Estimated reading time: 33 minutes
There is a long thread that winds through the history of Christian faith and practice. It is the recognition that creation is a common treasury for humanity. That salvation is more than dealing with individual guilt. Salvation is social salvation.
This thread runs for 2,000 years, from the start of Christianity to The Salvation Army. In this article, I am tracing that thread.
This is not about shared traditions or doctrines. The people are going to talk about all coming from different parts of the Christian faith. They all shared a common conviction. That salvation also means salvation from poverty. They all have a shared spiritual genealogy. A shared family resemblance.
KEY POINTS
– The call to challenge poverty, land monopoly, and unjust structures is not a modern political import into Christianity. It runs through scripture and through more than fifteen centuries of Christian witness.
– I am tracing one genealogy from that tradition. One rooted in English history, and in the history of the Salvation Army. It is not the only genealogy. I am not claiming that it is.
What Kind of Argument am I Making?
I am making a theological argument. Not a party-political one.
I’m not claiming that any political party or economic system is the Kingdom of God. Although some are definitely closer than others.
I am claiming that the Christian tradition has consistently identified the hoarding of land and wealth, and the systems that enable it, as a theological problem, not just an economic one.
I, like the people in the article, believe that God sides with those who are being crushed. The arrangements which crush them are not divinely sanctioned. So salvation must reach into the material conditions of human life. This brings this article into conversation with Liberation Theology.
I am not saying that the people in this article were doing liberation Theology. Nor am I arguing that if they were alive today that they would be theologians off liberation. I am saying that liberation Theology gives us a lens to understand their theology. It helps to connect the dots across the centuries.
What Is This Tradition? Naming the Powers
We need a theological framework before we can do anything else.
Liberation theology
Liberation Theology is a way of doing theology that begins with the experience of the poor. It asks what God’s justice demands in response to that experience. At its heart is God’s preferential option for the poor.
This is the belief that God consistently identifies with those who are excluded and oppressed.
It is drawn from the Hebrew prophets and from the life of Jesus. But the Exodus story is perhaps the most important narrative for Liberation Theology. The story of the God who rescues his people from slavery. Christ’s work of salvation is the second Exodus.
Structural Sin
Liberation theology argues that poverty is not just a social problem. Rather, poverty is the result of structural sin.
Poverty is caused by more than the sins of bad individuals. Yes, the powerful and wealthy taking more than that create poverty. But poverty is also the result of sin embedded in systems, institutions, and arrangements that are unjust by design.
Walter Wink’s work shows why this matters theologically. Wink argued that when the New Testament speaks of “principalities and powers,” (Ephesians 6:12) it is not describing supernatural beings floating in the sky.
It describes the spiritual dimension of human institutions and systems.
“Every business corporation, school, denomination, bureaucracy, sports team — indeed, social reality in all its forms — is a combination of both visible and invisible, outer and inner, physical and spiritual.”
Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), p. 3.
In Wink’s summary of the Christian understanding of the Powers he wrote:
“The Powers are good. The Powers are fallen. The Powers must be redeemed.”
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 10
Some of the powers and principalities that provide the spiritual reality to our world have fallen.
But they were meant to be good.
They must be redeemed as well as us. Salvation is for individuals and for the powers. For me, and for the society I live in. Personal and social salvation.
Economic Systems Are Never Neutral
Wink shows that an economic system is not neutral. It has a spiritual dimension. This includes the land enclosure of the seventeenth century, the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, and the financialised capitalism of today.
An economic system shapes what people value. It affects what they fear and who they trust. These systems shape what people believe is possible. The system shapes people far more than people shape the system. These structures also shape our governments and cultures more than we often admit.
When that system serves the few at the expense of the many, Wink says it has become a Domination System.
The Domination System
The domination system is a web of interlocking powers and structures whose operating principle is “might makes right.” It means that those with power concentrate wealth in ever-tighter circles while crushing human dignity and value. Power is controlled in a few elites who self-perpetuate their class.
The system of fallen powers and principalities behind these destructive systems is the reason why political or social reforms are not enough to change things. They inform, create, and sustain each other. Wink writes:
Any attempt to transform a social system without addressing both its spirituality and its outer forms is doomed to failure.”
Wink, Engaging the Powers, p. 10.
