Christianity, Proto-Marxism, and William Booth (Essay)

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

My argument is that The Salvation Army combined Christianity with a form of proto-Marxism through the Postmillennial beliefs of William Booth and his followers.

The historian Tom Holland makes the claim that Marxism is essentially rooted in Christian theology and culture.

Given the events of the last two centuries, the knee-jerk rejection in some cultures against even the mention of communism or Marxism, and the complexities of conspiratorial international politics, I thought that this is a theme worth exploring.

Is Christianity the intellectual, imaginative, and cultural parent of Marxism, or are they ultimately opposed? What are the links to The Salvation Army? Was William Booth a kind of Marxist? I’m going to try to have an answer by the end of this article.

There Is A Difference Between Marxism in Theory and Communism in Practice

We start by drawing a distinction between Marxism as a theory and the reality of Communism in practice.

The Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and other communist countries are all adaptations of Marx’s theories. They are not Marxist in a formal way. Marxism is not the same as the communist states that emerged in the 20th century.

Whether that is Leninist, Stalinist, or Maoist doctrine. Or how President Xi has been adapting the current communist dogma for China. They are all forms of communism. But they are not forms of Marxism. It’s similar to how a Christian and a Muslim are both Monotheists. But they believe and behave very differently.

Marxism Is Culturally Christian

The underlying theory of Marxism is deeply entrenched in Christian theology and culture. This might be a surprise for you. So hang in there, and I’ll explain.

There are some key ideas that Marxism gained from Christianity. People are inherently equal. History is moving towards a defined conclusion. The prophetic critique of oppressive power and wealth. An eschatological hope for the future.

These key elements of Marxist ideology are inherently Christian. Although they are from Christianity in a particular historical context.

The Christian Critique of Religion

This might seem strange given the harsh critique of religion that is found in Marx and other forms of Communism. It might be conceived that the attempts of Marxism to attack religion, or its claims to be purely scientific, is an Oedipal attempt to destroy the Christian and Jewish religious parentage of Marxism. However, that fails to grasp what is going on in Marxist theory.

Importantly, we need to remember that the critique of religion is inherent within Christianity. It is not original to atheists!

We find the critique of religion throughout the Christian tradition:

• The prophetic tradition of the Old Testament
• The Teachings and Acts of Jesus against the Temple and the Pharisees.
• The early monastic communities
• The mystics of the medieval age
• The radicals of the Reformation
• The Puritans of the 17th century
• In the work of Barth, Bonhoeffer, Möltmann, and the Radical Theology movement

Christianity has always critiqued itself.

Was The Church in Acts Proto-Marxist?

The start of the connection between Christianity and Marxism is in the Early Church. We see this described in Acts 4. The believers sold their belongings and lived together. Everything was held in kind for the benefit of the widows and orphans. So that anyone who needed anything would be taken care of.

This is similar to Marx’s famous dictum: “from each according to his ability to each according to their need.”

Unfortunately, there is little evidence for this lasting beyond the early days of the Church. However, this became the narrative which Church reformers would claim again and again when seeking the radical roots of Christianity.

An example of how much this was an element of the church is in Acts 5:1-11. Ananias and Saphira sell their property and give only some of the proceeds to the church, keeping some for themselves. They die because of it. This shows that, at least for some time, the Early Church maintained the practice of people selling their possessions to help others in need. They shared money and possessions in kind.

This could be traced back to Judas. He held the common purse for the disciples, even though he was a thief (John 12:6).

The Teaching of Jesus Provides Ideological Force to Marxism

The sayings and teachings of Jesus take us further in what might provide the theological foundation for Marxism.

Jesus Warns the Rich

In Luke 6:24-26, Jesus says, “Woe to the rich, for you have already received your reward. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry”.

In Matthew 20:16, Jesus says, “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

Also in Matthew 6:19, Jesus says, “Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth, but trust in the Father.”

In Luke 18:25, Jesus said: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

And in Luke 1:46-55, Mary sings about what her son will do. She said that he… “brings down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the humble, he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.“

These texts have been interpreted to mean a specific moment or incident. Some say they don’t apply to everyone, and that Jesus didn’t mean it literally. Despite this, there is a desire to make it true and to follow what Jesus said.

