American Christian Socialism?

John Gehring is author of The Francis Effect: A Radical Pope’s Challenge to the American Catholic Church. He seems hopeful that the white Catholics in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan who gave Trump is first term are poised to make sure there is no second term. and that's die, at least in part, because his "actions have raised a theological and moral question: Can a faithful Catholic vote for Trump?"

This may seem to be a strange question, given Trump’s commitment to appointing anti-abortion judges and his appeals to religious liberty in chipping away at LGBT rights. Both are strongly supported by the Catholic hierarchy. While polling shows a majority of Catholics oppose criminalizing abortion and a majority favor marriage equality, opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage are lynchpins of Catholic identity for bishops, conservative Catholic activists and millions of Catholic voters.

In fact, those issues have been so central to defining the Catholic political narrative that two months before the 2012 election, a bishop in Illinois warned his flock that voting for a Democrat could put “the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.”

A less discussed but increasingly relevant topic for Catholic voters is church teaching on racism. “A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who favors promoting an intrinsically evil act,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops states in “Faithful Citizenship,” a reflection guide for Catholic voters released every four years. Among those acts, the bishops specifically cite racist behavior, noting that Catholics “would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil” if their intent was to support such actions.

Racism is not treated as a peripheral issue by the bishops. “If a candidate’s position on a single issue promotes an intrinsically evil act, such as legal abortion, redefining marriage in a way that denies its essential meaning, or racist behavior,” the bishops write,” a voter may legitimately disqualify a candidate from receiving support.”

Almost half (48%) of U.S. Catholics now think Trump is a racist, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll, compared with 21% of evangelicals. On a recent Sunday at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic parish in Washington, a priest made national news for his homily that called on Trump to resign because he “spews hatred, bigotry and intolerance.”

The president has earned these opinions. A man who claims there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.; who tells women of color in Congress to “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came”; and who recently described a predominantly black district of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat-infested mess” where “no human being would want to live” has demonstrated a consistent pattern of willfully exploiting racism for political effect in ways that no conscientious Catholic should support.

...Along with white nationalist rhetoric that fuels violence, the Trump administration’s policies have a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Court documents recently filed by the American Civil Liberties Union show that more than 900 parents and children, including infants, have been separated by U.S. border authorities since a federal court ruling ordered the government to reunite more than 2,700 children with their parents more than a year ago.

Before the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Trump, his administration moved to systematically deprive communities of color resources and congressional representation by requiring a citizenship question on the U.S. Census, part of a broader voter suppression strategy the GOP has engineered across the country. This is in direct contradiction to the bishops’ national pastoral letter on racism, released last fall, that specifically cites “lack of access to the vote for some communities of color” as an example of “systemic racism.”

Faithful Catholics will have another reason to question their support for Trump after the recent decision by Attorney General William Barr to reinstate the federal death penalty. Barr, a Catholic, said in announcing the decision that “we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

But last summer, Pope Francis built on several decades of pro-life church teaching that challenged the death penalty and revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to categorically declare capital punishment “inadmissible” in all cases because it is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

After Barr’s decision, Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich called the Trump administration’s decision “gravely injurious to the common good, as it effaces the God-given dignity of all human beings, even those who have committed terrible crimes.”

If Catholic teaching definitively recognizes that opposing the death penalty is central to maintaining a consistent pro-life commitment, Catholic voters can’t ignore the administration’s decision when considering their vote.

The Trump administration’s pattern of racist policies and support for the death penalty are not separate issues. Many studies over the years suggest that the criminal justice system and death row cases are riddled with racial bias from the quality of legal representation defendants receive to sentencing disparities. Black defendants are far more likely to receive the death penalty if they kill a white person than the reverse, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Voting requires prudence and well-formed consciences. Neither political party has a monopoly on Catholic values. But faced with an administration that doubles down on racism at every turn and that has a politically expedient understanding of what it means to be pro-life, Catholics who check a box for Donald Trump will do so while ignoring core justice teachings at the heart of our faith.

Let's go way back before there was such a thing as a progressive pope-- to the turn of the century... when the 1800s turned into the 1900s, when the rise of industrial capitalism "challenged," wrote Aaron Sanchez for Sojouners Friday, "nearly every concept that people used to explain the way the world worked. The proliferation of the wage system, the rise of the corporation, hyper-urbanization, and the shift from farm to factory left people questioning all they had known to be true. Factory workers worked longer hours and made less. One in every 26 workers in the country would be injured or maimed while working. Farmers worked more, planted more, and harvested more, only to discover that they too made less. No matter how much they grew, the price for the products kept falling. African Americans had been promised freedom only to find themselves trapped in institutions meant to recreate their bondage. Natural resources, which had one seemed inexhaustible, were on the verge of running out-- trees, soil, animals, land. Filth and toxic waste poisoned water systems. The air, thick with pollution, shortened the lives of all who lived nearby. Success seemed uncertain, while perpetual debt and perpetual poverty was certain. The world was growing more unequal. The world that most people had known was coming undone. And yet not all Christians were not preparing for the second coming. Some believed they had to play a central role in the social transformation that was to come, so they became socialists."

