Working-class Christians have seized on the progressive elements in Christianity to challenge hierarchies and inequalities within churches; to advocate for labor, land, and housing rights; and to agitate against militarism, racism, and poverty. Among Protestants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Social Gospel pointed the way toward not just individual but social salvation. The Catholic Worker movement continues to preach anti-militarism and service to the poor.
Some Christians — including Thomas J. Hagerty, a key figure in the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World — have incorporated socialist and communist (if not explicitly Marxist) ideas into their social analysis and political practice. In the South American context, Christianity and Marxism fused to form liberation theology, which cast the poor and oppressed as primary agents fighting economic exploitation and challenging dictatorship, repression, and US imperialism. [...]
Some thinkers have tried to work through some of these tensions, arguing that there are grounds for a rapprochement. Andrew Collier’s book Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical Contribution to Their Reconciliation is one such attempt. [...]
On the other side, Collier decries the “bourgeois aspirations” of the Soviet’s “privileged bureaucracy” and laments the inability of states that called themselves socialist to forge a “socialist civil society,” leaving “atomised individuals confronting a top-heavy state.” Here, Collier suggests, socialists can learn from Christians’ reflexive opposition to “totalitarian commercialism” and resistance to modish ideas. [...]
Collier’s attempts to reconcile Marxism and Christianity underscore not just the political possibilities of an alliance but the persistent gulf between the two. A meeting of the hammer and the cross — it may not be a far-fetched Christmas miracle, but rather a political necessity in the age of Trump.
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