The Radical Socio-Economic Stance of the Early Church

In the Roman world, the rich and powerful assume they are the blessed and most worthy. This is true for some Christian traditions today. The basic assumption is that prosperity, wealth, power and status were all marks of blessing.

Into this assumption steps Jesus, who speaks against the rich and powerful and who spends his time with outsiders. Then comes the early Church with its transnational, multiethnic community of both slaves and free who lived together. They shared everything and called each other brother and sister, forming a new family.

This was not just a strange little religious group. This was a challenge to everything taken for granted in Roman culture and society. You don’t execute people for believing weird things; you execute people because you see them as a threat.

The First Monasteries and Marxist Communities of Practice

In the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, there was a move of Christians into the desert. They were critiquing the church working with the state. Also, they believed that many people were becoming Christian out of social capital and the desire to get ahead.

These early monasteries held everything in common. Made decisions together. Loved together. Supported each other. They saw themselves as intentionally attempting to create places where the kingdom of God could break into the earth in a foretaste of the coming kingdom.

Their focus on personal need for grace made for an intensely forgiving and welcoming community. Everyone’s previous background, whether courtier or farmer, was destroyed and put to death. So everyone was transformed into brothers or sisters.

Proto-Class War in Christianity – Are the Rich Automatically Sinful?

Then, in the 5th century, a kind of class war emerged out of Christian doctrine.

With the end of the Roman empire in sight and increasing corruption among the ruling classes, Christian theologians, especially in Britain and Ireland, looked back to the teachings of Jesus and considered whether they should be followed in practice.

Augustine vs. Pelagius

One example of this is with the British theologian (and eventual heretic) Pelagius. He thought that the whole of history is an expression of the war of the rich against the poor. If you get rid of the rich, the world will be like heaven.

For Pelagius and his followers, the problems in the world were due to the behaviour of the rich. The same behaviour the rich have always done. The rich needed to go, the wealth redistributed, and a more equal society created.

Pelagius believed in a radical version of free will, holding that people could save themselves through their moral decision-making. In contrast, Augustine said that as all of humanity is fallen, all you can hope for is that the rich keep on giving to the poor.

Augustine won the day. Pelagius was declared a heretic. But it is an example of how Christians tried to work out what the message of the Gospel meant in a society that did not match up to their hopes.

The inheritor of this tradition comes from the monasteries of the early and middle medieval period.

Monastic Communities

The monasteries were, to some extent, a retreat from the world. They were an attempt to live out the requirements of Christianity in a world that seemed to make it impossible.

How could a king be expected to turn the other cheek? How could a knight be expected to love their enemy and not persecute them? The monasteries retreated from the world to try to create a community where the Gospel could be lived out fully.

Everyone in the monastery was to live in poverty together, holding no personal possessions or wealth. When monks or nuns held positions of authority, they were elected for a purpose. To bring order to the community. They were seen as servants rather than as rulers.

This did not always work out in practice. Unfortunately, a great many monastic houses became horribly corrupt. But the original intention is another example of the kind of intellectual and imaginative attempts to realise the words of Jesus. It followed the model of the early Church, which provided the roots of Marxism.

Augustine’s theology of the fallibility of all people explains the failure of these systems. But that failure does not diminish the attempt to live out what the early Church seemed to do. Or to create a community based on equality and love.

The monasteries retreated from the world. But the next group went out into the world to try to make a change.

The Peasant’s Revolt – Theological Socialist-Utopian Revolutionary Movements

In 1381, the English Peasants’ Revolt took place. The peasants of south-east England marched against their landlords and nobles in an attempt to change the social and economic culture.

This revolt was inspired by the teachings of Jesus and had a distinctly eschatological thread. A priest called John Ball was at the heart of that revolt. He had been imprisoned just before the revolt for his preaching. But when the revolt began, he was released and preached to the peasants. He said:

When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning, all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondsmen from the beginning, He would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

John Ball and the Peasants

The revolt and the teaching of John Ball were predicated on the belief that everyone was equal from birth, from creation, and should be so today as well. The existence of oppressors, or nobles and gentlemen and lords, was an offence to God. It only came in through sin and unjust men.

