Should Christians be Socialists?

WE NEED TO overthrow...this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system.”

So wrote Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker co-founder whom Pope Francis recently held up to the U.S. Congress as a great exemplar of the American spirit.

In the centuries since the rise of capitalism, millions of Christians, like Day, have sought not only to bind up the wounds of the poor, but also to create a world in which people will not be impoverished by low wages, unemployment, discrimination, or plain bad luck. Day ended up advocating a sort of communitarian anarchism. But for many other Christians—from Mother Jones to Dom Hélder Câmara to Martin Luther King Jr.—the name for that alternate system has been “socialism.” And, after long decades during which acceptance of the existing economic order seemed inevitable, in 2016 the question of socialism is not only on the agenda again but, in the Democratic presidential primaries, on the ballot.

This is especially surprising because any alternative to corporate capitalism was widely declared dead after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which had called itself a socialist state and imposed its rule by force. Its failure, in the end largely economic, was rightly seen to discredit the Marxist-Leninist version of socialism that relied on centralized, coercive state power to manage the lives of its citizens. In the wake of the collapse, the West flooded the formerly communist states with free-market economic gurus to guide a sort of capitalist extreme makeover, and the end of history was declared.

But then global capitalism had its own collapse in 2008. In the U.S., the dream of upward mobility is dying. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, since 1973 the inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings for workers with a high school degree or less have declined; more-educated workers have barely stayed even. Meanwhile, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent has risen 138 percent since 1979. A generation has arisen that sees its prospects declining. For this generation, “socialism” has little to do with the Soviet Union; it’s just another insult that Fox News hurls at the president most of them supported.

So for the first time in 100 years, a democratic socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is waging a serious U.S. presidential campaign. Since his campaign began, the percentage of Americans who say they are willing to vote for a socialist has risen. In fact, for the past five years, U.S. public opinion polls have shown increasingly favorable associations with the word “socialism.” Among millennials, the S-word’s positives are now higher than its negatives.

Even in the Catholic Church, consideration of socialist alternatives no longer seems taboo. Since the days of Pope John Paul II, liberation theology has been on the outs in Rome, but last year Gustavo Gutierrez, who gave the movement its name with his 1971 book, A Theology of Liberation, was welcomed to the Vatican to address a conference. This is the same man who famously proclaimed that Christian theology needs to speak “of social revolution, not reform; of liberation, not development; of socialism, not modernization of the prevailing system.”

What does socialism mean in 2016?

But the question remains: What does socialism mean in 2016? Is it one possible way for Christians to give systematic expression to the priority of the poor and the primacy of the common good? Or is it, like the communism of old, fundamentally inconsistent with Christian faith?

Many Americans still think of socialism as defined by state ownership of the means of production. But for decades, democratic socialists have mostly sought to increase economic equality, social justice, and worker power within the context of mixed economies that include privately owned enterprises. The Socialist International, an organization of most of the world’s democratic socialist parties and movements, has in its declaration of principles this core idea: “The concentration of economic power in few private hands must be replaced by a different order in which each person is entitled—as citizen, consumer, or wage-earner—to influence the direction and distribution of production, the shaping of the means of production, and the conditions of working life.” This “social control of the economy,” the statement continues, “can be achieved through a wide range of economic means according to time and place.”

In the U.S., democratic socialists mostly want to start with instituting the basic public goods that their European peers won in the 20th century, including a national health system, tuition-free post-secondary education, a guaranteed minimum income, paid leave for the parents of young children, and massive direct public infrastructure investment. Beyond that, they talk about extending U.S. democracy into economic life through various kinds of cooperative enterprises.

Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Neibuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and a contributing editor for Religious Socialism, an online journal sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America. Dorrien says that his idea of economic democracy “would feature mixed forms of worker, community, and mutual fund or public bank enterprises. It is about democratizing economic power, abolishing poverty, and creating environmentally sustainable economies.” Dorrien acknowledges, “There is also a role for old-fashioned, large-scale, publicly controlled companies in certain areas. Most of the world’s economic powers have them.” But he also points to the Mondragon network of worker-owned cooperatives, based in the Basque country of Spain, as one of the more likely models for a better future.

“Mondragon employs over 100,000 workers,” Dorrien says, “in more than 125 companies in virtually every economic sector, including robots and mass transit...Each Mondragon worker/owner holds one share of voting stock, and profits are distributed in the form of additions to a capital account on which 6 percent interest is paid annually.” Mondragon’s top executives can’t make more than six times the salary of the lowest paid worker. In the U.S. last year, that ratio averaged 373 to one.

