The Dialogue of

Socialism
Common interest in a better world led the
way for religious pluralism.

Summer/Autumn 2010

By Dan McKanan

FOR MOST CHURCHGOING Protestants in nineteenth-

century America, the name “Owen” evoked a fascinated
horror. The Owens—father Robert, son Robert Dale, and
their close associate Frances or “Fanny” Wright—were
notorious “infidels,” preaching that the Bible was a fable,
the clergy hypocritical scoundrels, and human character
a product of environmental factors rather than spiritual
grace. Like their freethinking predecessor Thomas Paine,
they were foreigners: Robert Senior visited the United
States briefly in 1825, leaving Robert Dale Owen and
Fanny Wright behind to promote his ideas in the New
World. Above all, they were social radicals. Wright was
notorious for her feminist sentiments and for the
interracial commune she established at Nashoba,
Tennessee. Robert Owen espoused a pure communism in
which all property would be shared equally and a
common system of childrearing would prepare everyone
for a culture of equality. His purpose in coming to the
United States was to establish such a society at New
Harmony, Indiana; when that community formally
dissolved after a tempestuous two years, Wright and
Robert Dale Owen turned their energies to a radical
newspaper called the Free Enquirer and to the Working
Men’s Party, which they joined in 1828 to support
striking journeymen and demand universal male
suffrage, free public education, and a 10-hour day.1

Yet when Robert Owen arrived in the United States, he

was welcomed by a society of Bible-quoting Protestants.
The New York Society for Promoting Communities was
the brainchild of Quaker physician Cornelius C. Blatchly,
who recruited a board that included five ministers.
Among them were a Congregationalist who had recently
embraced the esoteric teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg
and two leaders from a rebellious Methodist Society that
repudiated the authority of bishops, celebrated working-
class culture, and had facilitated the emergence of the
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church as a distinct
denomination.2 Together, these visionaries called “every
religious congregation” to reconstitute itself on the basis
of the “community of goods” first practiced by the
apostles. Successful communism, they argued, would
necessarily be religious, because “all goodness comes
only from God” and only the influence of the gospel
could overcome the “inefficiency of human and external
laws to reform and regulate the conduct of the social
family.”3

Surprisingly, Blatchly’s Society published this millennial

manifesto alongside excerpts from Owen’s writings in
which he defended socialism on an opposite basis. For
Owen, “the character of man is always formed for
him . . . by his predecessors,” and he insisted that the
economic system of joint ownership was a sure means of
preventing “in the rising generation . . . the miseries
which we and our forefathers have experienced.”4 The
juxtaposition of these two arguments helped inaugurate
more than a century of interaction that brought radical
Protestants into continuous practical cooperation—and
more intermittent interfaith dialogue—with disciples of
Owen, Charles Fourier, and Karl Marx, as well as with a
diverse mix of spiritualists, Theosophists, Reform Jews,
New Thought practitioners, Ethical Culturists, and
humanists who shared their vision of a post-capitalist
society.5

Socialism (a term coined by Owen’s disciples, defined

here to include both “utopian” experiments and more
“political” organizations) is not commonly seen as a site
for interfaith dialogue, for at least two reasons. First, its
history does not easily mesh with the usual chronology of
dialogue. Many interpreters present dialogue as an
eminently twentieth-century phenomenon, possible only
after American culture had moved through the stages of
toleration and inclusion to a mature “pluralism.” And
that has certainly been true for the majority of
Americans and their churches. After the high profile
encounters of the 1893 Parliament of World Religions,
mainstream American Protestants reached out to the
religious “other” in a series of concentric circles,
committing to the Protestant ecumenism of the Federal
Council of Churches in the 1910s, to the tripartite system
of “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” in the 1960s, and seriously
encountering Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists only after
the immigration reform of 1965 brought large numbers
of Asians into professional-class neighborhoods.6 It has
only been in the last decade or so that most dialogue
organizations have widened the table to include people of
“no faith” as well.7 Yet the socialist dialogues of the
nineteenth century typically excluded orthodox
Calvinists and Catholics while embracing Reform Jews,
Theosophical disciples of the Buddha, and a host of
movements generally perceived as “unbelieving.”

This is the
second reason
that socialism
has usually
been left out of
the dialogue
story: it is not
generally
understood to
be “religious”
at all. There is
merit in that
perception. The
Owenites were
“secularist” in
their zeal for
church-state separation and “antireligious” in their
tendency to spend more time criticizing Christianity than
they did in spelling out their religious alternative. The
same was true for doctrinaire Marxists, though less so for
spiritualists, Theosophists, Ethical Culturists, New
Thought adherents, and humanists, all of whom tried to
place primary emphasis on what they did believe. All of
these groups departed from conventional
understandings of “religion” by disavowing a
supernatural basis for their beliefs about ultimate reality,
though they often held beliefs that seemed supernatural
or irrational to outsiders. Typically, they were composed
primarily of people who had once been Protestant, or at
least had come from culturally Protestant families. The
dialogue between members of these groups and radical
Protestants thus crossed boundaries of faith but not
culture, and participants on both sides shared prejudices
against Roman Catholicism in particular and established
or ritualistic religions in general. Many participants even
changed sides, lapsing from their Protestant
commitments over the course of the dialogue! It was easy
to see the conversation as one between believers and
apostates rather than between two distinct religious
worldviews.

