It may be obvious, albeit necessary, to begin my response to Gary Dorrien’s formidable Social Democracy in the Making with a reference to its first paragraph. From the start Dorrien indicates that the book combines his intellectual work and decades of social activist work, most recently in the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign (ix). Capturing the rebellious spirit wrought by the Occupy Wall Street movements, the Sanders campaign brought social democratic principles into the political agenda of the United States. Social Democracy in the Making narrates a story of similar breakthrough moments in the history of Germany and Great Britain, but the reader is never fully allowed to preserve this story in a safe historical vault. After all, Dorrien’s opening words also remind us of the victorious side of the 2016 US American presidential campaign. One could thus read Social Democracy in the Making as the history of a tradition currently coming to its fateful end, stunned by a renaissance of fascism.

That would be a mistake. In light of Donald Trump’s victory, the widespread assault on Social Democracy, and the global rise of fascism, this book displaces its readers to a historical account of the German and British trajectories in democratic socialism only to remind us continuously about the urgent need of a “Social Democratic standard of social decency” (x). Dorrien’s historical retrieval openly carries with it an “implied judgment about which parts of the history still matter” (xiii). In fact, this implied judgment implicates the reader in the politics of social democracy. Dorrien’s text treats its readers gently through a vast array of historical research while also radicalizing them into a tradition that conceives of history and theory as components of social and political transformation. For its theological audience, this book may also help to construct a new political-theological agenda.

For those accustomed to Dorrien’s work, the book will offer no surprises: it once again showcases his uncanny combination of erudition and a captivating prose, historical acumen, and theoretical depth, all the while conjuring radical political sensibilities. The book smoothly moves between intellectual and political landscapes of German and British social democratic traditions showing its ties—and disagreements—with Christian socialism. The focus is primarily on Britain and Germany, though Dorrien cannot help making occasional references to other nations, particularly the United States. This is certainly a statement about the book’s “implied judgment.” As Dorrien points out, the British case is “exceptional” because it combines social democratic politics, pragmatism, ethics, and an appreciation of religion. Germany, on the other hand, is much closer to debates in Marxist theory, less generous about religion, and more focused on ideological disputes. Germany and Great Britain trotted different paths but ultimately landed on similar ground—revisionism. Social Democracy in the Making does not capitulate into the discourse that this is necessarily a move away from the core of the socialist project, but rather points to the major achievements of this legacy even as it calls for continuous revisions and self-critique. Dorrien is always very clear in identifying the core of democratic socialism: an “ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community” (4) combined with its insistence on economic democracy (468). For these reasons alone, the book is already a relief in a global context that indicts social democratic principles only to endorse a rising fascist wave.

But Social Democracy in the Making also offers a great deal of insight for political theology. Dorrien’s first chapter, “Christian Socialism in Social Democracy,” opens with an important claim: “Political theology needs a better genealogy than the Carl Schmitt story that it usually tells.” Dorrien argues that an “incomparably better” genealogy would be to trace the history of political theology in the “religious and ethical socialists who imagined a democratic socialist society and contributed to the making of Social Democracy” (2). This is a crucial argument. Dorrien clarifies that the “reverse-Schmitt procedure” is related to “neo-Marxist, Whiteheadian, Deleuzian, and liberationist forms of political theology,” another important observation (3). As someone committed to this genealogy of political theology, particularly in its neo-Marxist and liberationist veins, Social Democracy in the Making creates possible pathways for further studies that unearth the connection between the story the book tells and current debates in political theology. In light of this, the major question the book raised for me is the extent to which Christian socialism has been able to create a robust legacy in political theology.

Nowhere is this issue more clearly addressed than in chapter 4, “Germanic Political Theology.” Dorrien describes the birth of twentieth-century theology in that fateful day in August 1914 when Karl Barth learned that his former teachers, the cultural elite of German Protestant liberalism, cheered for Germany’s declaration of war (218). Barth’s encounter with the chauvinism of his former professors puts contemporary theology right at the center of a political situation that ultimately led the Swiss theologian to socialism. Dorrien stresses, however, that Barth insisted that his decision for socialism was merely practical. Barth’s socialism was not religious but rather only a “practical political decision” (260), he confessed. Might this just be the way Barth found to maintain his theology uncontaminated by political preoccupations? Or may this point to an inability to theologize the political? As Dorrien described the Barthian revolt as the genesis of twentieth-century theology, I wonder if it is accurate to say that contemporary theology still hesitates to be fully political theology in light of Barth’s denial of considering socialism a theological problem. Did Barth confirm the basic premise of Schmitt’s political theology, namely, that politics and religion are definitely separate in the modern world?

More than a concern for a correct interpretation of Barth’s theology, my goal in raising these questions is to probe whether the socialist hope must come from and engender a political-theological commitment. Social Democracy in the Making seems to favor this position, particularly as it demonstrates great sympathy for the legacy of Christian socialism in Great Britain. At the same time, the British experiment also eschews theological debates, which once again may raise the question of its existence as political theology. In continental Europe, Dorrien’s narrative gestures toward Paul Tillich’s work as one that indeed articulates a socialist theological project. Dorrien sustains this by showing Tillich’s connections to the new readings of Marxist political theory at the Frankfurt School along with his expansive view of religion, culture, and politics. In this paradigm, Tillich could indicate that the struggle for justice is the “self-expression of the oppressed” and thus the embodiment of an ultimate concern. Dorrien summarizes Tillich’s position: “Nobody fights for justice lacking faith and ultimate concerns” (290). His endorsement of religious socialism included a rejection of the liberal and sometimes progressive understanding that religion is a “private” matter. Religion, for him, “was the depth dimension of life, the living out of the deepest wellspring of human being” (296).

In my view, this statement is one of the pillars to counter Schmitt’s legacy in political theology. One of its very promising outcomes is the identification of a lingering religious dimension within capitalism—one that ushers in the need for a theological critique of bourgeois society. This would also render the religious aspect of socialism an imperative. In the neo-Marxist tradition that begins to take shape at the Frankfurt School, this thesis may be found in Walter Benjamin’s studies of commodity fetishism.1 As Dorrien shows, Tillich was also drawn to Marx via this topic (278–79). Latin American liberationists assume this as the starting point of political theology and the project to build a theological critique of capitalism.2 In my own work, I have been suggesting how one can also trace this in the way Capital describes the capitalist mode of production achieves surplus-value by means of the exploitation of the worker’s living moments. Marx’s theorizations about the constitution of the working day engenders a death-dealing mode of temporality. Critical political theology, in this scenario, would entail the imagining and living out of alternative forms of temporality and of constituting the working day. Here the contribution of Christian socialism in Britain seems central, pacing its uninspiring technocratic ethos (402). Dorrien scrutinizes its ethical impetus: “The idea of socialism as ethically based, decentralized, economic democracy has deep roots in Britain through the cooperative traditions associated with Owens and Maurice” (9). Once again, I find in this a powerful opening into a socialist political-theological position. (It is worth mentioning, parenthetically, that Marxism did develop as an ethical tradition elsewhere, such as in Enrique Dussel’s creative appropriation of Marxist political economy and Levinasian ethics to form the Latin American tradition of liberation philosophy.)3