Liberation Theology provides the theoretical background that allows us to make the most sense of this genealogical journey. It gives us the language to understand the work of these dissenting reformers. Christians who named the powers for what they are.
More Than Social Reformers
The characters in this story were not simply social reformers. They were engaging spiritual forces.
Each one discerned and named the Domination System of their own day. Then they insisted that it was incompatible with the God of the Exodus. The same God of the prophets, the God revealed in Jesus Christ. The God who brought “Good News to the Poor”. (Luke 4:18)
Salvation is More Than Personal Guilt – It is Social Salvation
Salvation includes salvation from the consequences of structural sin. It is salvation from hunger, homelessness, exploitation, abuse, and oppression. Salvation means the destruction of the powers.
It is the liberation of the whole person and the whole community. Salvation is not just about the individual. Salvation is structural. It is social salvation.
When Jesus started his ministry, he read from Isaiah 61. He was not describing a purely spiritual agenda. His mission was not about you or me going to heaven. He said:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
Luke 4:18-19
Release. Recovery. Freedom. Favour.
These are material realities. They are not spiritual metaphors. This is the reality of salvation. He sets the prisoner free and breaks every chain.
Social Salvation and the Year of Jubilee
When Jesus says the year of the Lord’s favour, he is not just being poetic. It is a reference to the Jubilee.
The Jubilee is a law in Leviticus 25. It has a central role throughout the prophetic tradition. The books of Jeremiah and Daniel depend on it for their prophetic power. Second Temple Judaism based its expectation for a Messiah on it. The Jubilee is a central part of Biblical salvation.
The Jubilee law commanded the cancellation of debts, the freeing of enslaved people, and the return of land to its original community.
Every fifty years.
Not just once. Every fifty years. Jesus claimed the Jubilee as the context for his message of salvation. The salvation Jesus brought would be like the jubilee. According to Daniel 9, when the Messiah came the exile would finally end she there would be a jubilee of jubilees.
The Jubilee and the Domination System
The Domination System is what the Jubilee was designed to interrupt. Structural salvation to undo structural sin. The jubilee was not about individuals. It was about social salvation.
Capitalism in its current form is a system that systematically transfers wealth and land value from the many to the few. It treats human beings as resources. Worse, it perpetuates the claim that this arrangement is natural, inevitable, or God-given.
Modern financialised capitalism is one of the Domination System’s most powerful expressions. Not least because it is just accepted as the assumed norm for a modern society.
This is not a political opinion. It is a theological description. It is part of the long tradition of Christian radicals who brought together the common treasury and social salvation, leading to The Salvation Army.
The Scriptural Ground: Common Treasury and Jubilee
Two passages of scripture underpin every movement in this family tradition. Both are from the book of Acts. To be fully understood, they need to be read together.
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
Acts 2:44-45
And…
“Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any of their possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”
Acts 4:32
These passages are the classic evidence for Christian socialism, anarchism, and solidarity movements. But Acts 2–4 is not a blueprint for a commune.
It is an example of a Kairos moment.
Kairos Moments and the Common Treasury
A Kairos moment is a charged break in ordinary history where the Holy Spirit breaks in. It reveals what human community looks like when the Spirit of God is genuinely at work. In that Kairos moment, we get a glimpse into the future reality of the Kingdom of God.
Private ownership is suspended. Need determines distribution. No one goes without while others accumulate. Everyone attends to each other. The weak are cared for. Poverty is destroyed. To paraphrase Julian of Norwich, all shall be well for all.
But Acts 2-4 are not simply examples of what the kingdom of God looks like in our world. These verses ask every generation an uncomfortable question.
Why don’t we live like this?
What does the gap between the history of Acts 2–4 and the reality of our society mean? Is the Spirit genuinely at work among us if we are not attending to each other? Why does the church still collude with these destructive systems?
Something is missing.
It is the Year of Jubilee
The challenge of Acts 2-4 is deepened when we turn to the Jubilee law:
“You shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.”
Leviticus 25:10
The Jubilee is rooted in a simple theological principle. The land belongs to God, not to those who hold the title deeds. We are temporary custodians. We have to think really carefully about any claim to ‘own’ land. This includes our obsession with national borders. The land beneath our feet is not ours. We see that a bit further on in Leviticus:
The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants
Leviticus 25:23
Landowners are stewards, not owners. Any arrangement that treats the earth as a commodity to be accumulated is theft from God. Therefore, we have a responsibility to and for the land. So we need to know and respect that the land is a gift. It is not something to control or acquire. We hold it in trust.