This perception of religious absence rather than presence

obscures the fact that many ex-Christian socialists had
both explicit beliefs about ultimate reality and much of
the apparatus we usually associate with religion—creedal
statements of belief or disbelief, “social hymns,”
designated leaders (many of them originally credentialed
as Protestant ministers), rituals of initiation and
excommunication, even the practice of meeting on
Sunday mornings for singing and a sermon. Robert
Owen devoted a major section of his Book of the New
Moral World to “The Principles and Practice of the
Rational Religion,” and frequently claimed that
observance of this religion would usher in the
millennium.8 His followers gathered in such freethinking
congregations as Boston’s Society of Free Enquirers and
New York’s Universal Community Society of Rational
Religionists. Their services featured readings from
Owen’s writings, songs from his Social Hymns, and talks
on topics ranging from the platform of the Working
Men’s Party to the doctrine of the soul.9

Congregational institutions of this sort provided an

indispensable base of support for the labor unions,
political parties, and utopian colonies that are the better-
remembered institutions of every wave of socialism.
Without the former, the latter might not have come into
existence. But practitioners of post-Christian spirituality
were not alone in socialist unions, parties, and colonies.
They worked alongside a roughly equal number of
Protestants and (especially in the twentieth century)
Jews who found a powerful sanction for socialism in
biblical faith. Some of these biblical believers gathered in
their own freestanding radical congregations, while
others clung precariously to the fringes of mainstream
denominations. On several occasions, their cooperation
with post-Christian socialists blossomed into dialogue.

Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright voiced their

commitment to dialogue in the first issue of the Free
Enquirer. Declaring that “silence on the subject of
religion seems to us little better than treason to truth and
virtue,” they promised to open their pages to “any
spirited, well written communication, be it religious or
infidel, orthodox or heterodox, if it be dictated by good
taste and expressed in the spirit of charity.”10
Undoubtedly, this reflected their zeal for the principle of
free speech more than any desire to listen deeply to their
Christian brothers and sisters. Still, they set a precedent
for several instances of meaningful interchange. When
budding abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who then
based his critique of slavery on biblical authority, was
turned away from both Unitarian and Orthodox
Congregationalist pulpits in Boston, the First Society of
Free Enquirers opened its hall for his revolutionary
demand for immediate abolition.11 (Garrison repaid the
favor a few years later by protesting the imprisonment of
the Society’s “minister,” Abner Kneeland, on charges of
blasphemy as “a proof of the corruption of modern
Christianity.”12)

In 1835 Kneeland’s newspaper, the Boston Investigator,

also featured a brief exchange with Orestes Brownson,
who, like Kneeland, was a former Universalist minister
who had been disfellowshipped for heterodox views; he
had come to Boston to create a Society for Christian
Union and Progress as a rival to Kneeland’s Free
Inquirers. While Kneeland defined himself as a non-
Christian “pantheist,” Brownson (at that moment in his
long spiritual pilgrimage) sought a basis for Working
Men’s politics in the Christian scripture. And so he wrote
to Kneeland that he believed humanity could be divided
into a “stationary party” that supported “things as they
are” and a “movement party” that “desires something
better.” Conceding that organized religion was generally
aligned with the “stationary party,” he posed a question:
“Suppose you should find the church maintaining the
most universal freedom, exerting itself incessantly to
meliorate the condition of man, carried away always by a
spirit of progress, of perfectionment, would you not
cease to oppose it?” Kneeland quibbled with Brownson’s
categories, noting that even Roman Catholicism was
notoriously un-stationary in its list of doctrines. After
conceding the main point—he would not “object to the
mere name of christianity, were its principles to be what
you suppose I would wish to have”—Kneeland added
waggishly that anyone who “avow[ed] such principles,
and endeavor[ed] to carry them out in practice” would
“no more be considered a christian by the ‘stationary
party‘ of christians, than I am.”13

Kneeland aptly predicted the way in which dialogue

would unfold in the next great wave of American
socialism. Charles Fourier, whose detailed
communitarian blueprint inspired dozens of colonies in
the United States, appealed to many American Christians
precisely because he was no Robert Owen. Neither an
atheist nor an exponent of the theory that character is
formed by environment, the eccentric Frenchman taught
that the human person is a complex of divinely ordered
“passions” (for sensory pleasure, for romantic love and
parental affection, for a diversity of occupations, and
above all for “universal unity”) that will harmonize
perfectly with the passions of others so long as the
“Divine Social Code” is followed. Apparently drawing on
strands of Western esotericism, Fourier affirmed that
this same code explained the gravity-like laws of
“attraction” binding together individuals, groups,
planets, and even universes, as well as the hidden
correspondences linking the musical scale and the
sequence of planets to human passions.14

Fourier’s theory of correspondence closely paralleled the

esoteric Christianity of Emanuel Swedenborg, and so it
naturally appealed to the Swedenborgians (among them
Blatchly’s erstwhile associate) who organized the
Leraysville Association and to the Transcendentalists of
Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, many of
whom were familiar with Swedenborg’s writings.15 But
other phalanxes were dominated by Hicksite Quakers or
the ecumenically minded Disciples of Alexander
Campbell, and virtually all took a fierce pride in their
religious diversity. “We had seventy-four praying
Christians, including all the sects in America, except
Millerites and Mormons,” claimed one phalanx leader.
“We had one Catholic family (Dr. Theller’s), one
Presbyterian clergyman, and one Universalist. One of our
first trustees was a Quaker. We had one Atheist, several
Deists, and in short a general assortment; but of
Nothingarians, none; for being free for the first time in
our lives, we spoke out, one and all, and found that every
body did believe something.”16 The Brook Farmers took
special delight in sharing their religious differences. One
recalled learning to appreciate “the great beauty of the
Swedenborgian doctrines” from one friend, the inner
meaning of Judaism from another, and the “symbols” of
Catholicism from “persons who are not and never can be
Romanists any more than myself. “17 On a more
humorous note, another Brook Farmer recalled how the
simple task of peeling potatoes provided an occasion for
a woman of working- class background to introduce
“stirring Methodist hymns” to a companion who, “having
stepped at a bound from Episcopacy to rationalism, was
a stranger to this spirit.”18