The peasants were called to cast off bondage and recover liberty. A call for workers to unite and cast of their chains. The rhetoric is similar to that of Marx. The hope was that the workers and peasants would rise up to oppose their masters.

The monasteries retreated from the world. But the peasants’ revolt marked the start of a renewed age of Christian activism and radical action aimed at changing the world rather than leaving it behind.

Further examples can be seen in the radical fringes of the reformation. Here, an attempt was made to put the sayings of Jesus into reality.

The Radical Reformation Actually Tries to Follow the Gospel

The Hussite wars took place between 1468 and 1478, instigated by the rogue priest Jan Hus, who opposed the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and sought to bring about change in the society of what was then Bohemia.

During these wars, knights and peasants come together at a place called Tabor, a mountain named after the place where the transfiguration was supposed to have happened, and they build a huge city in preparation for paradise after judgment, where everyone will be equal.

Every member of every class in society was invited to unite under the Law of God. Who they were previously was put aside. They no longer belonged to their previous classes but to the new humanity of God.

The Anabaptists are at it again

Similarly, for the Anabaptists in Munster, who attempted to live in a city where the only rules were the Laws of God. Everyone was going to be equal. Everyone would serve each other out of love.

This lasted from 1534 to 1535 before they were destroyed by the Holy Roman Empire. They handed out pamphlets calling for the redistribution of wealth and invited the peasants from the surrounding land to come to the Jerusalem they were building.

Given that this took place shortly after the German Peasant’s War, which included issues over peasants leaving the land they owned, this was a radical move. The Munster Anabaptists died because they believed that people were equal in all ways and should live as if they were.

Thomas More writes Utopia

The Roman Catholic saint, philosopher, humanist, and puritan Thomas More had a vision for the future called Utopia, an analogy for a world in which heaven and earth had become one place.

Everyone would be equal here, sharing everything together, so that personal ownership, property, or belongings would no longer exist. It was a dream that died in the fires he lit to burn heretics, but it was still a dream of a world based on the teachings of Jesus when taken to their proper conclusion.

Primitive Evangelicals and Proto-Communist Communities

During the English civil war (technically probably the 3rd civil war at least) the group of evangelical radicals called the Diggers were a group agrarian dissidents who promoted a kind of Christian socialism.

They grew out of a group called the Levellers, who sought to ‘level’ society by increasing common land and reducing private ownership.

The Diggers!

The Diggers farmed common land, which gave them the name, and sought to establish small agrarian communities where everyone worked together for the common good. They based these ideas on the church described in Acts 4, which also led them to an early form of communal health insurance and to sharing resources.

The link between land ownership and the freedom of the individual was key to the Diggers’ interpretation of the Gospel. The created world was a free gift from God to all people, so no one person could own any land privately. It might be used by a person, but it belonged to everyone because it belonged to God. Wealth and land were to be shared for the good of everyone.

Postmillennialism and Marxism share the same Eschatological Worldview

The theological doctrine of postmillennialism, the idea that the power of the Gospel will eventually convert most or all of the world to Christ.

At this point, there will be a period of health, well-being, peace, prosperity and joy for about a 1000 years, after which Christ will return. One of the earliest writings on this doctrine dates back to the Savoy Declaration of 1658, but it came to prominence through the American revivalist movement and among Evangelicals with a strong commitment to the social gospel.

Those who held this view adopted a revolutionary approach, seeking to convert and transform the world to usher in that millennium and allow Christ to return. Postmillennialism was held by the early Salvation Army, inherited through Charles Finney, James Caughey, and Phoebe Palmer, and combined with the hopes of British Wesleyanism.

The millenial Army of William Booth

This is why the Army understood itself as needing to conquer the world, wanting to see everyone sanctified, and gave it the energy and drive to try to achieve this mass conversion. It did not survive the First World War, with the last postmillennial song published in the 1930s and the doctrine effectively removed from the Handbook of Doctrine by 1928.

Postmillennialism did not survive the Somme and could not have survived Auschwitz. However, it did drive the Army, and its effects can still be seen in the militaristic approach and dedication to converting the world. The links are clear to Marxism: its eschatological expectation of the perfection of the world, the need for a revolution, and a paradise after the revolution has been achieved.