So, where shall a democratic socialist political theology go? Social Democracy in the Making does not intend to address this question, but it may provide some clues. For theologians like myself who tend to begin their thinking with the rise of liberation theologies in the 1960s, Dorrien offers historical perspective. And this is a true gift, always. Particularly as one witness to the ways in which democratic socialism developed significant anti-fascist forms of resistance. To the extent that Schmitt’s political theology quickly showed its totalitarian face, reclaiming the socialist story in political theology seems all the more important. Dorrien’s “implied judgement” does gain some explicit contours as he describes the best democratic socialism has to offer—in sum, pathways toward economic justice that open up opportunities to dismantle “white privilege, male privilege, and heterosexual privilege, repudiates Eurocentric presumptions, and upholds ethical commitments to freedom, equality, community, and ecological flourishing” (469). It is indispensable that this vision be affirmed. Social Democracy in the Making speaks of these demands as core to Christian socialism and, by doing so, it has the additional benefit of socializing new projects for social democracy. As talks of a “religious left” continue to pop up in public discourse, the time seems ripe to allow ourselves to be once again haunted by the specters of Christian socialism.

The most important point I can make about reading this book is—yes, you can. Do not be cowed by the size. Tell yourself you only need to skim the opening chapter, “Christian Socialism in Social Democracy.” It offers a stunningly illumining map of the historical landscape of social democracy. Quickly you realize the immense force, complexity, and relevance of the volatile throbs of Christianity with and against socialism, so different in England, Germany, and the United States. Though Dorrien’s book on American religious socialism, building on his prior volumes on the Social Gospel white and Black, is still to come (with typically unfathomable speed), you realize early in this one how those of us enmeshed in US progressive Christian circles are oddly more heir to the effects of democratic socialism than are most European theological colleagues. This despite the fact that it is here, not Europe, where “socialism” has meant the kiss of political death for over half a century. And if that chapter is all you read, you will be grateful. But like me you will likely be tricked into reading the whole book, gripped by Dorrien’s ability to narrate an inordinate richness of history. For this is no moment—no year—in history to be ignorantly utopian or numbingly compromising, carelessly catastrophist or dismissively pragmatic, in our relation to “socialism,” indeed even to “social justice.”

What we learn from this book is first of all that socialism is from the start inseparably and contentiously linked with democracy, not only in formal “social democracy” and “democratic socialism,” but also in indelible strands of Marx and of Marxism, which along with most socialism swiftly named as betrayal the Bolshevik/Leninist/Stalinist adaption of Marx’s tragic espousal of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” And radicals I knew nothing of, like Eduard Bernstein, advanced Social Democracy in the nineteenth century, building on Marx and against the determinism of a Marxist orthodoxy that assumed capitalism was destroying itself. His “evolutionary socialism” presumed the irreducible importance of personality, personal freedom, community as crucial to revolution; and that “democracy was the means and the end of socialist struggle: ‘It is a weapon in the struggle for socialism, and it is the form in which socialism will be realized” (169). Does such radically democratic orientation of socialism to the “socius” of cooperation provide needed ancestral support (not dogma) for any plausible struggle for justice—and against ecological and social catastrophe—in the confused United States today, where a class-based movement has no chance of prevailing without the solidarity of race, gender, and sex movements for equality?

Dorrien’s narrative lends historical depth to not only democratic but Marxist resistance to Marxist orthodoxy and its fatal apocalypticism. Is it not thereby channeling the still living possibility of a radically democratic r/evolution? If in England the Labour Party and in Germany the SPD “went on to become so deeply integrated into welfare state capitalism that it was hard to see democratic socialist aspiration in either of them,” nonetheless forms of “guild socialist and revisionist traditions have been the most creative in exploring forms of socialization besides nationalization, with patchy records of stubborn persistence” (468–69). Does this “guild” focus also bring to the fore a history of social movements in distinction from—but not necessarily contradiction to—party politics? It lets Dorrien insist upon the ongoing creative tension of his guiding perspective: “Every Social Democratic party is a pale reflection of a founding vision and an obstacle to remembering that democratic socialism is a radical idea” (1). In a United States where any language of social democracy has long counted as radical among most Democrats, can we channel that “stubborn persistence” into building a complex coalition rather than fragmenting into in-group purities? Perhaps calling for complexity rather than compromise among democratic differences holds out some pragmatic possibility for us here now?

Dorrien’s tome demonstrates how strong, deep, and differentiated is the history of religious socialism and of differently named offshoots that continue to hold Christianity accountable to the social ethics of the gospels. And he brings to light the vibrant socialist movement in England captured especially and, to me at least, surprisingly (no doubt due to an oversimplified sense of Anglican class status) in Anglocatholic forms, in relation to the secular but not anti-religious Fabians. But it is Dorrien’s account of the history of German religious socialism that may prove particularly, indeed painfully, revealing for those of us rooted in one way or another in German Protestant theology.

I knew the obvious, that the Protestant theology of the twentieth century grew out of German churches and universities disturbingly contaminated by nationalism and then fascism; that the towering figures of Barth and Tillich never succumbed to that trend. They responded to it in theologically incompatible but equally socialist ways. But backing up a bit, to the late nineteenth century, with Dorrien: I had hardly heard of the prophetic Christian activists Kutter and Radaz, figures monumentally important in early German-language religious socialism for their divergent and potent public leadership, ministry, refusal of academic absorption. Kutter recognized the mutual hostility of Christians and socialists in Germany as much deeper than in England or the United States. So he countered that “socialism was a secular parable of the kingdom” (223) and of course for their influence on the young “red pastor of Safenwill.” I did presume that Barth’s later leadership in the Confessing Church and Barmen saved the honor of the Protestant legacy; that Tillich, outspoken in his religious socialism, may not have survived 1933 without Union Seminary’s invitation.

I further presumed, however, in my dogmatic resistance to Barth’s christomonist patriarchal orthodoxy, that the Nazi sellout by one or two of his liberal Christian professors gave him the excuse he needed to crusade against the theological reception of liberalism/contextualism/pluralism/philosophy. So Dorrien’s account shook me in its historiography of the horrifying extent of the scholarly Protestant acceptance of nationalism and then fascism. This was not just a matter of congregational populism and the standard solidarity of war, nor of a tradition like our Christian right of religio-political reaction. Certainly, the late German achievement of nation-state status pertains. The young, Swiss Barth witnessed in dismay the almost total embrace of the First World War. But then after the evident catastrophe of the first war, he watched barely a decade later, the majority of theologians, including most of the liberals, identify with the new Nazi ideology of the Volk. Here Dorrien drills down into the liberal tradition that flows famously from Ritschl through Troeltsch and Harnack. This is the tradition that funds all of our liberal/progressive theology of self-critical attention to the social context of religion and thus the relativization of scriptural or traditional authority. And its social context was the German nation. So “the Ritschlian School signed up for opposing Social Democracy, defending Bismarck’s welfare state, boosting the German army, and thwarting radical Christian socialism. It provided a theological basis for bourgeois civil religion, usually called Culture Protestantism” (21). Harnack in the ’20s already took the opportunity “to expunge the Bible of the so-called Old Testament,” as the work of a religion inferior to Christianity, the mere “law and history of the Jew.” A liberal Christian theology of nationalism—and soon of fascism: social context! So I wept a tear or two of self-contradicting respect for Barth’s turn to theological antiliberalism—even as he remained a socialist (but quietly, and shunned religious socialism) for the rest of his life.