The effect of this dialogue was both mutual

understanding and a convergence toward religious
liberalism. “ ’I am a Jew, but a liberal, understanding
Jew,’ ” one Brook Farmer quoted his companions. “ ’I am
a Catholic, but I am a liberalized Catholic,’ says another.
‘I am a Swedenborgian, but my belief liberates me from
the crudities of Swedenborg,’ say others. . . . ‘We all see
how the forms of our churches were intended for good,
and we all see how many of them have been prostituted.’
”19 The result was what Kneeland had predicted: however
Fourierists understood themselves, their neighbors
viewed them as rank infidels, and those phalanxes that
attracted significant numbers of truly orthodox
Protestants experienced wrenching divisions. Orestes
Brownson, by this time a Roman Catholic who had
repented of his youthful radicalism, aptly noted that the
Fourierist “starting point” was “at the opposite pole from
Christianity” because it denied original sin. The rich
dialogue of Fourierism was for him a symptom of the
“miserable eclecticism” of the age, which reduced every
religion to “symbols. . .of partial truths” and thus denied
the possibility of truly authoritative revelation.20

In part because most of its Christians were liberal

Unitarians rather than orthodox Calvinists, Brook Farm
was able to continue the practice of dialogue even after
its demise as a community. In 1847 former community
members and friends organized a Religious Union of
Associationists that for four years gathered weekly for
musical performances, prayer, and presentations on such
varied topics as the “Solidarity of the Race,” “The War
With Mexico,” and “The Relation of Christ and the
Spiritual World to Us.” Among their many dialogues was
a conversation among a Catholic, a Jew, and a rationalist
about the diverse paths that had brought them to the
Associationist movement.21

Though spiritualism is
remembered for its
spectacular manifestations of
contact with dead spirits, the
movement was also marked
by a vigorous tradition of
both feminism and socialist
activism.
Fourierist communities provided an important seedbed
for the most successful non-Christian religious
movement in nineteenth-century America, the wave of
spiritualism that swept the nation in the 1850s. (Two
other milieus that fostered spiritualism were radical
abolitionism, especially in upstate New York, and the
Universalist denomination; both Robert Owen and
Robert Dale Owen were also among the radicals who
embraced spiritualism during its heyday.) Though
spiritualism is best remembered for its spectacular
manifestations of contact with dead spirits, the
movement was also marked by an elaborate cosmology
and a vigorous tradition of both feminist and socialist
activism.22 Most phalanxes that survived into the 1850s
hosted séances; some of those that didn’t were reborn as
spiritualist communities; and several community leaders
had subsequent careers as spiritualist lecturers. The best
known systematizer of the movement, Andrew Jackson
Davis, was notable for the degree to which his cosmology
blended Swedenborgian mysticism with Fourierist social
theory.23

Davis, who began his career as a medium transmitting

spirit messages from Swedenborg, increasingly divorced
his harmonial philosophy from Swedenborg’s Christian
exegetical context. “The church estimate of human
nature is an insult to the Great Spirit,” he wrote in one
book, while in his own (perhaps half-serious) catechism
he answered the Calvinist question about the “chief end
of man” by saying that it was “endless progression; to do
good, be happy, get wisdom, and aspire calmly toward
perfection; to become harmonious even as his Father-
God and Mother-Nature are harmonious.”24 Such
rhetoric was not calculated to please socialists who felt
they were following the gospel path to God’s Kingdom on
earth.

One such socialist was Adin Ballou, who had steered his
Hopedale community of “Practical Christian Socialism”
on a path that was parallel to but distinct from
Fourierism because he regarded Fourier as both
insufficiently Christian and too wedded to abstract
theorizing.25 A prodigiously productive scriptural exegete
who wrote the century’s most influential treatise on
Christian pacifism, Ballou was predictably “amazed and
confounded” by the way Davis’s writings “sweep away
very unceremoniously some of our long cherished
religious opinions and views.” But he also found that
they “confirm some of our purest, sublimest, most
unselfish convictions and aspirations.” Ballou’s
sympathy for Davis’s social ideals not only kept him
reading; it led him to support spiritualist
experimentation at Hopedale (especially after the death
of his beloved son, which gave Ballou new incentive to
contact the spirits) and to chair several spiritualist
conventions. The ultimate fruit of Ballou’s participation
in this dialogue was a proposal for a Christian
spiritualism that would allow the “fundamental truths”
of Christianity to be “reaffirmed, clarified from error,
demonstrated anew, and powerfully commended to the
embrace of mankind by fresh spiritual
communications.”26