Socialism before Marx

The Mondragon network was co-founded in 1956 by José María Arizmendiarrieta, a Jesuit priest, and it represents the kind of economics that Catholic social teaching has advocated for more than a century. Ever since Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, the church has criticized the inhumane aspects of capitalism and called for alternatives oriented toward the centrality of workers, families, and communities.

Unfortunately, Rerum Novarum also muddied the waters for decades to come with its unequivocal condemnation of “socialism,” making no distinction between democratic socialists, many of them Christian, and atheistic Marxists. This confusion persisted throughout the 20th century. However, in 2006 Pope Benedict XVI published an essay (“Europe and Its Discontents”) in which he acknowledged, “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

In his 1988 landmark work Christian Socialism, the late John Cort, a former Catholic Worker, traced the Judeo-Christian roots of socialist thinking back to the biblical Jubilee year in which debts were to be forgiven, slaves freed, and land returned to its original owners. In their concern for the poor, Cort wrote, “Jews of the Old Testament did not stop short at personal exhortation...They enacted and enforced legislation...They dealt with causes.”

The early church fathers and mothers, Cort points out, assumed that the goods of the earth belonged to all. Private ownership was simply a temporal arrangement, to be honored so long as it didn’t offend the demands of justice. As St. John Chrysostom put it, “Do not say, ‘I am using what belongs to me.’ You are using what belongs to others. All the wealth of the world belongs to you and to the others in common, as the sun, air, earth, and all the rest.”

This continues to be Catholic teaching, most recently reiterated by Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ when, quoting Pope John Paul II, he wrote, “God gave the Earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favoring anyone...the church does indeed defend the legitimate right to private property, but she also teaches no less clearly that there is always a social mortgage on all private property, in order that goods may serve the general purpose that God gave them.”

When capitalism arose, with its notions of inviolable rights to individual ownership, Christians formed by this older tradition inevitably began to seek more just and humane alternatives. In Cort’s telling, this is how the socialist movement began. And, he emphasizes, this “pre-Marxian” socialism called for worker ownership of the means of production, not state control, as the best way to enact justice and defend human rights. Post-Marxian socialism, it seems, is coming full circle.

The ‘least grotesque’ analogy available

Still, many Christians, even some who may seek a radical transformation of the existing economy, shy away from the socialist label. In 2013, members of Britain’s Christian Socialist Movement, an influential organization aligned with the Labor Party, voted to change their name to “Christians on the Left.” Leadership feared that the “socialist” label carried “less contemporary resonance.”

Of course, many other Christians believe that capitalism doesn’t need replacing at all. In a column for The New York Times, Catholic lay theologian Michael Novak recently wrote, “No other [system] has so quickly lifted the world out of poverty, grasped the need for freedom and creativity, and valued sacrifice for the future.” He continued, “Capitalism is the most moral of a bad lot of economic systems known to humans.”

Scott Rae, a professor of Christian ethics at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology, goes further, saying in an interview on epsociety.org, “the entrepreneurial traits necessary for success in economic life are actually important Christian virtues...[and] the responsible wealth creation of the market system is how an economist would capture the biblical notion of human dominion over creation."

Christian defenders of capitalism universally acknowledge that free enterprise must be subject to moral restraints, and that basic provisions must be made for the poor. In that same interview, Rae admitted, “I believe...that the rich can get richer without it being at the expense of the poor. But I am troubled by the increasing gap between rich and poor and worry about what that might do to social stability if that’s a long-term trend.”

Ultimately, the question for Christians may be whether the common good is better served by continuing to attempt to regulate and reform a system built on the private accumulation of wealth, with all its temptations, or by attempting to build new institutions in which, as the other Catholic Worker founder, Peter Maurin, put it, “It is easier for [people] to be good.”

Andrew Wilkes is one Christian whose faith journey has led him to democratic socialism (see “Another Way is Possible”). Wilkes is an African Methodist Episcopal minister and executive director of the Drum Major Institute, a think tank and community action organization co-founded by Martin Luther King Jr.

Wilkes says, “All societies are analogies of the beloved community, shadows of the ideal society that will result when God brings to completion the work of creation. I don’t believe that we can legislate this society into being. I think instead that we create the most equitable society achievable and the most loving relationships possible on a communal, individual, and familial level. My sense is that a socialist society is the least grotesque analogy of the beloved community available to us in our time.”