The belief that the earth is not a commodity but a commons held in trust is the theological root for what follows.
The divine ownership of creation underpins the belief in the common treasury of creation. The common treasury confronts the claims of landlords who use their ‘ownership’ to create wealth for themselves at the cost of the poor.
The person who builds a property portfolio for profit while people sleep on the streets offends God.
It also challenges us in our care for creation, which is one of The Salvation Army’s five mission priorities.
A Tradition Older Than England: The Patristic and Medieval Roots
Before we reach the English tradition of social salvation, we need to show how deep the roots go. It’s not a modern or ‘liberal’ affectation. It has a long history.
The “common treasury” is not a Protestant invention. Nor is it an English one. It runs from the earliest centuries of the church, through the great doctors of the East and West, through the medieval canon-lawyers, all the way to the founding of the Salvation Army.
The English figures we will meet did not invent it. They were recovering something that was being forgotten.
Martin of Tours: Christ in the Beggar (c. 316–397)
Martin of Tours is one of my favourite early saints. If you don’t have a favourite pre-fifth-century saint, you should really look into that.
Martin was a Roman soldier stationed near Amiens in Gaul. His story became one of the most widely told stories in the whole Christian tradition. It wasn’t a sentimental legend. His story was a theological statement. His life was a sign of God’s commitment to the poor.
Martin encountered a beggar shivering in rags, passed by every other soldier. He had nothing with him but his military cloak. He drew his sword and cut the cloak in two. Then he wrapped one half around the man.
That night, he dreamed that Christ stood before him, clothed in the half of the cloak he had given away. Christ said to the angels gathered around him:
“Martin, who is still only a catechumen, clothed me with this robe.”
— Sulpicius Severus, “Vita Sancti Martini” (Life of St Martin), c. 397, ch. 3; in F.R. Hoare (trans.), The Western Fathers (London: Sheed and Ward, 1954), p. 11.
Christ Is The Poor Stranger
This is a clear echo of Matthew 25. You meet Christ in the poor person. Not as a spiritual metaphor, but as a literal theological reality. You literally meet Christ when you serve someone in need. To pass by and ignore the beggar is to ignore Christ. When you clothe the naked, you clothe God.
Martin became Bishop of Tours and the father of monasticism in Gaul. He was one of the most beloved saints of the Western church. His feast day, the 11th of November, was kept across England for centuries before the Reformation.
John Ball and Gerard Winstanley (whom we will meet later) would have known his story. The belief that the poor person is Christ was not a radical new idea in 1381, when John Ball began preaching. It was fourteen centuries old.
Basil of Caesarea: The Rich Seize the Commons (329–379)
Basil, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (modern Turkey), preached his most powerful sermons on wealth and poverty during a severe famine in 368. He was direct, blunt, and cutting in his sermon, in which he diagnosed the problem.
“That is what the rich do. They seize common goods before others have the opportunity, then claim them as their own by right of preemption.”
— Basil of Caesarea, “I Will Tear Down My Barns,” §7, in C. Paul Schroeder (trans.), On Social Justice: St. Basil the Great (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), p. 68.*
And with equal bluntness:
“You are guilty of injustice to as many as you could have aided but did not.”
— Basil of Caesarea, “I Will Tear Down My Barns,” §7, in Schroeder (trans.), On Social Justice, p. 69.*
For Basil, poverty was not the result of laziness or bad luck. It is the result of the powerful appropriating what belongs to all.
This is similar to the argument that Winstanley will make against the enclosures. To take from the poor through hoarding and accumulation without consideration of people in need is an act of injustice, not an act of enterprise. It is how the systems of domination function.
This is Winstanley’s argument, made twelve centuries before Winstanley. It is Wink’s Domination System, named in the language of the Church Fathers.
Basil and the Basiliad
Basil also built what he called the Basiliad. It was a vast complex of hospitals, hostels, and workshops for the poor on the outskirts of Caesarea. He did not just preach about the common treasury. He tried to enact it. Faith was meant to lead to action, otherwise it just participates in that injustice.