Spiritualism was at the height of its influence when Karl

Marx unveiled a radically new system of “scientific
socialism.” Dismissing the schemes of both Owen and
Fourier as “utopian” and rejecting all forms of religion as
understandable but unhelpful “opiates,” Marx insisted
(with as much faith as science!) that a class-conscious
proletariat was historically destined to usher in socialism
by first seizing state power and then allowing the state to
wither away. This vision had little room for the vagaries
of spiritualism, and yet for a brief moment the two
movements might have merged in the United States. In
1871, just as Marx’s International Workingmen’s
Association was trying to gain a foothold among both
native-born Americans and German immigrants, a
highly self-aggrandizing spiritualist named Victoria
Woodhull organized section 12 of the Association. In
rapid succession she managed to get both the American
Association of Spiritualists and the National Woman
Suffrage Association to nominate her for the presidency
of the United States. Though this feat was the result of
manipulation rather than genuine leadership, it also
exposed the overlapping constituency of the three
movements.27 Indeed, as open-minded experiments
exposed spiritualism to be less “scientific” than it
originally claimed, it was natural for spiritualists to drift
to the (perhaps equally suspect) claims of scientific
socialism. The leadership of the two movements
continued to overlap into the early twentieth century,
when several journals promoted both causes and at least
one Socialist local (in Galena, Kansas) was chaired by a
devout spiritualist.28
American socialism did not
unfold according to plan
because the native-born
proletariat was too racially
divided to be fully class-
conscious and too in love
with Jesus to accept
dialectical materialism.
With or without spiritualist support, American socialism
did not unfold according to Marx’s plan. The native-born
proletariat was too racially divided to be fully class-
conscious and too in love with Jesus to accept dialectical
materialism. Marx’s most ardent disciples were
immigrants, many with bitter memories of reactionary
established churches in Europe, who dominated the
Socialist Labor Party of the 1890s and the Communist
Party formed in the wake of the Russian Revolution. If
doctrines and excommunications make a religion, these
parties were certainly religious, and the latter in
particular was profoundly shaped by Yiddish culture and
Talmudic styles of exegesis. But it would be a stretch to
say that they were arenas for interfaith dialogue.
The situation was quite different for the milder, less
class-conscious forms of socialism that sprang up in the
last two decades of the nineteenth century. Appalled by
the persistence of poverty amid industrial abundance,
Henry George proposed in Progress and Poverty (1879)
a “single tax” on land that would have effectively
socialized real estate but not other forms of capital.
Laurence Gronlund went a step further in The
Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), arguing that
collective ownership of both land and capital could be
achieved through an evolutionary consolidation of
existing monopolies rather than a violent revolution.
This was surely a form of socialism, though when
Edward Bellamy popularized it in his novel Looking
Backward (1888), he cleverly labeled it as “Nationalism”
to avoid anti-Marxist stigma. Each in turn, George and
Bellamy inspired experimental communities and
electoral politicking before folding into the broader
Populist movement.29

Just as spiritualism and Fourierism were intertwined, so

Bellamyite Nationalism built on the organizational
structures of Theosophy, a partial successor to
spiritualism that relied on the revelations of mysterious
“Mahatmas” rather than of dead spirits for its cosmology.
The Theosophical Society’s first objective was “to form a
nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity,” and
when a cluster of Boston Theosophists discovered a
similar hope in Bellamy’s novel, they procured an
endorsement from the Society’s leader, Madame
Blavatsky, who agreed that Bellamy had identified “the
first great step” toward brotherhood. The Boston
Theosophists also initiated a national network of
“Nationalist Clubs” that quickly attracted Protestant
ministers. Nationalist clubs ceased to be an arena for
dialogue when their turn toward electoral politics gave
Blavatsky cold feet. “If Nationalism is an application of
Theosophy,” she urged, “it is the latter which must ever
stand first in your sight.” Still, Theosophists went on to
build a series of cooperative colonies in California, and
Theosophical ideas became integrated into the discourse
of reform-minded journals.30

Many of the
Protestant
ministers who
were drawn to
Nationalism
had first had
their social
consciences
pricked by the
absence of
working-class
people in their
congregations.
By the turn of
the twentieth
century, these
ministers and
their lay allies
had coalesced
into a diverse
movement that
would
eventually be
labeled the
“social gospel.”
Many histories
of the social gospel assume that its institutional base was
in the Protestant seminaries, the denominational social
service agencies, and above all the Federal Council of
Churches, founded by social gospelers in 1908. These
organizations included more than a few committed
socialists, but they were dominated by reformers whose
vision fell short of socialism. Moreover, they had little
commitment to interfaith dialogue: the Federal Council,
in particular, drew its boundaries narrowly enough to
exclude Unitarians and Universalists, to say nothing of
spiritualists and Theosophists.

A rather different set of organizations appealed to those

social gospelers who believed, with labor leaders Terence
Powderly and Eugene Debs, that Jesus was a class-
conscious worker whose gospel required the overthrow
of capitalism. Most of these activists participated in
informal “fellowships” that brought ministers and
laypeople together for conversation and mutual
accountability. The most famous of these was the Baptist
Brotherhood of the Kingdom; the most notorious was the
Midwestern Kingdom movement, which helped propel
its founder George Herron from the Congregationalist
ministry to a bitterly anticlerical style of Marxism. Even
after renouncing Christianity, Herron participated in a
Chicago “Fellowship” of socialist activists who shared his
hostility for organized Christianity.31 Other fellowships
were intentionally interreligious. New York’s Collectivist
Society, organized by an Episcopalian layman, included
Baptist Leighton Williams and feminist Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, whose His Religion and Hers proposed
a naturalistic faith committed to the well-being of future
generations rather than eternal life in heaven.32 The
Brotherhood of the Daily Life, active in 1905, declared
itself “Catholic in its broadest sense. Jew, Gentile,
Christian or Pagan, all are welcome.”33
Another important institution for radical social gospelers
was the freestanding “People’s” congregation. Though
these churches had a variety of trajectories, they were
most typically launched by charismatic Protestant
ministers who had gotten into trouble with their
denominations both for biblical liberalism and for
sympathy with organized labor. Some were tiny and
struggling; others attracted parishioners by the
thousands and built massive edifices. Free from
confessional moorings, they were able to declare social
concern as their core identity. Thus, Chicago’s People’s
Church, launched in 1880, promised to provide a place
where “strangers and those without a religious home,
and those of much or little faith” could unite in “the great
law and duty of love to God and man, and in earnest
efforts to do good in the world.”34 People’s Church of
Cincinnati said its only “article of faith” was the
“establishment of the brotherhood of man,”35 while in
the 1930s the Church of the People in Seattle “made it
obligatory upon applicants for membership to subscribe
to the dogma that the capitalistic system is inimical to
the religion of Jesus.”36

