Christian Socialism, movement of the mid-19th century that attempted to apply the social principles of Christianity to modern industrial life. The term was generally associated with the demands of Christian activists for a social program of political and economic action on behalf of all individuals, impoverished or wealthy, and the term was used in contradistinction to laissez-faire individualism. Later, Christian Socialism came to be applied in a general sense to any movement that attempted to combine the fundamental aims of socialism with the religious and ethical convictions of Christianity.
Early in the 19th century, the French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon expounded a “new Christianity” primarily concerned with the plight of the poor. Saint-Simonians believed that the keynote of social development would be a spirit of association, with religion as the dominating force, that would gradually supplant the prevailing spirit of egotism and antagonism in society. They advocated (among other things) that inheritance rights be abolished so that capital could leave the hands of self-seeking capitalists and be placed at society’s disposal. The Saint-Simonians imagined this and other related actions would effectively end the exploitation of the poor.
The term Christian Socialism was first appropriated by a group of British men including Frederick Denison Maurice, novelist Charles Kingsley, John Malcolm Ludlow, and others, who founded a movement that took shape in England immediately after the failure of the Chartist agitation of 1848. Their general purpose was to vindicate for “the Kingdom of Christ” its “true authority over the realms of industry and trade,” and “for socialism its true character as the great Christian revolution of the 19th century.” Four years after Karl Marx characterized religion as “the opiate for the people,” Kingsley (probably unaware of Marx’s phrase) asserted that the Bible had been wrongly used as “an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded” and as a “mere book to keep the poor in order” (in Politics for the People, 1848).
Inspired principally by the writings of Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez, a disciple of Saint-Simon, and by the emergence of cooperative societies in France, Ludlow—who had been reared and educated in France—enlisted other churchmen in an effort to promote the application of Christian principles in industrial organization. Stirred by the sufferings of the poor and by factory and workshop conditions, Ludlow’s group vigorously criticized socially conservative Christianity and laissez-faire attitudes within the industrial sector. Urging, among other measures, that cooperation replace competition, they joined forces with the cooperativist movement and financed several small cooperative societies that favoured copartnership and profit sharing in industry. They created the Council for Promoting Working Men’s Associations, and in 1854 they founded the Working Men’s College in London. The movement as such dissolved in the late 1850s. Some members of the movement continued working for cooperativism, however, and numerous Christian Socialist organizations were formed in the 1880s and ’90s in England.
In addition to the French Roman Catholic social movement long in existence, movements similar to Ludlow’s took shape among French Protestants in the latter half of the 19th century. The Protestant Association for the Practical Study of Social Questions, founded in 1888, opposed bourgeois Protestantism while rejecting a strict, egalitarian socialism. In Germany, the movement for Christian social action in the late 19th century became associated with violent anti-Semitic agitation. Adolf Stoecker, a court preacher and a founder of the Christian Social Workers’ Party, took a leading role in the anti-Semitic drive. In the United States, Henry James, Sr., the father of novelist Henry James and philosopher William James, had argued the identity of the aims of socialism and Christianity as early as 1849. The Society of Christian Socialists was organized in 1889. The first years of the 20th century witnessed the rise of the Social Gospel movement, which was an outgrowth of Christian Socialism that stressed the social aspect of salvation.