Yet an orthodox and even now so widely honored Lutheran such as Paul Althaus soon joined Emmanuel Hirsch, Harnack’s student, in the fascist follow-up, to teach “a purified Aryan religion stripped of Jewish everything” (258). Jesus was no Jew but an Aryan. The Deutsche Kirche—that quickly absorbed two-thirds of German Protestants and their clergy—made the Aryan Jesus their white Lord. Rade, a dissenting liberal, “observed dolefully in December 1930 that approximately 90 percent of the Protestant theologians at North German universities ‘appear at lectures with the National Socialist Party badge’” (27). This is three years before Hitler’s ascension; there is no excuse here of self-protection. The point of such historiography is not to demonize Germans. But is it in part to witness to the possibility that unexpected swathes of a culture may swing with a violent “populist” nationalism?

The ever nondogmatic genius of Dorrien’s analysis does not permit him to settle for Barth’s own blame-philosophy-proclaim-gospel method. Dorrien’s theological inclination, with great nuance in its critical appreciation of German idealism, hovers closer to Tillich’s. And not coincidentally, Tillich ardently and publicly spoke and wrote against fascism and for socialism. Dorrien gently regrets that neither—Barth due to his binarist faith vs. world (and vs. “religion”) solution, Tillich in gratitude to postwar US hospitality—in their major work persist with any language of social democracy/democratic socialism. Indeed, Dorrien has never supported any simple radical/progressive vs. liberal account of modern theology. He has already shown voluminously, with particular attention to the US legacy, that an honestly progressive Christianity cannot exist without the democratic impulse and its liberal heritage, even as it must liberate itself from its own reactionary twists into racist nationalisms or their apparent opposite, global neoliberalism. Dorrien’s analytic help will be urgently welcome vis-à-vis a rapidly shifting politics in which the critique of global capitalism—with its strong chorus of progressive anti-imperialism—is being coopted by right-wing nationalists.

When Barth’s second edition of The Epistle to the Romans announced the “death rattle of the churches,” he proclaimed the gospel message as “the fire alarm of a coming new world.” I wonder how Dorrien would interpret this apocalypse in relation to the Marxist apocalypse, on the one hand; and to an anti-mystical version of apophatic mysticism, on the other, where faith is “always a leap into the darkness of the unknown.” I ask this question less for the sake of theological history than of theological future: s’il y en a? Does Barth’s early eschatology prophesy more than the unbearable yet to come in his lifetime? As a member of a denomination about to go up in flames, of a species threatening its own habitat with overheating, and in a land of enflamed white nationalism, I covet Dorrien’s non-histrionic reading of this uncanny ninety-nine-year loop. My Political Theology of the Earth, published just a couple months before Social Democracy in the Making (and one-fourth the length, winkwink), is organized as a meditation on that possible triple apocalypse of theology/earth/politics.

So, let me note that a couple of paragraphs early in Dorrien’s work so firmly slams the door on the current use of the nomenclature of “political theology” that I wondered if I should even knock. I am guilty of referencing the largely nontheological and Continental precipitators (Agamben especially) who themselves reference the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Yet I agree with Dorrien that “much creative thought, especially in Neo-Marxist, Whiteheadian, Deleuzian, and liberationist forms of political theology” performs the “reverse-Schmitt procedure” that he decries (3). But I would only join the repudiation of that procedure inasmuch as any one of them were actually claiming that political theology begins with Schmitt’s Political Theology—or even with his mockery of the anarchist Bakunin’s coining of “political theology” in mockery of those very religious socialists Dorrien treats with such respect. Dorrien’s book helps to assure that word spreads through the burgeoning multifaceted public of “political theology” as to how richly, problematically, often progressively, ever complicatedly, political theology has been. It spread in waves of a particularly vibrant, prophetically gifted, tragically constrained movement of Christian socialism mingling with social democracy during the period of Dorrien’s analysis.

In conclusion, as to the conclusion of Social Democracy in the Making. There isn’t one. It stops suddenly with the discussion of the British socialist Cole (another new hero for me), with his repudiation of Marxian scholasticism in favor of a rigorous social justice driven by and to “fellowship, genuine community.” “Fellowship does not count heads, or, if it does, it counts everyone as more than one—in fact, as infinite” (473). He was no Christian, but this sense of one in and as boundless multiplicity satisfies my theological anthropology. I suspect Dorrien ends here, without any recap of the book, without the expected forward-looking vision, because a darkness of the unknown—apocalyptic or apophatic—lies upon the present future. But also because he was already writing the sequel. More than one . . .

“Somebody,” Dorrien writes of Cole, “had to show that democratic socialism was radical, compelling, realistic, and a real option, with or without religious compensations.” As we may now say of Gary Dorrien.

Gary Dorrien’s book could contribute significantly to generating—for this turning point in human history1—a form of democratic and ecological socialism grounded in the wisdoms and mistakes of socialisms in their previous forms. Before exploring that contribution, I comment on the volume’s value to two sets of readers.

This text will have distinct but related value to two audiences who know that the current form of global capitalism is an engine of economic inequity and climate change, and who are eager for change toward economic practices and policies that lessen the gap between rich and poor and contribute to earth’s well-being, but who do not know paths for moving effectively in that direction. One audience is those Christians who: (1) mistakenly associate socialism primarily with Soviet-style state socialism and therefore dismiss it as antithetical to God, and (2) are not yet aware of the rich history of Christian socialism intermingled with other democratic socialist movements and with Social Democratic politics, and (3) are also unaware that many revered mothers and fathers of Christian faith identified themselves as socialists. For these readers Dorrien provides a rich, detailed, and insightful history of Christian socialisms intertwined with other forms of socialism, a history that includes strong theological critiques of capitalism as antithetical to the gospel and to democracy. This is important knowledge at a time when popular theological consciousness in the United States tends to misidentify capitalism as consistent with democracy and with Christianity. For these readers, the book could open the door to theologically grounded critique of capitalism, and to recognizing the value of socialisms for shaping economies that are more in line with God’s promise of life abundant for all and that do not exploit some people in order to accumulate great wealth for others.

