Political Christianity: A Reader

by David McLellan

This introductory work focuses on the historical, which attempts to situate Christianity in a specific context. It also looks at case studies in different parts of the world, and deals with past and present politics in Christianity.

Paperback

First published December 1, 1997

About the author

David McLellan (born 10 February 1940) is an English scholar of Karl Marx and Marxism. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St. John's College, Oxford University.

McLellan is currently visiting Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. He was previously Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent.

McLellan has also been Visiting Professor at the State University of New York, Guest Fellow in Politics at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, and has lectured widely in North America and Europe.

Reviews

[Ting · Rating 4 out of 5]

p. 185 ... elements in socialist tradition go back further than the industrial revolution--at least as far as the original Christian community which, we are told, 'held all things in common'. This kind of social gospel has been part of the Christian tradition from many of the early Church Fathers, through the Franciscans, Thomas Munzer and the millenarian movements, the Diggers and the Levellers of the English Civil War, the Jesuit Reductions in Paraguay, to contemporary forms such as the Christian Base Communities of Southern and Central America and the Ujama socialism of Julius Nyerere.

Even some of the most militant socialist critics of X such as Marx felt that X contained certain ideas that it was Socialism's vocation to put into practice. A rather simple but powerful equation of X gospel... in the writings of Dorothy Day.

p. 186 The progress (or otherwise) of the 20th century has shown such an equation of the advance of socialism with the retreat of religion to be much too facile. Marxism tended to generalise from the function of religion in all societies and to reduce the significance of religion to that of the economic conflicts it was held to reflect. Most socialists, particularly those influenced by Marxism, conserved a strong element of Enlightenment rationalism in their view of the world. This led them to underestimate the importance of non-rational modes of discourse. the religious mode, like the aesthetic, can refresh parts that more rational modes cannot reach. On this view some forms of socialism have had an inadequate grasp of human nature--not in the banal sense that socialists projects reflect some supposedly ineradicable self-interest, but in the more important and opposite sense that their conceptions are too narrow, too exclusive and too short-sighted in their views of human potential.