A Brief Excerpt from Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Here's an excerpt from a book I'm currently reading called Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left by Vaneesa Cook. It explores the lives of a certain group of Christians she labels "spiritual socialists," who believed that the Kingdom of God can be brought on Earth, creating a more equitable society, through the practices of Jesus: caring for the poor, breaking bread, and sharing wine. Their acts and views are both political and spiritual. Overthrowing the capitalistic order by revolutionizing the heart. This book has been illuminating to me, challenging me to imagine the possibility of the Kingdom of God, that a revolution does not start with and runs on violence and top-down legislation, but from bottom-up movements, by treating each other better each day, by forming a community that becomes the microcosm of the envisioned Kingdom of God.

The narrative of spiritual socialism reveals the social thought of left religious radicals who refused to measure progress on a scale of issue-oriented political gains, church attendance, or denominational conversions. Their tradition must be traced along a much onger arc of continuous struggle for socioreligious renewal throughout the mid-to late twentieth century. Socialism, in the minds of these activists, did not fail in either the United States or the world; it simply had not been afforded the time required for it to take root and permeate human relations. Socialism as a spiritual project, they predicted, could take millennia to achieve. Their patience, however, had political consequences, making them less apt to compete for sensational media headlines on hot-button topics such as abortion and affirmative action. What's more, their message of a selfless life lived for others was much harder to advocate than the individualistic and sometimes materialistic peddling of the religious Right...

By understanding the unique vision of spiritual socialists, who believed they could create the foundation for a better world, historians may break out of the standard "rise and fall" declension narratives that have dominated politically centered studies of both the American Left and U.S. religion. Spiritual socialists conceived of socialism as decentralized, religious way of life, not as an economic system or political program for proletarian revolution. Consequently, they regarded political "failures" to achieve power or affect policy as temporary setbacks. They regarded campaigns for political power during World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and within the Communist Internationals as misapplications of moral values. They focused instead on the much longer struggle to build small socialist communities that would prefigure the coming Kingdom of God on earth, which they understood to be an ideal, spiritualized state in which socialist values - equality, peace, and cooperation - become normative social practice. Their approach to international relations, therefore, offers and alternative to the recently renewed interest in conservative religion and liberal Christian realism. They did not all advocate absolute pacifism, but they did believe, contrary to conservative evangelists like Billy Graham and Christian realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr, that human virtues and moral values could reshape international relations and redeem a sinful world. They argue that a religious way of life learned in small, local, and cooperative communities would eventually transform the global landscape through cultural reconstruction.

Cook, V. (2019). Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 5, 9-10.