The exploration of diverse religious ideas was a

formative practice at many People’s Churches. The
sanctuary of People’s in Cincinnati displayed quotations
by both radical Christians and freethinkers—among
them Lev Tolstoy and Thomas Jefferson—alongside a
single biblical admonition to “know the truth and the
truth shall make ye free.” The Los Angeles Fellowship, a
thousand-member congregation launched by a former
revivalist who had been converted to socialism by George
Herron, offered classes on Whitman, Emerson, and the
Bhagavad Gita.37 And Seattle’s Church of the People
encouraged dialogue between Christians and Communist
Party members by welcoming both into the
congregation’s fellowship. “Communist members are
among the best,” reported the minister. “They have a
sense of discipline that others lack. . . . One thing is
certain, the Communists have learned a good deal about
the religion of Jesus and the religionists have learned
even more about Communism.”38

Perhaps because of these experiences of dialogue,

veterans of the fellowships and the People’s Churches
played a vital role in fostering religious pluralism within
the most electorally successful socialist entity in United
States history, the Socialist Party of America. Ostensibly
Marxist in ideology, the party brought together Marxists
who found the Socialist Labor Party too narrow and
Populists who found William Jennings Bryan’s 1896
campaign too broad in its emphasis on “free silver”
rather than the fight against capitalism. Protestant
ministers had a special cachet among the party’s
founders, who hoped they would attract native-born
voters into an alliance with immigrant socialists who
were not yet citizens. Thus, at the founding convention in
1901, George Herron served as temporary chair and a key
negotiator between the factions, while a few People’s
Church ministers were among the delegates. Herron
worked with another former minister to establish the
Rand School of Social Science (for party activists in
training) in New York City; former ministers were
elected to office on the party ticket in California,
Montana, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts; and a
Universalist pastor named Charles Vail signed on as the
party’s first “national organizer.”39

Most of these ministers were active in the Christian

Socialist Fellowship (CSF), which, despite its name,
created ample space for interfaith dialogue. Founder E.
E. Carr believed (in accord with the Socialist Party’s
electoral strategy) that “The hope of America is not in
applied Paganism, but in applied Christianity,” but he
also affirmed that “we should freely and lovingly
welcome to membership any Jew, Hindoo, or other
religious socialist who is broad enough to work with us
under the name of Jesus.”40 Apparently no Hindus took
him up on this, but several Jews did, along with New
Thought lecturers and a disproportionate share of
ministers from denominations excluded from the Federal
Council’s definition of “Christian.”

The
fellowship’s
Christian
Socialist
newspaper
featured
careful
exegetical
arguments that
“the Socialists
can well claim
that were Jesus
here today he
would be one of
us”41 alongside
declarations
that “SOCIALISM IS RELIGION: not a religion, just
religion. There is only one religion, and that is man’s
expression of his humanity.”42 Some of the party’s
leading spokespeople situated themselves right in the
middle of the dialogue between these seemingly
divergent theologies. In a widely reprinted article,
Berkeley mayor Stitt Wilson affirmed, on the one hand,
that “what America needs is a revival of genuine
godliness and of primitive Christianity,” and, on the
other, cited New Thought prophet Ralph Waldo Trine to
the effect that “All men must be brought into ‘tune with
the Infinite’ and all institutions of men must mirror the
harmony and Freedom of the Good and the Free.”43
Charles Vail took time out from writing manuals of
scientific socialism to publish The World’s Saviors, a
comparative study of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and a
dozen others. Vail concluded (in line with Theosophical
teaching) that “all religions have their source in the
Divine Wisdom of the Brotherhood of Perfect Men,” and
that therefore “every religion is at its best as it comes
from its Founder.”44

The CSF also sustained a more combative dialogue with

those Marxists who wanted the Party to declare itself
unequivocally for a philosophy of “scientific”
materialism. That dialogue was contentious not only
because the Christians’ status as “good socialists” was at
stake, but also because so many of the debaters on the
other side had defected from Christian socialism. In both
Chicago and New York, the fellowship established local
worshiping congregations only to see the leaders start
declaring that “While it may not seem so at first sight,
the scientific method is best, and it will win out in the
end.”45 Such were the risks of dialogue in the socialist
milieu: the religious loyalties of the participants were
constantly changing.

A similar spirit of dialogue continued in the Fellowship

of Reconciliation (FOR), which after World War I
supplanted the Christian Socialist Fellowship as the most
important network of left-wing social gospelers.46 Unlike
the CSF, the FOR’s defining identity was pacifist rather
than socialist, but most of its active members voted for
the Socialist Party, at least after FOR member Norman
Thomas had ascended to the top ranks of the party and
made it explicitly open to non-Marxist varieties of
socialism. Like many in the CSF, Thomas was a convert
from a biblicist Christianity to a radical humanism. At
the beginning of his editorial stint, he could declare that
“for the ills that beset our race the spirit of Christ is the
one sole medicament”47; by the end, he was committed to
what he called the “implicit religion of radicalism”—a
“religion of the future” that would build on the radical
labor movement’s faith in the human capacity to build a
better society.48 As Thomas shifted his energies to
politics, the two sides of his internal dialogue were
carried forward by editorial successors Kirby Page
(whose Jesus or Christianity defended the “simple faith”
of Jesus against the “alien and hostile elements” found in
the church)49 and Devere Allen, whose Quakerism vested
no special authority in Jesus.