As second audience is people who are aware of Christian socialism but are not aware of the multiplicities of democratic socialisms and Social Democracies and of the shifting and porous relationships between these two trajectories (including the role that each has played in the development of the other). Dorrien notes that “various schools of democratic socialism” are so divergent that they “do not agree on its defining meaning or goal” (4), and it is hard to find any particular element running throughout democratic socialisms. If there is one, he suggests, it is an “ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community” where that radical democratic impulse includes economic life. Similarly he clarifies that, while at times “democratic socialism” and “Social Democracy” were interchangeable terms (22), in fact the relationship tween the two is highly varied depending in part on two primary factors. One was the extent to which Social Democratic politics gave up or supported movement toward economic democracy, and the other was the theory that Social Democrats held regarding how to move from capitalism to socialism and regarding the extent to which that move was possible. The sundry relationships between Social Democracy and democratic socialism were influenced also by: (1) national context, (2) historical moment, (3) the school of socialist thought and practice, (4) the school of Social Democratic thought and practice, and (5) the role and nature of Christian socialism in varied contexts. For readers unaware of these contextually formed complexities, overlaps, and divergences, this knowledge is a building block for conceptualizing a form of democratic socialism capable of addressing the current context. In proffering this historical knowledge, Dorrien conveys models upon which to build and mistakes to avoid.

Among both sets of readers, while the hunger for more equitable and ecological economies may be strong, the sense of not knowing how to get there or the subtle belief that getting there is not possible is endemic. This book—with its meticulously constructed political and intellectual genealogies of democratic socialisms and Social Democracies—offers guidance for forging pathways into a future that build on a past widely unknown in the theo-political imaginary of many US citizens who long for a more equitable economy.

A Question

What does Dorrien’s book contribute for this particular five-year period in human history—the period in which we could still make the radical economic changes necessary to overt the most ravaging degrees of climate catastrophe?

Response depends on what is presupposed about the current moral crisis of economic life. I presuppose that the currently dominant form of economic life—finance-driven global capitalism, otherwise known as the neoliberal global economy—has three related and devastating moral problems. It concentrates wealth, providing some with wealth in the billions while relegating vast numbers of people to abject poverty. By concentrating wealth, it also concentrates power, thus subordinating political power to private economic power and undercutting democracy. It requires and assumes economic practices and norms that the planet cannot sustain and that cause unacceptable levels of greenhouse gas emissions. In short, finance-driven global capitalism is anti-equity, anti-democratic, and anti-ecological; it is a threat to social equity, to democratic tendencies and trajectories, and to earth’s fragile life systems.

This analysis of dangers leads to two conclusions, one about geophysical reality and the other concerning morality. The geophysical reality—aside from any political or moral assessment—is that the corporate- and finance-driven global economy will change because earth as a biophysical system can no longer provide or provide for what it demands and requires:2

• Unlimited growth in production of goods and services.
• Unlimited “services” (required for unlimited growth) provided by earth. Those services include “soil formation and erosion control, pollination, climate and atmosphere regulation, biological control of pests and diseases,” and more.3
• Unlimited “resources” (required for unlimited growth) provided by earth, such as oil, timber, minerals, breathable air, cultivable soil, air with a CO2 concentration of somewhere between 275 and 350 parts per million,4 oceans with a balanced pH factor, the ocean’s food chain, potable water, etc.
• An unregulated market in which the most powerful players are economic entities having:
  • a mandate to maximize profit,
  • the legal and civil rights of a person,
  • limited liability,
  • the legal right and resources to achieve size larger than many nations,
  • no accountability to bodies politic, be they cities, states, nations, or other,
  • the right to privatize, own, and sell goods long considered public.
• Freedom of individuals to do as they please with economic assets (including unlimited carbon emissions and speculative investment that may result in the economies of nations crashing).

Since earth can no longer provide or support these requirements of unregulated corporate- and finance-driven global capitalism, carrying on indefinitely with it is not an option.5 The option is something different. (Clearly that “something different” is not state socialism, which is yet another form of centralized economic power dedicated to growth and unaccountable to a democratic public.) The question is in what direction.

This leads to the moral conclusion. Morality grounded in Christian tradition calls for that change to be in three directions: ecological, equitable, and democratic. (By this I mean, in short terms, that the economy would be embedded in earth’s economy and thus carbon neutral, would reduce rather than continually enlarge the wealth gap, and would cultivate participatory and distributed economic power.) In the United States today this three-faceted direction is understood by some as the move to the “new economy.”

For those who seek change in these three intertwined directions, a paradox glares. Change in these directions is necessary. Yet it is impeded by a widespread assumption that reining in the power of global finance institutions and corporations—a requisite of change in these directions—is not possible. This contextual paradox shapes response to the question posed: What does Dorrien’s book contribute for this particular five-year period in human history—the period in which we could still make the radical economic changes necessary to overt the most ravaging degrees of climate catastrophe?

Response to the Question

The book contributes in two senses. First, it debunks two central myths that stand in the way of change toward the “new economy.” They are the myths that:

1. Capitalism is inevitable; there is no viable alternative.
2. Capitalism and democracy are consistent with each other, and socialism is inconsistent with democracy. (While this sounds absurd to those who have studied the relationship of capitalism to democracy and of socialism to democracy, this remains a pervasive myth in popular consciousness.)

A central moral task for the current crisis is to expose these two myths as indeed myths (or lies). The historical account provided in this book does so.

Second, the book provides clues for how to achieve change toward the new economy (more democratic, equitable, and ecological). One necessary ingredient of power for moving in that direction is knowledge of history. A historical trajectory of particular import is the history of movements in modernity toward economies committed to equity, democratic control, and—more recently—ecological sustainability. At the heart of that legacy, of course, are the varied streams of democratic socialism and Social Democracy. Dorrien’s astute and nuanced history and analysis of those trajectories, their intersections and divergences, and the role of Christianity in both is a treasure trove of clues to achieving change toward the “new economy.”

I articulate those clues as questions to which this book responds or could enable response. While space precludes my responding to all of these questions, I do begin responses to the last two of them, grounding my responses in Dorrien’s text.

