery a sin ... religious institutions should now declare that sanctioning and supporting the profit system is sin.”

Fey, Harold E., editor. Kirby Page, Social Evangelist: the Autobiography of a 20th Century Prophet for Peace. New York: Fellowship Press, 1975.

Page, Kirby. Individualism and Socialism. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933.

Page, Kirby. Jesus or Christianity: A Study in Contrasts. New York: Doubleday, 1929.