Page and Allen aptly illustrate the common ground that

kept the socialist dialogue (mostly) friendly for more
than a hundred years. Page the Christian despised the
church’s Constantinian compromises with power every
bit as much as post-Christian Allen, while Allen admired
the human Jesus enough to describe him as “the light of
the world, throbbing with reality, incomparable” in a
series on the theme “Would Jesus Be a Christian
Today?”50 The glue that held their socialist dialogue
together was the original Protestant critique of medieval
Catholicism as an abandonment of the primitive faith of
the apostles—a critique that was itself a distorted echo of
the Hebrew prophets’ critique of priestly religion.
Christian and post-Christian socialists found common
ground because they shared both the culture and the
ethos of Protestantism, and as a result their experience
offered only a shaky precedent for the more inclusive
dialogues of the late twentieth century. It could readily
make room for the most radical of Reform Jews, but not
so easily for Catholics or others who saw ritual,
asceticism, or historical continuity as essential to faith.51
Still, the Fellowship of Reconciliation did much to
inaugurate the contemporary era of dialogue. Beginning
with John Haynes Holmes’s sermon that Gandhi was
“The Greatest Man in the World,” and culminating with
the publication of popular manuals of Gandhian
technique, the FOR played the central role in introducing
Americans to the nonviolent Hinduism of Mahatma
Gandhi. Members of the FOR staff introduced Gandhian
techniques to the bus boycotters, student sit-in leaders,
and Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement. Yet,
enthusiasm for Gandhi hardly involved an open dialogue
with Hinduism. Gandhi was comprehensible to
American socialists in part because he had learned the
language of both liberal Protestantism and Theosophy
during his studies in England; like his American
admirers, he was fond of pitting Jesus against
Christianity. Many of those admirers, in turn, shook their
heads in bemusement “that a man of Gandhi’s ability
could take seriously the heredity of professions, celibacy,
and cow protection.”52 One historian has cited this
passage as evidence that the FOR was deeply shaped by
the Orientalism of Christian missionaries.53 The fact that
the author, Curtis Reese, was not a Christian at all, but a
major leader in the humanist movement, only
underscores the point. He was no Christian, but he was
still a Protestant, and that gave him a place at the table of
socialist dialogue.

The Gandhian activism promoted by the FOR would

eventually create a context for dialogue that was
intercultural as well as interreligious, especially after the
Vietnam War brought many American radicals into
conversation with Vietnamese Buddhists. By the 1970s
the FOR was in fact organized on a dialogical basis, with
affiliated Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Protestant
denominational Peace Fellowships. But this turn, and the
broader rise of dialogue in U.S. culture, occurred after
organized socialist movements had ceased to be viable
players in the American political scene. The Socialist
Party in the 1940s and 1950s was little more than a
vehicle for Norman Thomas’s “educational” presidential
campaigns, while the Communist Party, after a period of
vigorous “Popular Front” organizing in the 1930s,
virtually collapsed as a result of revelations about
Stalinist tyranny and red-baiting backlash. Many people
continued to regard themselves as socialists, and in some
ways they were more religiously diverse than ever. The
anarchist Catholic Worker movement, the loosening of
strictures against socialist affiliation during Vatican II,
and the rise of liberation theology in Latin America all
made it much easier for Roman Catholics to identify as
“socialist” in the second half of the twentieth century.54
But when these folks came together in conversation with
Protestants, Jews, and post-Christians, it was more likely
in the context of civil rights or anti-war activism than
under the rubric of socialism.

What, then, does the socialist experience of dialogue

have to teach those of us who are committed to dialogues
that move beyond the logic of Protestantism? A first
lesson is that no single taxonomy of religious groups can
apply in all contexts. We ordinarily think that
“Christianity” is an inclusive category and
“Protestantism” a subset thereof, and that is certainly
true in many respects. But the Protestant influence on
American culture reaches far beyond the boundaries of
formal Christianity. It is possible, in some settings, for a
dialogue that ostensibly brings together a “Christian,” a
“Buddhist,” and a “Jew” to include only people whose
way of thinking about religion is culturally Protestant.
Certainly, that was the case for the dialogues staged at
Brook Farm! Such dialogues may well have great value,
but only if the Protestant presuppositions are
acknowledged and worked through by all involved.

A broader implication of this point is that any dialogue

involves some common presuppositions, values, and
even prejudices, as well as the differences that are
usually the focus of conversation. These commonalities, I
suspect, are helpful only to the extent that they are
acknowledged. Socialist dialoguers were brought
together not only by their unacknowledged commitment
to Protestantism, but also by their acknowledged
commitment to socialism itself. And that was a great
boon. A common vision of a better world made it
possible for socialists to listen attentively to religious
ideas that others might have dismissed as blasphemous
or preposterous. Without such a vision, Cornelius
Blatchly might never have given a hearing to Robert
Owen, or Adin Ballou to Andrew Jackson Davis.