Christian socialists did not shy away from class struggle. They believed it was the defining feature of the era. The growing chasm between rich and poor in nearly every facet of life from life expectancy to living conditions drew the attention of pastors, practitioners, and theologians.

Capitalism was neither a natural force nor a supernatural one. This hand was not invisible and it was certainly not the hand of God.

This was a system made by humans, but the greed was as old as Cain and Abel. This was the message of Congregationalist minister, George D. Herron in his 1890 sermon, "The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth." Cain’s choice, according to Herron, “was the first bald, brutal assertion of self-interest as the law of human life-- an assertion always potential with murder.” He believed that capitalism was founded on the ancient evils of self-interest and competition. Those foundations made capitalism incompatible with Christianity. He declared: “The trial in progress is Christ versus Cain. The decision to which the times are hastening us is, Shall Christ or Cain reign in our American civilization?” Christians could not ignore their responsibility.

Herron campaigned for socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. In 1901, he helped organize the Socialist Party of America. He was not the only minister to become a socialist either. One historian estimated that between 5 and 25 percent of all mainline Protestant clergy were socialist party members or voted for the party in the first three decades of the 20th century. Congregationalist minister Franklin Monroe Sprague wrote Socialism from Genesis to Revelation in 1892. John Spargo, a Methodist minister, became a socialist educator. Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister, ran for president of the United States as a socialist candidate from 1928 to 1948. Charles Vail, a Universalist minister, was an important socialist writer. African Americans, both outside and inside of the socialist party, also demanded fairer economic systems that affected other facets of life, pushing white Christians and socialists towards a “new abolitionism.”

Socialism attracted Christians because of the growing influence of the social gospel in the U.S. and its social interpretation of sin and salvation. Inequality was a social sin and Christians were responsible for addressing it. Yet the answer was not in the promise of a singular saved soul but the remaking of society to be more just. This justice had to be achieved through reforming institutions in order to create an environment of equality for everyone. Socialism, or what some called “industrial democracy,” would provide the equitable distribution of economic and electoral power.

Christian socialists were true believers in both the gospel of Jesus and socialism. They often combined the two. The interpretation of Jesus as a radical who opposed capitalism was widespread. Less so was the idea that socialism could be the foundation for a more universal humanistic religion. Norman Thomas expressed both ideas when he wrote in 1921 that “essentially the faith of radicalism is religious” and in 1936 that “socialism is the hope for all mankind.”

So where did all the Christian socialists go? They went the way of most socialists in the U.S.

Intra-party fighting over involvement in World War I caused many rifts. The popularity of the New Deal in the 1930s coopted much of socialist party’s plank and melded it to an ameliorated capitalism which drew voters and members away. Thomas criticized the New Deal as “reformed capitalism” and he meant it as an indictment of the programs, but most citizens and politicians were happy with the characterization. Post-World War II social programs minimized economic inequality among white Americans and the Cold War ushered in a second Red Scare. In addition, influential theologians turned away from Christian socialism for either its universal post-Christian aspirations or its utopianism. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, disavowed his youthful socialism for political realism, which abandoned the notion that the government or any bureaucracy could be perfected in order to achieve social salvation.

As the century progressed, the rise of the New Right political coalition welcomed white evangelical Christians and welded them to a free-market ideology. The social gospel, while not fully replaced, lost its prominence in the pulpit. The proliferation of the prosperity gospel in the late 20th and early 21st centuries wedded Christianity to capitalism-- God’s blessings were individual and material. Christ, it appeared, was markedly anti-Keynesian.

Today we are living in a Second Gilded Age. National and global inequality is reaching similar levels as they were in the late 19th century. Half of the world population lives on less than $ $5.50 a day. In the U.S., the top 1 percent of the population holds 40 percent of the wealth. The largest corporations in the country like Amazon and Walmart don’t pay their workers a livable wage. Pollution is on the rise and we are on the verge of an environmental catastrophe.

While they were often dismissed as utopian, Christian socialists and others believed that capitalism was a passing phase of human history. This wasn’t naiveté. There had been a time when industrial capitalism hadn’t dominated their lives, so it made sense that there could be a moment when it no longer did. Although today very few people believe that capitalism is a passing phase in human history, it is not a transhistoric, invisible force. It is not the will of God. Social programs made industrial capitalism bearable for many, though not all people, in the U.S. Those programs have been cut since the 1970s. That’s policy and not divine intervention.

Christian socialists were not afraid to talk about class struggle. In fact, it was the defining feature of society; it was the central social sin. Today, mentioning the chasm between rich and poor is often derided as “class warfare,” as a way to erase the grievances of the poor as the product of laziness and their jealousy. Class and its intersection with race must be at the center of any social or biblical analysis.

In the midst of the Gilded Age and the rise of Jim Crow, religious historian Gary Dorrien explained of Black social gospelers: “They wrung a liberating message from the Christianity of their time. They did not settle for making segregation more tolerable. They rebelled and endured, taking the long view, laying the groundwork for something better than the regime of oppression and exclusion they inherited.”

In the midst of the Second Gilded Age, we are called upon to do this today.

Or, at least, to vote for Bernie (and AOC).