• One clue flows from Dorrien’s portrayal of the ease and frequency with which Social Democratic parties and impulses abandoned the quest for and commitment to democratic socialism with economic democracy at its heart. What forces led to that abandonment and how are those forces potent today?
• Resistance to finance-driven global capitalism today focuses on building local and regional small-scale alterative business, finance, and agricultural models. What can be learned from the guild and other cooperative movements of nineteenth-century England to guide the building of local and regional small-scale alternatives today?
• A deeply sacramental form of Christianity (British Anglicanism) was at the heart of the Christian socialism that informed and enabled democratic socialism in England. What clues can be gained from that movement for the fomenting of Christian contributions to a new form of democratic socialism in the United States today?
• “It took [Christianity and socialism] fused together in England . . . to produce the nation’s best anti-imperialist tradition.” “With very few exceptions Christian socialist leaders took for granted their ethical obligation to oppose all that went into British imperialism and came of it” (413). In contemporary US society, imperialism takes many forms, one of which is corporate and finance imperialism. Another is white supremacy. What theological and ecclesial factors enabled Christian socialist leaders in England to take “for granted their ethical obligation to oppose all that went into British imperialism and came of it”? How might those factors and forces take form in the United States to build the “ethical obligation to oppose” US imperialism today?
• Yet another clue concerns the role of context. As Dorrien aptly demonstrates, context matters. What are the most salient contemporary contextual factors that call for forms of socialism distinct from previous forms? One contextual factor not present in the period covered in this text (roughly mid-19th to late mid-20th century) is the rise of neoliberalism (beginning in the 1970s) and its profound subordination of democratic political power to economic power. A second contextual factor is the dire urgency of the climate crisis.
• What is the most fruitful way to frame the movement toward the new economy in the Unites States today? This question is vital. Whether that movement makes adequate headway to avert climate catastrophe in its most ravaging forms will depend upon whether it gains enough popular support and momentum, and that depends in part on how it is framed. While Dorrien does not explicitly make a constructive proposal for that framing, he does imply and briefly suggest one. He articulates it as a form of decentralized Social Democracy that holds itself to a standard of democratic socialism in that it fights for economic democracy. (Dorrien distinguishes “between Social Democratic strategies that still fight for economic democracy and those that give up trying” [468], and he distinguishes those presupposing an exclusively centralized national scale from those aimed at decentralized smaller scales. In both cases, he identifies with the latter. “I am against giving up but also against identifying economic democracy exclusively with national-scale strategies” [468].)

My point is this: Responding to these questions would provide clues for how to move toward the new economy (more democratic, equitable, and ecological).

A Constructive Suggestion

I differ from Dorrien slightly in response to the last question. I am not sure why he frames the way forward as Social Democracy, given that (as he writes): (1) the United States lacks a Social Democratic tradition (x), (2) currently “in Europe . . . many [Social Democratic parties] are so integrated into the establishment that their socialist pasts are invisible” (x), and (3) “today the democratic socialist streams in every European Social Democratic party are outnumbered by mainstreams that relinquished the goal of economic democracy long ago” (xii).

It seems more fruitful to frame the way forward as democratic socialism in the form that encourages “decentralized, economic democracy” (9–10). This means a form of economic democracy that includes not only national-scale strategies but also expands the small-scale local or regional “cooperative, public bank, and social market sectors” and “mixes various modes of social ownership” (469). Said differently, while the book articulates itself as tracking “the making” of Social Democracy in Germany and Britain, I believe that its constructive impact is not to argue for the continued “making of” Social Democracy but rather for the development of (“making of”) democratic socialism that is ethically based with decentralized economic democracy at its “heart” (468). As I read Dorrien, his bias is toward a “fully democratic society” (1) in which the demos (the people) control both the economy and the government. It seems to me that the title would better be “Democratic Socialism(s) in the Making,” with the history and contemporary dynamics of Social Democracy as a central part of that story.

Perhaps Dorrien prefers the language of Social Democracy for his title and for his framing of the way forward because Social Democracy is a more politically viable label in the contemporary Unites States context than is democratic socialism. This may be the case. Yet, perhaps not. Rising numbers of people are articulating the call to socialism as humanistic socialism, or even spiritual socialism. If that is the case then the framing of socialism as democratic and as consistent with values such as equity, democracy, and justice—claimed historically by the US ethos—and using the language of democratic socialism to do so may be a viable political move.

Efforts to bring economic change by appealing to democratic socialism would be strengthened by arguing that it is particularly well suited to confront the two contextual factors noted above—neoliberalism that subordinates political power in its best sense to economic powers, and climate catastrophe driven by unfettered capitalism. A form of democratic ecological socialism counters both of these factors. Its public credibility would depend upon making clear that democracy depends upon both accountable power and shared power. Both are far more possible when economic structures (business, banks, finance institutions) are small-scale, local/regional, beholden to a triple bottom line (ecological, social-justice, and financial), and owned by stakeholders rather than only by shareholders.

In short, it seems to me that this book offers key resources for moving toward the new economy—economies at local and national levels that are structured to be ecological, equitable, and democratic. Those resources include debunking the two potent myths noted above, and clues derived from the aforementioned list of questions. These questions flow from the historical legacy recounted and analyzed in Gary Dorrien’s extraordinary and invaluable account of a past that could do what the past should do—enable a more just, compassionate, and ecologically sane future.

Even in the United States, socialism is no longer a dirty word for many, as recent surveys have shown. Still, confusion about the meaning of the term may never have been greater, and so gaining some clarity about the concept and its history is essential.

Gary Dorrien’s book Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism introduces readers to some of the complexities of socialism. Those who think that socialism was somehow conjured up by Karl Marx or his followers will be surprised to learn that democratic socialism in Britain was not significantly shaped by Marxist thought for almost a century after its beginnings. Others who think that socialism is by nature antithetical to religion will benefit from learning how democratic socialism in Germany developed in a complicated relationship with religion in general and so-called mainline “social Christianity” in particular.

Note also that the complexity of socialism is not only a matter of ideas (where there is a lot of ground to cover) but of different historical developments. While focusing mostly on ideas, Dorrien’s book deals with some of these developments in Germany and Britain up until the 1960s because this is where social democratic traditions have the richest traditions (bracketing communist traditions), so we will have to develop the lessons for the United States from there.

Perhaps the biggest myth about socialism is that it would be undemocratic. From a socialist perspective the matter is reversed, however, as capitalist concentration of wealth and power at the top wreaks havoc with democracy and the agency of the masses. The current situation in the United States illustrates the problem. The dream of democratic socialism, as Dorrien reminds us, is “a fully democratized society in which the people control the economy and government, no group dominates any other, and every citizen is free, equal, and included” (1). The drivers in this process have been unions and social movements, cooperatives, and—often forgotten today—religious communities. Democratic socialism disagrees with Social Democracy about the primacy of parliamentary politics. Politics for democratic socialists, while not insignificant, is not in the lead—labor and social movements are.

To be sure, socialism shaped up differently in different locations: In England it was often pragmatic, non-ideological, open to religion and the middle class. In Germany, on the other hand, socialism tended to be more ideological, anti-religious, and proletarian (Dorrien’s terms, 4). It is this latter aspect—the connection of socialism to working people and their movements, broadly conceived—that I will use as the guide to my engagement with the material that follows. After all, one of the biggest differences between socialism and liberalism is the question of the agent, and it makes a difference whether working people or the middle class are the driving force.

Unlike in the United States, in both Britain and Germany there was no connection between socialism and liberalism, the latter of which remained elitist, without ties to a social gospel. German liberal theology and Culture Protestantism stayed firmly rooted in the middle class. Adolf von Harnack’s support for family, welfare, and opposition to class prejudice (137) exemplify the liberal position in support of the status quo, I would argue, being tone-deaf to the concerns of socialism. From a socialist perspective, to be sure, the task would not be seen as reducing class prejudice (in today’s language: celebrating the diversity of ruling class and working class) but as abandoning exploitative class relationships. Moreover, that in the United States support for welfare has been branded a socialist agenda just shows how much American readers still have to learn.