This vision of a better world may also help to explain the

penchant of socialists to change their religious loyalties
in the middle of the dialogue. Everyone discussed in this
essay would fit in Orestes Brownson’s “movement party”
of people who “desire something better.” As such, none
of them were fully satisfied with the politics or the
religion they had inherited. The practice of interfaith
dialogue, like the practice of socialism, has an inherent
appeal to such people, for it promises to introduce new
ideas that might be better than the old. Yet, many
dialogues are structured with the expectation that
participants will speak out of the (more or less
“stationary”) traditions they represent, rather than out of
their personal questions and questings. Such structures
may be a valuable corrective, making dialogue a bit more
friendly to persons of more “stationary” disposition who
would otherwise be underrepresented in dialogue. But
the legacy of socialist dialogue reminds us that,
ultimately, the table of dialogue must be set for
progressive seekers and stationary traditionalists
alike.[55]

Notes:
1. Overviews of the Owenite movement include J. F. C. Harrison,

Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest

for the New Moral World (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); Arthur

Bestor, Jr., Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the

Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663–1829

(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); and Donald E. Pitzer, “The

New Moral World of Robert Owen and New Harmony,” in America’s

Communal Utopias, ed. Donald E. Pitzer (University of North

Carolina Press, 1997), 88–134. On the broader context of

“workingmen’s” activism in the antebellum United States, see Sean

Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the

American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford University Press,

1984), and Jama Lazerow, Religion and the Working Class in

Antebellum America (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

2. The history of the “Stilwellite” movement within Methodism is

traced in William R. Sutton, Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical

 Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore

(Pennsylvania State University Press), 91–95; and Kyle T. Bulthuis,

“Preacher Politics and People Power: Congregational Conflicts in

New York City, 1810–1830,” Church History 78, no. 2 (June 2009):

270–281.

3. An Essay on Commonwealths (New York Society for Promoting

Communities, 1822), 3–4, 27.

4. Ibid., 46, 50.

5. Many of these traditions are featured in Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless

Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (HarperSanFrancisco,

2005).

6. On the gradual emergence of religious pluralism in the United

States, see William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America:

The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (Yale University Press,

2003); on the current context for dialogue in the United States, see

Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘Christian Country’

Has Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation

(HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).

7. President Barack Obama’s inaugural description of the United States

as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and

nonbelievers” has been widely cited as evidence of this new

understanding of dialogue.

8. Robert Owen, The Book of the New Moral World, part 4,

Explanatory of the Rational Religion (James Watson, 1852); and

Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 92–139.

9. “Sunday Lectures at Lower Julien Hall,” Boston Investigator, April

 23, 1831, 15.

10. “Prospectus of The Free Enquirer,” The Free Enquirer, second

series, 1 (October 29, 1828): 5.

11. Henry Mayer, All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the

Abolition of Slavery (St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 102–103.

12. “Imprisonment of Abner Kneeland” and “Petition for the Pardon of

Abner Kneeland,” Liberator, July 6, 1838.

13. Boston Investigator, April 17, 1835.

14. The definitive study of the Fourierist movement in the United States

is Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in

Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 1991). On

Fourier himself, see Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The

Visionary and His World (University of California Press, 1986).

15. The most recent of many studies of Brook Farm is Sterling F. Delano,

Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 2004).

16. John Greig, cited in John Humphrey Noyes, History of American

Socialisms (J. B. Lippincott, 1870), 280.

17. B. J. Thomas to “My Dear Friend,” 9 June 1845, in John Thomas

Codman, Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs (Arena

Publishing Company, 1894), 270.

18. Georgiana Bruce Kirby, “My First Visit to Brook Farm,” Overland

Monthly 5 (July 1870): 9–19, in The Brook Farm Book: A Collection

of First-Hand Accounts of the Community, ed. Joel Myerson

(Garland, 1987), 107.

19. B. J. Thomas to “My Dear Friend.”

20. “Mr. Brownson’s Notice of Fourier’s Doctrine,” Phalanx 1, no. 14

(July 13, 1844): 197–198.

21. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Memoir of William Henry Channing

(Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 225; and Sterling F. Delano, “A Calendar

of Meetings of the ‘Boston Religious Union of Associationists,’

1847–1850,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1985), 187–267.

22. Notable among recent studies of spiritualism are Ann Braude,

Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-

Century America (Beacon Press, 1989); Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism

in Antebellum America (Indiana University Press, 1997); Robert S.

Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American

Spiritualism (University of Virginia Press, 2003); and John B.

Buescher, The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the

Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience (Skinner House, 2004).

23. Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural

History of American Metaphysical Religion (Yale University Press,

2007), 206–220.

24. Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia, 8th ed., 5 vols. (Colby

& Rich, 1884), 4, 10; and Davis, The Penetralia, Being Harmonial

Answers to Important Questions (Bela Marsh, 1856), 26.

25. Adin Ballou, Practical Christian Socialism: A Conversational

Exposition of the True System of Human Society (Fowler and Wells,

1854); and Edward K. Spann, Hopedale: From Commune to

Company Town, 1840–1920 (Ohio State University Press, 1992).

26. Adin Ballou, “Spirit Manifestations—No. 1,” Practical Christian 12,

no. 11 (September 27, 1851): 42. Ballou elaborated his views in An

 Exposition of Views Respecting the Principal Facts, Causes, and

Peculiarities involved in Spirit Manifestations (Bela Marsh, 1853).

27. Braude, Radical Spirits, 170–173.

28. Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920

(University of Illinois Press, 1981); see also Paul Buhle, Marxism in

the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left, rev.

ed. (Verso, 1991), 67–70.

29. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (W. M. Hinton, 1879);

Laurence Gronlund, The Cooperative Commonwealth in Its

Outlines: An Outline of Modern Socialism (Lee and Shepard, 1884);

and Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Ticknor and

Company, 1888).

30. J. Gordon Melton, “The Theosophical Communities and Their Ideal

of Universal Brotherhood,” in America’s Communal Utopias, ed.

Donald E. Pitzer (University of North Carolina Press, 1997),

396–418.

31. The vision of this Fellowship is amply represented in Socialist Spirit,

published 1901 and 1903.

