This explains why there arose a tradition of Christian socialism, from the English ‘Diggers’ of the seventeenth century, to Christian Democratic Socialists of the nineteenth, all the way through to the Catholic Liberation Theologians of the twentieth century.11 As such, Marx, though a professed materialist and atheist, was ‘oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil’.
