In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx: Harry F. Ward and the Struggle for Social Justice

Religion and American Culture

by David Nelson Duke

This absorbing and insightful biography illuminates the life of the controversial champion of Social Gospel in early-20th-century America.

Radical religious and political leader Harry F. Ward started life quietly enough in a family of Methodist shopkeepers and butchers in London. But his relentless pursuit of social justice would lead him to the United States and a long career of religious activism. Ward served as professor of Christian ethics at the Union Theological Seminary and chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union for two decades. He also became a leader in labor groups, Protestant activist organizations, and New York intellectual circles.
 

David Duke builds his comprehensive story of this fiery leader from extensive archival sources, including FBI files and private correspondence, sermons, class notes, and other unpublished material. Duke skillfully charts Ward's rise from an idealistic Methodist minister in a Chicago stockyard parish to a prominent national religious leader and influential political figure. Ultimately, Ward's lifelong attempt to synthesize the beliefs of Jesus and Marx and his role as an admirer of the Soviet Union put him on a collision course with McCarthyism in Cold War America. Viewed by some as a prophet and by others as a heretic, traitor, and communist, Ward became increasingly marginalized as he stubbornly maintained his radical positions. Even in his own circle, he went from being a figure of unquestioned integrity who eloquently spoke his convictions to a tragically short-sighted idealogue whose unwavering pro-Soviet agenda blinded him to the horrors of Stalinist oppression.
 

Harry Ward's long, colorful career intersected nearly every intellectual current in American culture for more than a half century. This biography will be important for scholars of American religious history, students of liberalism and politics, social Christians, and general readers who enjoy a compelling tour into the private and public lives of notable figures of history.
 

Genres: Theology

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 26, 2003

Reviews

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful look at Rev. Ward’s life. I appreciated the framing of his life though his Victorian, dualistic thinking and the authors balanced way of parsing Ward’s political efforts. It was a quick and enjoyable read, and was also a great look at parts of the American socialist and Methodist church that don’t get a lot of air time in histories.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely mixed bag with Duke's work here. Focusing mostly on Ward's early life and devoting a mere chapter to the last 20 years where he grappled most with Marxist theory and its integration with Christianity, Duke takes view of admiration towards Ward but harsh criticism towards his supposed naivete on the subject of socialist states, Stalin, etc. Even the mere citing of works of Marxist theory by Stalin in Ward's manuscripts makes Duke recoil with terror. The information provided here is voluminous, and extremely valuable for a complete picture of Ward. Duke's thesis that Ward was held by his childhood "Victorian morals" and mindset his entire life does not seem to me a strong one, and I would've have emphasized his intellectual development rather than a lack of dynamism.

Also rather strange and dualistic is Duke's engagement with the life and theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, who in many ways was Ward's antithesis. While Ward radicalized as he aged, Niebuhr hardened in a conservative way, moving from a moderate socialist engagement with Marxism to a complete apologist of imperialism, in many ways the theologian of containment doctrine. Rather than present a balanced view of Niebuhr and his much more conservative, even reactionary, later life, Duke presented Niebuhr as if he was the rational one, able to see the Soviet Union for what it truly was. Even if this is the truth of the matter, it in no way diminishes Ward's postwar anti-imperialist activism nor excuses Niebuhr's downright reactionary postwar conduct.