Augustine, Pelagius, and the Debate That Shaped Everything (c. 400–430)
The debate between Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and the British monk Pelagius (c. 354–420) is usually remembered only about free will and original sin.
It was also a debate about wealth and structural injustice. Its outcome shaped how Western Christianity discussed poverty for the next 15 centuries. Its consequences still affect us today.
Pelagius and his followers held a radical position on wealth. An anonymous Pelagian tract, De Divitiis (On Riches), written around 410–420, put it simply:
“Get rid of the rich man, and you will not find a poor one.”
— Pseudo-Pelagian, “De Divitiis” (On Riches), c. 410–420, §12; in B.R. Rees (ed. and trans.), The Letters of Pelagius and his Followers (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1991), p. 183.*
Poverty is Created by the Rich
The Pelagian position was not simply that the rich should give more money away. The answer was not increased philanthropy. It was that wealth and poverty were structurally linked. The existence of great wealth itself caused poverty.
Poverty, in this view, is produced, not discovered. It is not an abstract and inevitable social condition. Poverty does not need to exist. It exists because people want to be rich. This is precisely what liberation theology calls structural sin.
Augustine responded by shifting the categories.
For Augustine, the spiritually “rich” and the spiritually “poor” were not identical with the materially wealthy and destitute. There were many wealthy people who were spiritually poor.
This is very similar to arguments I have heard, including those made by some Salvationists. That rich people are poor in other ways. They might be lonely, lost, and they need Christ just as much as the poor.
It is true that everyone does need Christ. But only one of those people is worrying about whether they will have something to eat, whether they can heat their homes, or whether they can afford their bills. And only one of those groups has contributed to the other’s poverty.
Augustine’s response to the Pelagians deflected the radical social critique of wealth into an inward register. Poverty was spiritualised, and the structural question was softened. It allowed the church to accommodate wealth without critiquing its consequences.
The Spiritualisation of Poverty
This is one of the most significant forks in the road of Christian social theology. The Augustinian settlement won. It shaped mainstream Western Christian thought on poverty for centuries.
But, thankfully, the Pelagian critique did not disappear. It surfaced, again and again, in the figures we are about to meet. The thread of jubilee salvation, of social salvation, continued throughout the centuries.
Gratian and the Natural Law Duty of the Rich (c. 1140)
Gratian is one of my favourite but mostly ignored historical figures. I’ve written about him before here:
Around 1140, Gratian, a monk and lawyer, compiled the Concordia Discordantium Canonum (Concordance of Discordant Canons). Thankfully, it was known simply as the Decretum. It served as the foundation of Catholic canon law and was the most influential legal text for the medieval Western church.
Gratian’s principle was that all systems of law, whether from bishops or kings, were subject to natural law. Natural law is grounded in love of neighbour. Any acts “contrary to natural law must be totally excluded.” This applied equally to kings, lords, and peasants, because neighbour-love is a fundamental law of reality.
Applied to wealth and poverty, this has radical implications. Implications we need to take seriously.
The Rich Owe The Poor
By the end of the twelfth century, canon-lawyers using Gratian’s framework drew a shocking conclusion. If someone poor and starving stole bread from a wealthy man, they were not guilty of a crime.
Actually, it’s even more shocking than that.
Under natural law, the starving person was only taking what was rightfully theirs. It was not the poor person who was starving but the wealthy lord who hoarded while others starved that stood in violation of God’s law.
see Concordia discordantium canonum, c. 1140, Distinctio 86; trans. Augustine Thompson and James Gordley, The Treatise on Laws: Decretum DD. 1–20 [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993].
For the development of this principle, see Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Application in England [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959].)
Recalling the Forgotten Principle
This is not a background moment in medieval Christianity. It is the mainstream medieval legal tradition. The principle of responsibility is built on the most authoritative body of canon law in the Western church.
We have forgotten this principle. Instead, we have seen philanthropy from the rich as something generous. A rich person who is charitable is seen as doing something extra for people.
What we should say is the rich are expected and required to support the poor. Not least because they have helped to create and sustain the conditions of poverty. Philanthropy is not a bonus. It is the minimum requirement.
Thomas Aquinas: The Universal Destination of Goods (1225–74)
Thomas Aquinas may seem like an unlikely source for this argument. But he is actually very helpful.
