Christian Socialism | Revolution in Jesusland

A Revolution that needs a little more hope October 25, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 9 comments

Progressives (Christian and secular) have lost faith in humanity’s ability to intentionally manage our economies.

I’m not talking about central planning, but I am talking about collectively guaranteeing that everyone in the world has access to means of making a good living that’s sustainable and doesn’t destroy the earth. That’s just not an acceptable goal anymore for respectable progressives.

We’re comfortable with the idea of society guaranteeing bare essentials like water access, education, healthcare and a few other baseline services. We’re comfortable with the idea of society creating incentives against socially or environmentally harmful economic activities and in favor of desirable activities. But when we think of society, say, providing the resources to completely overhaul a polluting industry and making it happen, we think of Stalin. Or at least we think that such an ambitious project would be doomed to fail spectacularly. Don’t we?

One hundred years ago, and for hundreds of years before that, progressives had complete faith that it was possible for humans to build and maintain a far, far better economy than we have today. They expected that, by the year 2007, there would be no poverty, no preventable illness, no illiteracy and no war. They were divided about how to get there—incrementalism, violent revolution, non-violent/democratic revolution, spontaneous/anarchist revolution, etc—but they all believed it was humanity’s job to make it happen.

Yesterday I got a remarkable reminder of that optimism while spending some time with Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis. It’s a 100 year old book from one of the leaders of the Social Gospel movement.

In some ways, it’s written with the same purpose as the other book I’ve been reading, Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change. But the difference in tone caused by the difference between the two worlds in which Rauschenbusch and McLaren worte could not be more stark.

Reading Rauschenbusch, you can feel how the whole world around him was on fire with change and hope. As bad as things were for the billion or so suffering poverty, a worldwide movement was in full swing to change everything. It was a real, practical movement with mass parties, some in power, and examples of societies all around the world leaping forward in development through various means—some lead by the movement, some desperately trying to stay ahead of it. Despite periodic setbacks, the direction was clear. And the endpoint was just as clear: no, not a Utopia, merely a world without poverty, unnecessary illness, illiteracy, etc…

Where Rauschenbusch wrote with the tone of being one voice in the cacophony of an already-500-year-old revolutionary movement, McLaren has to write—on his economic topic—with the tone of a lone voice in an almost silent wilderness.

Where you can feel Rauschenbusch’s confidence in humanity’s abilities to solve it’s economic problems bursting onto every page, McLaren can only offer beautiful but consciously irrational hope. He advocates resistance because it’s the just thing to do, but can promise nothing. At the start of a critical chapter named “A Revolution of Hope” he offers:

Can the suicide machine [of our economic system] really be stopped?…
The simple answer is that nobody knows. (p. 269)

There’s a new edition of Christianity and the Social Crisis out in print—peppered by (mostly condescending) essays from present-day thinkers. You can also download the full book for free thanks to Google books because it’s now in the public domain.

I clipped some interesting bits for you from Google books and put them here. Please take a look.