32. W. J. Ghent, “The Collectivist Society,” The Commons 9, no. 2

(March 1904): 89–90; E. E. Carr, “The Christian Socialist

Fellowship: A Brief Account of its Origins and Progress,” Christian

Socialist 4, no. 16 (August 15, 1907): 5; and Charlotte Perkins

Gilman, His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers

and the Work of Our Mothers (Century, 1923).

33. “The Christian Socialist Fellowship,” Christian Socialist 2, no. 20

(October 15, 1905): 7. The quote is from a letter by Robert W. Irwin.

34. Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed, University of Chicago Biographical

Sketches (University of Chicago Press, 1922), 351–352.

35. Zane L. Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the

Progressive Era (Oxford University Press, 1968), 143–145; “Pacifist

Whipped in Kuklux Style,” The New York Times, October 30, 1917,

3; “Ohio: Two & None,” Time, January 13, 1936. Also see Daniel R.

Beaver, A Buckeye Crusader: A Sketch of the Political Career of

Herbert Seely Bigelow (1957).

36. Fred W. Shorter, “An Experiment in Radical Religion,” Radical

Religion 1, no. 4 (Autumn 1936): 19–22.

37. W. A. Corey, “The Benjamin Fay Mills Movement in Los Angeles,”

Arena 33, no. 187 (June 1905): 593–595; “Rev. Benj. Fay Mills

Dead,” The New York Times, May 2, 1916, 13; Carey McWilliams,

Southern California: An Island on the Land (Peregrine Smith,

1973), 257; and Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American

Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement (University

of California Press, 1999), 205.

38. Shorter, “An Experiment in Radical Religion.”

39. The best introduction to the role of religion in the first two decades

of Socialist Party history is Socialism and Christianity in Early 20th

Century America, ed. Jacob H. Dorn (Greenwood Press, 1998). For

general histories of the party, see David A. Shannon, The Socialist

Party of America (Macmillan, 1955); Howard Quint, The Forging of

American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (University

of South Carolina Press, 1953); Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist

Movement, 1897–1912 (Monthly Review Press, 1952); Frank A.

 Warren, An Alternative Vision: The Socialist Party in the 1930s

(Indiana University Press, 1974); Buhle, Marxism in the United

States; Anthony V. Esposito, The Ideology of the Socialist Party of

America, 1901–1917 (Garland, 1997); and Seymour Martin Lipset, It

Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States

(Norton, 2000).

40. E. E. Carr, “The Christian Socialist Fellowship,” Christian Socialist

2, no. 20 (October 15, 1905): 4.

41. Ibid., 10–13.

42. Everett Dean Martin, “Why I Am a Socialist,” Christian Socialist 6,

no. 3 (February 1, 1909): 2.

43. J. Stitt Wilson, “Individual and Social Salvation,” Christian Socialist

4, no. 11 (1907): 1–3.

44. Charles Vail, The World’s Saviors (Macoy Publishing and Masonic

Supply Company, 1914), 194.

45. “What Bentall Thinks,” Christian Socialist 5, no. 24 (December 15,

1908): 5.

46. The Fellowship of Reconciliation is the subject of two outstanding

recent histories: Patricia Appelbaum, Kingdom to Commune:

Protestant Pacifist Culture Between World War I and the Vietnam

Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Joseph Kip

Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern

American Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2009).

47. “An Interpretation and Forecast,” The New World 1, no. 1 (January

1918): 4–5.

48. Norman Thomas, “The Implicit Religion of Radicalism,” World

 Tomorrow 3, no. 8 (August 1920): 231–233.

49. Kirby Page, Jesus or Christianity (Doubleday, 1929), 1.

50. Devere Allen, “Would Jesus Be a Sectarian Today?” World

Tomorrow 11, no. 11 (November 1928): 458–461.

51. The one important exception to the anti-ritualism of the socialist

dialogue was the involvement of radical Anglo-Catholics, many of

whom were also formative leaders in the New Thought movement.

For a representative example of this strand of socialist thought, see

Jacob H. Dorn, “ ’Not a Substitute for Religion, but a Means of

Fulfilling It’: The Sacramental Socialism of Irwin St. John Tucker,”

in Socialism and Christianity, ed. Dorn, 137–164.

52. Curtis Reese, “Mahatma Gandhi’s Ideas,” The World Tomorrow 8,

no. 5 (May 1930): 229.

53. Leilah C. Danielson, “ ’In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi’:

American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence,

1915–1941,” Church History 72, no. 2 (June 2003): 361–388.

54. Early in the twentieth century, the Catholic hierarchy was

unrelentingly hostile to socialism, even though, beginning with

Rerum Novarum in the 1890s, popes and bishops promoted a

middle path between capitalism and socialism that was well to the

left of mainstream Protestant thinking on the economy. The rigidity

of church authority made active involvement in socialist movements

virtually unthinkable for most observant Catholics. This began to

change in the 1930s, when the Catholic Worker in the United States

and Esprit in France began promoting more radical interpretations

of Catholic social teaching. Though the Catholic Worker movement’s

 vision was more anarchist than socialist, it broke the taboo on

Catholic affiliation with all stripes of economic radicalism. See John

C. Cort, Christian Socialism: An Informal History (Orbis Books,

1988), for an evocative account of religious socialism from the

perspective of one Catholic who came to socialism via the Catholic

Worker movement.

55. I am most grateful to Kip Richardson for his assistance in

researching this article.

Dan McKanan is Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian

Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity at
Harvard Divinity School. His most recent book is The
Catholic Worker After Dorothy: Practicing the Works of
Mercy in a New Generation (2008), and he is working
on a general history of the religious left in the United
States.