Aquinas built on Gratian and formulated the principle of the universal destination of goods. This means that while private property may be legitimate for practical purposes, the goods of the earth are ultimately ordered by God to the benefit of all humanity.
When accumulation exceeds need, the excess belongs by right to the poor.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, Q. 66, Art. 7; trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province [London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1920–42].)
John Ball and the Millenarian Imagination of Equality (1381)
John Ball (c.1338–1381) was an English priest whose preaching helped ignite the English uprisings of 1381. These uprisings were commonly known as the Peasants’ Revolt.
His sermons fused social equality, biblical imagery, and expectations of imminent upheaval. Ball was bringing a promised future reality into the present and calling people to make it a reality. His preaching united the hope of the Kingdom of God with the expectation that it could be realised here and now.
In Ball’s rhetoric, we can already hear themes that echo through later English dissent. From Lollardy and Wycliffite reform, to Winstanley’s Diggers. Even in a very different key, to The Salvation Army.
If the video doesn’t work, go here; it’s worth a watch.
When Adam Delved and Eve Span
The most famous text associated with Ball is the sermon traditionally preached at Blackheath in June 1381, preserved in later chronicles and modern editions. It opens with the line:
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.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that Ball actually preached that himself at Blackheath. However, it is almost certainly drawn from his preaching on other occasions.
Ball argued that if God had intended some to be slaves and others free:
“he would have appointed who would have had any bond and who free,”
Therefore, Ball preached that “Now the time has come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may, if ye will, cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.“
To Change the World
Ball and his supporters believed that “imminent and dramatic social and political upheaval” was about to happen. They believed that the summer of 1381 was the divinely appointed time for the commons to enact God’s plan.
Their theological grounding came from the parable of the Wheat and Tares (Matthew 13). But most importantly, they drew from the passages in Acts we started with. Everything was to be held in common.
This is a millennial social theology. It called for the removal of oppressive elites, the levelling of hierarchies, and the creation of a more equal Christian commonwealth. This was part of God’s work in history.
The Prototype of Dissent
John Ball is often linked with John Wycliffe and the Lollard movement. However, he had already been preaching dissent for at least a decade before Wycliffe attracted attention.
Some later hostile sources claim that Ball taught the doctrines of Wycliffe, and especially social equality. Ball certainly shared many of Wycliffe’s beliefs, especially the critique of the church’s wealth. But Ball predated Wycliffe. Their styles and motives were distinct, but they were part of the same tradition of religious and social dissent.
Ball’s revolt can be seen as an early eruption of the same anti‑hierarchical, reforming spirit that would later lead to Lollardy and Protestantism. The same spirit would inspire the unlikely figure of Gerard Winstanley.
Gerard Winstanley, the Diggers, and the Common Treasury
Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676) was the leader of the True Levellers. These were later called the Diggers because they lived in what was effectively a commune. Winstanley is one of the most radical theological voices of the English Revolution.
In 1649, amid the social upheaval following the Civil War, Winstanley and his companions began cultivating common land at St George’s Hill, Surrey. This was a practical demonstration of the belief that God intended the earth to be shared by all. Their short‑lived experiment is one of the most striking attempts to live out a Christian, egalitarian commonwealth ‘from below.’
Their egalitarian community posed such a threat to the establishment of church and state that they were attacked, killed, and persecuted.
The Diggers’ Beliefs and Practices
Winstanley’s central conviction was that God, whom he frequently called “the great Creator Reason”, had made the earth for the common good, not for private domination. We can note here that Winstanley became increasingly heterodox in his beliefs as he grew older. He was certainly an unorthodox Christian in his doctrinal positions. I would say he was fairly heretical in some areas. But his praxis lived out the truths of the Gospel in a way more faithful than that of most of his contemporaries.
In The True Levellers Standard Advanced, he said:
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason made the Earth to be a Common Treasury for all, both Beasts and Men” (Winstanley 1649, p. 1)
This “Common Treasury” was not a metaphor but a mandate. Enclosure, landlordism, and economic hierarchy were, for Winstanley, direct violations of God’s intention for creation.
Against the Enclosure Systems
Enclosure was the system by which the landed gentry parcelled off what used to be common land to become private land. They then enclosed it and prevented the commoners from accessing it. It controlled the land and, by privatising common land, effectively led to the destruction of self-sufficient peasants. Instead, it created the proletariat, in which commoners were required to sell their labour for wages.