In Britain, Fabianism also displays some of these tensions, as the working class had a role to play in creating socialism, but intellectuals remained firmly in charge. Still, the Fabians were distinct from liberalism and Dorrien notes their challenges to the ruling class, including demands for minimum wage, for limited hours of work, for shifting tax from workers to the recipients of rent and interest, for welfare, and for political representation of all (78–79). Of course, even the more moderate socialist positions of Fabianism would be considered quite radical in the United States today. This shows how foreign robust discussions of socialism have become to us.

Religion was part of the socialist ethos in Britain, where prominent church leaders supported socialist values. Well-known Anglican bishops like Charles Gore and William Temple were influential socialists, and Gore considered socialism a modern expression of Christian ideas—the indictment of injustice that is found in the prophets (112–13). It would have been interesting to know more about connections to the broader labor movement, but there is a sense that religious socialism in Britain remains fairly moderate and never became too much of a threat to the establishment. After all, we should not forget that Gore was also chaplain to Queen Victoria and King Edward VII, and Temple was the Archbishop of Canterbury for the two final years of his life.

In Germany, religion was regarded with some suspicion in the socialist movements, even though Karl Kautsky, Friedrich Engels, and Rosa Luxemburg all argued that socialism mirrored the revolutionary spirit of the Jesus movement. Several German-speaking theologians exemplify the challenges and the potential of the relationship between socialism and religion. Hermann Kutter and Leonard Ragaz, the Swiss founders of religious socialism (222–23), embodied closer connections to labor and social movements than their British counterparts, one of the things that also distinguished them from mainline “social Christianity” that promoted welfare in their day. Both of them were influential on Karl Barth, with Ragaz being closer to politics and Social Democracy and Kutter being closer to the church and thus of greater interest to Barth.

Barth’s lifelong identity as Swiss socialist is now well known even in the United States, but the relationship between socialism and religion always remained complex for him. Dorrien reports on his resolve to keep the two separate (260), which created confusion for later Barthians who never quite figured out what to do with socialism. Barth’s position, I would add, makes little sense for those who have come to socialism or religion via ideas or ideology because it is intentionally unsystematic. It makes more sense, however, for those who are engaging with social and labor movements and therefore know the complexities of both religion and socialism firsthand. While Barth’s solidarity with working people in Safenwil is often mentioned, I would argue that the lessons need to be drawn out more, especially for US academics in the twenty-first century.

Another important development in the relation of socialism and religion was what might be called cultural Marxism, which Paul Tillich engaged during his German beginnings. Tillich, like most theologians ever since, did not care about economics much, yet his socialism was linked up with some affinity to the working class that faded away after he moved to the United States. Dorrien reports how in 1950 James Luther Adams published a piece by Tillich, written in 1929, titled “The Class Struggle and Religious Socialism,” against Tillich’s will, who feared it would ruin him in America (288). After coming to Union Theological Seminary, Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr agreed in their own ways that socialism without a proletarian movement base was merely middle-class ethical idealism (310). One can only speculate why these theologians did not explore this base more—which did exist in the United States and which kept parts of the Social Gospel grounded, as we now know (see, for instance, Heath Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015]). Sadly, today even less awareness remains of these histories.

The rest of the story is quickly told. After World War II, Social Democracy in Europe—and especially in Germany—became more amenable to capitalism, building welfare programs and international institutions, and fighting Communism (409–10). Here, the shift from social movements to parliamentary politics came into its own. Getting lost in the process is not only a radical spirit and drive, but also the intersectional potential of socialism. In contrast to Social Democracy, Communist movements reached out to organized workers of color and other minorities, even in the United States and in the former colonies, where Social Democracy had no connections (411). This would be a story worth exploring further, as it demonstrates that intersectional solidarity is not wishful thinking but has a long history. Religious and even theological engagement is part of this story as well, even though not part of the academic establishment (see, for instance, David Burns, The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]).

In Germany, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) serves as example for this development away from the agency of working people and social movements toward middle-class parliamentarian politics, making peace with capitalism and attracting middle-class voters after World War II. To be sure, there are some gains as well, which are still unimaginable in the United States. One example is the successful push of the unions in the 1950s for codetermination—adding worker representatives to corporate boards (463)—although the boards continue to be chaired and dominated by shareholder representatives to this day.

In the end, can we still see the forest for the trees? What are the key elements in this discussion? The agency of working people is central. Dorrien gives a few pointers in this direction, noting toward the end of the book that “economic democracy is the heart of democratic socialism and the test of its ambition for social justice” (468). This includes expansion of cooperatives, public banks, and social market sectors, as well as the dismantling of white, male, and heterosexual privilege; ecological sensitivity can be considered part of it as well. Nevertheless, I would suggest that we need still more attention to what this economic democracy entails, especially in the halls of the theological academy.

At stake is not just whether we need to move forward via the agency of working people or politics or both, but how we analyze the fundamental problems. In what looks like a little side note, Dorrien hits on the relation of fair distribution and production (126). While much of the discussion today is focused on the fair distribution (and redistribution) of wealth—Marx used to call this “vulgar socialism”—the core of the problem with capitalism is with production. Dorrien understands the problem, despite some ambiguity about what he debatably terms Marx’s “dogmatic determinism,” “doctrine of proletarian dictatorship,” and “fixation on collective ownership wrongly identified socialism with a totalizing goal” (5), concluding that “Marxian theory is the most creative and sophisticated tradition of anticapitalist criticism ever devised” (114). The core of Marx’s analysis remains the question of production, who produces and who collects the profit (surplus), and other socialist movements picked it up. In other words, production and surplus shape distribution and maldistribution, and the latter cannot be resolved without the former. This is one reason, I would add, why the agency of working people is so crucial in overcoming capitalism: here is its energy and its heart, and here is where theologians might have to start investigating matters of the divine and the world again (for an initial effort, see Joerg Rieger and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities [Chalice, 2016, German translation 2019]).

When the agency of working people is taken into account—in all their intersectionality along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—things might change. Instead of having to soft-pedal capitalist exploitation, socialism can follow through on what is most important: economic and political (and religious) democracy instead of totalitarianism, diversity instead of centralization, non-exploitative relationships, and even profit no longer has to be a dirty word. Instead of casting its lot with nonprofit corporations, which are often run just like for-profit corporations or worse, socialism can be built through worker cooperatives, which produce profit that benefits the members, the communities, and even the environment. Wouldn’t that match the ideals of many religious communities as well?

More Americans today than in many years are asking: “What does it mean to be a democratic socialist? What would it mean for me to be one?” Gary Dorrien’s new book is a response to such questions. It is a big book, telling the stories of British and German (that is, German-speaking) socialist movements and thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but its core idea is simple: socialism’s rich intellectual diversity has been impoverished, its range and depth of thought diminished. Although secular and religious socialisms developed in dialog with one another, one half of that dialog—the religious socialist half—is largely absent from the awareness of socialists today. Dorrien’s book is an ambitious effort to recover lost legacies and alternative possibilities for today’s democratic socialists, in particular to restore religious socialism’s place within socialist conversations.

