The Christian Party
We have received for comment a leaflet called “A Christian Party,” and described on the front cover as “A Call to the Church and the World’s People by a Company of Priests in North Staffordshire,” by whom the leaflet presumably is published, and who say (inside cover) : ”You would be doing us and the cause of truth a service by your comments, criticism and advice which will be really welcomed and fully considered.”
The priests of the Christian Party (eleven of them) would appear to be cast in a different mould from many of the political divines who grace “left” political parties. They aim at an order of things where “each shall be the owner, or with his fellows the joint owner, of land and industry, subject to the autonomous economic corporations to which he belongs.” They say further : —
“We shall be called Socialists. We do not repudiate, but we are not eager to accept this label : for the Socialist parties of the day look for State control of all departments of life. Nationalisation is their cry. We see lurking in this the tyranny of German National Socialism or Russian State Socialism with its inevitable suppression of all free spiritual activity.”
And …”We shall be labelled anarchist and syndicalist. We have to refuse this label too.”
But : “We would call ourselves communists only that we do not wish to be regarded as cynical and unscrupulous agents of the Stalin tyranny in Russia.”
The eleven priests of North Staffordshire would call themselves Communists. But if Christianism stands for what they say it does, Communism (the “Kingdom of God on earth”), there is no need to describe themselves in any way but as Christians. The fact that they describe themselves as Communists (reservations noted) and claim to stand for Communism is a measure of the extent that Christianism has nothing to do with Communism. They aptly illustrate the fact that man’s ideas and the objects he struggles for are governed by the world in which he lives. “Gross materialism,” perhaps, the suggestion of which might incline the Communist priests to draw in their cassocks. Nevertheless, when they want to explain what they stand for they do so by economic definitions (quoted above), by comparisons with Anarchism, Communism, and so on, and not by quotation from textual Christianism. It is true that they give extracts from biblical texts such ingenious interpretations that in their minds they make Christianity equal Socialism. Nevertheless it cannot escape notice that in nearly two thousand years of Christianity such interpretations are of modern origin. In fact, Socialism as an idea, as a science, even the words Capitalism and Socialism, are less than two hundred years old. There could have been no conception of the idea of Socialism three hundred years ago because the Capitalist system of society out of which the idea arose had not come into being. Still less could it be argued that the idea of “Christian Socialism” (or Communism) is two thousand years old.
The truth is that, whether these priests like it or not, the influence behind their ideas and the objects for which they stand, spring out of the material world in which we live and not from Christian inspiration. The attempt to square the material world with the religious conception of life in this way is but evidence of the process of the whittling away of the religious view of life which has been going on for two hundred years under pressure of the progress of the material world. Moreover, it would be reasonable to ask for support from Christian writings for the expressed attitude of the pamphlet to Nationalisation, Stalinism, and so on.
And why is a bishop who took sides with the Abyssinians in the war with Italy a “progressive bishop”? Need for some criterion—Christian or Socialist—seems to have escaped attention.
On the last page of the pamphlet the reader sustains as what comes as a shock from these “revolutionary Christians.
“Because of our sins this war is upon us, and for a penance we have to wade through mud and blood. We cannot contract out of it.”
Because of our sins !
Bunyan was more “revolutionary” than this—and certainly not less pious.
Is it the sins of the workers that condemn them to suffer capitalism ? Can they contract out of that ? Why should they not have to endure capitalism as a penance too ? How and why do these pietists distinguish between the one and the other?
One would tremble tor the future of the working class movement if there were any evidence that the muddled ideas of these well-intentioned moralists and noble “idealists” were likely to spread among the workers. Fortunately, the evidence is all the other way. None of the parsonic eleven are ever likely to play a part more than as an extra at any Labour or Communist meeting that found them useful.
When they write their next pamphlet we recommend they do not write of nationalisation, or State capitalism, (which the S.P.G.B. has opposed consistently) as being synonymous with Socialism : or describe parties whose policy is nationalisation as Socialist parties. It is a habit among wily politicians who find it expedient to erect their own Aunt Sallies. But the Christian Party should know better than to copy such an example. A few of their number certainly do know better.
A new Christian Party, but the old, old story.
H. W.