Whilst the Booths were not necessarily keen on bringing down the rich, they very much wanted to raise up the poor and make a fairer, more equal society prior to the coming Kingdom. It is significant that some early Officers left to join the socialist workers’ movements.

Liberation Theology Was Influenced by Marxism

A further example, perhaps with stronger resonance, is the work of Liberation Theology in southern and Latin America.

Liberation theology emphasises the liberation of the oppressed and grew out of the poverty and oppression in parts of South America. It engaged in a socio-economic analysis to demonstrate a social concern for the poor, to the extent that it popularised the phrase that God has a ‘preferential option for the poor.‘

This was first said in 1968 by Jesuit General Pedro Arrupe. Liberation theology emerged from Roman Catholicism, gained adherents within Protestantism, and has since spread beyond South America to wherever there are oppressed people.

Growth of Contextual Theologies

Liberation theology informed the development of contextual theologies such as black theology or womanist theology. It recognises that the context in which theology is undertaken makes a difference to the theology. Liberation theology was originally criticised for being Marxist or communist, but this was later withdrawn, and Liberation was instead promoted within the Church.

Liberation theology explicitly draws from Marxist theory to engage with poverty, but the way it unites the radical attention to the poor and the revolutionary drive to change society is combined with the Christian Gospel of transformation and salvation by emphasising that God has a preference as seen throughout scripture and that preference is always for the poor and the oppressed over the strong and the powerful.

Salvation and Liberation Go Together

Christian doctrine teaches that all of humanity has fallen, still in their sin, so that the world as it is cannot become perfect. Humanity is always on a journey; there is a flow to history, with a beginning and a defined end. Then, in the middle of history, is the moment of revolution, when everything changes and becomes different.

For Christianity, this is the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ, which begins the great and permanent revolution of the kingdom of God. The history of the Bible in the Old and New Testaments all give examples of the prominence God gives to serving those in need, to raising up the weak and knocking down the powerful and rich.

Jesus teaches clearly about wealth and power. The examples given of the early Church show a community that lived with everything in common for the good of the community. Then, throughout Christian history, there are examples of how Biblical principles were attempted to be put into practice.

Christianity Created Marxism, but Marxism isn’t Christian On Its Own

There is clear evidence that Christian theology, imagination, and culture provided the roots from which Marxism has grown, even if that is not necessarily true of the forms that communism has taken as political nation-states.

Christianity is not Marxist, any more than Christianity is conservative, progressive, anarchist, liberal, democratic, theocratic or capitalist. But Christianity has given rise to Marxism in the same way that it created the background for democracy, social liberalism, historical conservatism, and certain elements of capitalism to emerge. But perhaps some of these children of Christianity more fully adhere to the history and truth of Christianity than others do.

Perhaps the fear of idealism, or commitment to the comfort of the present moment, is why literal interpretations of passages of scripture critiquing wealth and power and privilege tend to be rejected, whilst passages of scripture relating to ‘moral’ matters of sexual behaviour, dietary laws or purity cultures are more likely to be accepted as literal.

Perhaps there is a reason why those verses are more likely to be believed by people who are poor and oppressed and outsiders rather than those who are comfortable and content with their lifestyle and power.

The Salvation Army and Marxism

As part of The Salvation Army, a movement which has committed itself to serving the poor, transforming society, and which has a strong faith in the ultimate restoration of all things and a paradise to come, I think there is an element where perhaps we need to acknowledge the deep tradition of the Christian Church in relation to not only serving the poor but in seeking to transform society itself.

Not only in small steps but by living for the permanent revolution which Christ has ushered in here and now. Maybe there are more questions to ask.

A last thought.

One of the very first Franciscans, a companion of Saint Francis, was travelling when he saw the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles travelling along a road.

He ran up to the emperor, who paused, thinking the friar was going to offer a blessing. Instead, the friar shouted that the Emperor could not take his wealth to heaven, and he should throw his jewels into the river to add some brighter colours to the pebbles.

What use is power or wealth when the Emperor’s people were starving?

Is there something I need to throw into the river? Do you?

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