The Christian socialists whom Dorrien examines made distinctive contributions to socialist thought. Here is a cluster of four related themes that reappear often in their thinking. (It is an interesting question to what extent the characteristic concerns of Christian socialists have been shared by religious socialists more broadly. Nevertheless, in keeping with the historical specificity of Dorrien’s book, I will mostly refer here to Christian socialists.)

First, Christian socialists have typically seen socialism as a re-statement of an ancient impulse. Where secular socialists have often rooted their socialism in the modern quest for progress, confident that human efforts to willfully reshape the world proceed inevitably, Christian socialists have rooted their socialism in the perennial prophetic impulse to question projects of mastery. This feature of Christian socialism is so central as to be easily missed; it often remains implicit. But whether Christian socialists argue that socialist ideas echo Biblical teachings or whether they look instead to Christian liturgical and communal practices, they are claiming ancient antecedents for their politics.

Second, Christian socialists have offered a moral critique of capitalism. They have believed that the economic inequality generated by capitalism is a problem because it impedes authentic experiences of community. The moral core of socialism, they have thought, is an aspiration toward fellowship. When Swiss theologian Hermann Kutter proposed in 1908 that the temporary disruption of strikes leads toward stronger communities, or when the great Anglican socialist writer R.H. Tawney argued in his 1920 book The Acquisitive Society that economic activity should provide “the material foundation for a good social life,” each was suggesting that socialism should be based on a conception of the human person as a member of a community. They were also implying that the Christian tradition entails a substantive vision, or at least a sketch, of the sort of community fitting for human habitation.

Third, such ideas of fellowship have often led Christian socialists to embrace values like participation and cooperation. Seeking something more comprehensible and human-scaled than the modern state, Christian socialists have been among the most committed advocates of decentralized economic democracy. These are especially prominent themes among the British Christian socialists. F.D. Maurice, the most important early figure in the British Christian socialist tradition, supported consumer cooperatives; some of his followers looked also to worker cooperatives. In the early twentieth century, Anglican theologian J.N. Figgis became a major influence on “guild socialists” like G.D.H. Cole, and even after the guild socialist movement had faded, Anglican socialists like Tawney and William Temple retained a sympathy for the guild socialist dream of pluralistic, non-statist socialism.

Fourth, Christian socialists have attended to the problem of hope. They have recognized a need for something more sustaining than what Dorrien calls a “bare moral ideal,” a simple statement of values. Once I commit myself to values like fellowship and democratic community, how can I be sustained in such a commitment? Christian socialists have wrestled with that question openly and earnestly. The Christian socialists Dorrien writes about were all, in one way or another, confident in what he calls “the God of becoming who has always just begun to save the world;” they were also all members of a community constituted by practices of liturgy and remembrance. These two facts—of confidence and of membership—are not unrelated.

None of these four themes—the insufficiency of modern perspectives, the moral critique of capitalism, the preference for decentralization, the need for hope—have been the exclusive concern of Christian (or other religious) socialists. But it is probably not a coincidence that religious socialists have been among the most consistent voices for these concerns. This is why the near-absence of religious socialism from contemporary socialist thought matters. The characteristic concerns of Christian socialists are urgently important today. In the face of ecological catastrophe, the modern ideas of growth and progress are more dubious than ever. Christian moral critiques of capitalism anticipate—and in some ways remain more radical and provocative than—later attempts to break the left out of its narrow economism, like the mid-twentieth century critique of “mass culture,” the late twentieth century idea of “communitarianism,” or the newly-resurgent idea of “intersectional” social crises. As for the ideas of decentralization and participation: they seem harder to realize than ever, as our economic relationships become more global and our technologies less comprehensible—but for the same reasons, those ideas are increasingly important. And the problem of hope is most urgent of all these concerns: who today is able to believe in the forward march of history?

Alongside their commonalities, the British and German Christian socialist traditions that Dorrien examines—mostly Anglican and mostly Lutheran, respectively—have revealed distinct sensibilities. Dorrien makes clear that although these differences are partly the product of political institutions, they have theological roots as well.

Anglican socialists (especially Anglo-Catholic “sacramental socialists”) have tended to see the living community of the church as the model for socialist politics because they have seen something sacred in human sociality. Thinkers like F.D. Maurice, Stewart Headlam, and Charles Gore saw egalitarian community—like the community of baptism or of the Eucharist—as the proper site for a human relationship with the divine, and have also believed that the human encounter with the divine impels us toward egalitarian community. For Anglican socialists, fellowship is both our duty and our joy. Thus for many Anglican socialists, the problem with capitalism is in no small part that it imposes ugliness on the lives of the poor, that it impedes genuinely public or shared experiences of beauty.

The great German socialist theologians, in contrast, offered radical critiques of existing churchly communities. Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Leonard Ragaz, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich all saw socialism not as an idea that flows from the life of the church but as one of the extra-ecclesial positions (the Bible itself being another) from which a critique of church life can be launched. Reading Dorrien’s account of the German Christian socialists, one sympathizes with their rage at the tepid faith of the everyday church, but one mourns their lack of delight in living forms of community and, thus, their inconsistent appreciation for decentralization and participation.

Whatever they may have missed, the German Christian socialists never forgot that politics always remains tough and unloving. Too often, the Anglican socialists turned away from political conflict, retreating into valuable but insufficient projects of education, service, and moral witness. Too often, they expected that a socialist movement could enact a beloved community. Their German counterparts—steeped as they were in the theologies of Martin Luther and St. Augustine—warned that politics, even socialist politics, is too worldly to do more than prepare the way for the in-breaking of a beloved community. Politics, their theological tradition teaches, can ready us for grace, but it can never itself be a means of grace.

A century ago, Max Weber warned that modern politics has been “disenchanted.” In their different ways, the Christian socialists Dorrien writes about pointed toward a re-enchantment of political life, a re-discovery of what Tillich called the “depth dimension” of the work that movements and parties and states do (or, better: are called to do) every day. They pointed, in other words, toward a sense of what it means to be “radical” different from the sense in which that word is often taken by people on the left: being radical not as unearthing the roots but as becoming rooted. But it matters that they did this in different ways. Dorrien refuses to offer his readers a synthesis of the British Christian socialists’ love of fellowship and the German Christian socialists’ realism about the limits of political life, let alone a synthesis of secular and religious socialisms. Instead, he places these traditions of thought side by side, allowing both their gaps and their overlaps to emerge. Dorrien invites his readers to simply sit with the tensions among the ideas whose stories he tells. In the end, this invitation may be the wisest feature of this wise and timely book.

We have all probably seen the recent polls indicating that more than half of America’s young people have a positive view of socialism. The success of the Bernie Sanders Campaign, the prospects of The Green New Deal, the rise of AOC, Jacobin Magazine and Bhaskar Sunkara’s, Socialist Manifesto are all indications of this. As the movement continues to develop it will be confronted by longstanding debates over socialism’s relationship to populism, nationalism and internationalism, and religion.

The first of these two — populism, nationalism and internationalism — has received significant attention over the last few years. The third, namely, religion, much less so, but this is beginning to change. Perhaps no book better demonstrates this than the recent publication of Martin Hägglund’s, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, which could be construed as an attempt to provide democratic socialism with a new theoretical bases for the 21^st century. If one were to base the turn to socialism on Hägglund’s book, they would have to conclude that socialism must be atheistic and secular to the core. Religious faith, according to Hägglund, prevents its adherents from seeing finite lives as ends in themselves since they believe in an afterlife, nirvana or the like, which trivializes existence in this life; in times when they act as if those finite lives do matter, Hägglund believes they are abandoning the precepts of religious faith in favor of secular faith. More charitably, we could say they are dialectically advancing from faith to rationalism.

Hägglund’s This Life is Teutonic in inspiration (Marx/Hegel) and if there is one major theme that runs throughout Gary Dorrien’s latest book, Social Democracy in the Making, it is that the German tradition of democratic socialism post-Ferdinand Lassalle, “wore its hostility to religion as a badge of honor.” The same kind of Left Hegelian hostility to the role religion might play in socialism is on display in Roberto Unger’s very powerful book, The Religion of the Future. Unger, drawing on nineteenth century German inspirations very similar to Hägglund’s, rejects all the world religions for being incompatible with his vision of democratic socialism. The problem is that they make peace with the existing order by accepting its political, economic and social institutions. And even if Christians, Jews, Muslims or Buddhists  aspired for something like Unger’s vision of socialism, they would have to undergo changes so radical that they would most likely no longer be recognized as Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism.

So there are plenty of powerful theorists today who remain steadfast in their commitment to a nineteenth century German way of seeing democratic socialism as being entirely incompatible with religious socialism. Should the new socialists embrace this path? There seems to be good historical precedent for why this view makes a lot of sense.  As Dorrien observes, in the run-up to World War I, Christian Socialism was rightfully recognized as being “a patsy for nationalism, militarism, cultural chauvinism, and slurs against the too-Jewish, too Marxian, too atheistic, and too-threatening SPD.” That Dorrien’s biggest exemplar of German Christian socialism, Paul Tillich, who had been exiled to the United States, desired to be reinstated at Frankfurt in 1934 by telling the Nazi government that his work provided National Socialism with theoretical inspiration is, indeed, revealing: “As the theoretician of Religious Socialism I have fought throughout the years against the dogmatic Marxism of the German labor movement, and thereby I have supplied a number of concepts to the National Socialist theoreticians” (301). Dorrien does not dwell much on the fact that the other great Christian socialist of this era, Karl Barth, had a remarkable number of students who became ardent Nazis. The theologian Paul Silas Peterson’s recent book provides a detailed theological and historical contextual analysis of the parallels between Barth’s dialectical theology and National Socialism.1 What are we to make of the fact that Barth is perhaps more popular today with conservative American Evangelical theologians than ever before?

And yet plenty of the new socialists are not at all hostile to religion with some of the leading ones being downright devout such as Elizabeth Bruenig and Dawn Foster. Here is where we find some socialists attempting to combine certain Marxists insights with a kind of religious or secular ethical imperative. Take, for instance, recent comments by the essayist Pankaj Mishra. “The current appeal of socialism reminds us, inevitably and soberingly, not only of the scale of its historical defeat, but also its inadequacies—its hubristic faith in human mastery over nature and its simple-minded view of individual desires and motivations.”2 He goes on to say that “the set of ideas that emerged in response to a widespread distress of the working classes preserved the ethical core of Christianity against the Social Darwinist ethos of industrial capitalism. Any weakening of its principles of compassion and solidarity were bound to lead to large-scale suffering, as can be witnessed in our own age, when capitalism, somewhat defanged after 1945 by social-welfarism in the west and protectionist economies elsewhere, again turned feral, devastating the environment as well as workers’ rights.”3 All of which leads Mishra to suggest that the new socialism must entail a moral and spiritual renewal of society, which he says is embodied in the Green New Deal. This tradition of socialism, according to Dorrien, is much more in keeping with the longstanding revisionist socialism of nineteen century British socialism, which, was “from the beginning religion friendly and ideologically porous.” Its main representatives were William Temple, R.H. Tawney and G.D.H. Cole. The historian Tim Rogan, whose book Mishra reviewed favorably, has recently called for a revival of this tradition, specifically what he describes as the tradition of “the moral economists,” by which he specifically has in mind Tawney, Karl Polanyi and EP Thompson.4 Another way of putting this is that the withering of the welfare state is inseparable from the decline of moral economy.

So which way will the younger generation of socialists go in terms of religion? It seems like the question is up for debate, and if that is the case then Dorrien’s book, which explicitly tries to avoid contemporary politics, nevertheless offers much food for thought.  He locates the essence of democratic socialism in an “ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community” (4).  In this regard, the book seems to defend the Christian tradition of British socialism, especially since the book sides with Bernstein’s critique of Marxism, movement politics and the repeated claim that, even despite the young Marx, Marxism suffers from a degeneration of “moral-everything” and a fixation on collective ownership that wrongly identifies socialism with a totalizing goal.

Yet by elevating the ethical to the essential raises the foundational question of whether Christian socialism serves as a mere moral surrogate or conscience for Dorrien’s democratic socialist vision. In other words, an ethical imperative might insulate the Christian socialism that Dorrien aspires to separate from nationalism, racism, militarism and the like, but it could also end up going in the very direction that Unger mentions above and therefore disappear in the process. The fact that the book abruptly ends before the 1960s and thus fails to explain the tidal wave of secularization in Europe, and the causes for it that came crashing down on liberal Protestantism during this time, perhaps speaks to this.  There is a large debate, of course, on such causes, and Dorrien appears critical of the fideism of the Barthian revolt, and the kind of post-liberalism that arose in its wake, which blamed liberal Protestantism for its own demise. “The challenge” Dorrien observes, “for ethical socialists was to prevent socialism from gaining the world but losing it soul.” The question, then, is how can such a vision be revived and sustained especially given the appeal of  socialism today. Where are the ethical and moral sources of socialism to found? Here it is helpful to note that the British Christian socialists that Dorrien prefers had the backing of powerful institutions that in our time have declined in significance: specifically, the Anglican Church and a once central role for theology in university education.

What does all this mean for the relationship between the new socialism and religion today? If someone like Bernie Sanders has a shot at being elected, he is absolutely going to have to win over working class Christian swing voters in the Midwest, some of whom switched from Obama to Trump. Can there be a kind of Christian socialist movement that mobilizes this group for Bernie? It seems unlikely that they are going to give up their faith for secular socialism. Institutionally, I would have to imagine that there are plenty of religious socialists in divinity and theological schools across this country that have institutional means to reach this crowd. If something like religious freedom today is being used for conservative purposes then perhaps these Christian socialists should use it for their own political purposes, especially since there are institutional resources across the country that are uniquely available to them to reach working class people. Dorrien’s book offers a wealth of knowledge about the promises and pitfalls of such endeavors in the past, which is why it so important for thinking about the present moment.