The Diggers, therefore, pulled down hedges, collectively cultivated land, and attempted to live out a form of agrarian communism grounded in Scripture and reason.
Winstanley’s anthropology was equally radical. In The New Law of Righteousness, he said:
“Every single man, male and female, is a perfect creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe dwells in man to govern the Globe” (Winstanley 1649b, p. 6).
If the same divine Spirit dwells in all, then no person has a God‑given right to rule over another. Social hierarchy is not a divine order but a human distortion of what God intended. While we may not say that God dwells in everyone, we can say that everyone is made in God’s image. The same principle then applies. As everyone is made in God’s image, no one has the inherent right to rule over others.
A Seventeenth‑Century Precursor to Liberation Theology
It is anachronistic to say that the Diggers were based on liberation theology. However, Winstanley’s writings display several recognisably liberationist themes. These include:
1. Reading Scripture from the perspective of the poor. Winstanley and his group claimed ownership of scripture. They believed that they could understand and explain scripture and did so as a group.
2. Justice as the form of true worship. They very much held that salvation also included the restoration of right relationships in the world. The rich and landed classes were taking from the poor. Ownership of land, especially in enclosure, was taking what rightly belonged only to God.
3. Communal praxis as revelation. The Diggers strongly believed that God was at work in their community. Not only at work, but also revealing the coming Kingdom. The way the Diggers lived together revealed what they believed about how the Kingdom of God works.
The Common Treasury and the Politics of Creation
The “Common Treasury” functions as Winstanley’s central theological theme. It included:
A doctrine of creation.
The earth is given by God/Reason for the flourishing of all creatures. It belongs to no one person and should not be acquired for the use of individuals, no matter their class and wealth. The land is a gift, and it is a holy responsibility to manage it well.
A doctrine of sin.
Enclosure and class domination arise from “selfish imaginations”. This includes the behaviour of churches that restrict how people can belong and engage with the body of Christ. He described them as ‘particular churches’ which were like enclosures of land, hedging in some and hedging out others. He particularly applied that to the withholding of sacraments by the churches. The common treasury in this sense is both economic and sacramental.
A doctrine of redemption.
The restoration of common ownership is part of God’s renewing work. Redemption was not just about sin; it was about the regeneration of creation. This meant the renewing of the relationship between humanity and creation, principally through the ending of enclosures and private ownership of land and belongings. Salvation was personal, social, economic, and environmental.
We can see echoes of the earlier traditions of natural law and the structural sin of poverty, as well as John Ball’s attacks on the abuses of power by the landed classes. Winstanley’s movement is another thread in the tapestry of dissenting economic spirituality that called for the transformation of society, not just individual hearts.
Henry George, Land, Poverty, and the Salvation Army
Henry George (1839–1897) was one of the most influential political economists of the nineteenth century. His landmark book Progress and Poverty (1879) sought to answer a question that troubled him deeply.
Why does material progress so often intensify poverty rather than eliminate it?
He thought it was because of the land monopoly and the unearned income derived from it. This belief became the foundation of the “single tax” movement. That movement shaped social reformers worldwide. Reformers, including Frank Smith, the man who would drive William Booth towards social reform.
The Political and Social Economics of Henry George
In Progress and Poverty, George argued that poverty persists because of structural injustice in land ownership.
He described the paradox at the heart of industrial society in this way:
“The association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times” (George 1879, p. 9).
For George, the cause of this question was clear. As societies develop, the value of land rises. Not because of the landowner’s labour, but because of the growth of the community. Increased need necessarily increases value. Landowners, therefore, capture unearned wealth, while workers and tenants face rising rents and declining real wages.
George wrote:
“The increase in land values is the cause of the increase in poverty” (George 1879, p. 257).
Rent extraction without productive contribution was, for George, the root of systemic inequality. Poverty was not just a matter of individual wealth. The whole system of land capital created a structure of poverty.
The Land Value Tax: George’s Proposed Remedy
George’s solution was the single tax on land values. This was a levy on the unimproved value of land. This was specifically not a tax on buildings, labour, or capital. Just on the unimproved and undeveloped land.
It would naturally affect the rich and the landed gentry much more than the commons. George argued that because land value is created by society, not by individual owners, its economic rent should be returned to society.
“We must make land common property… by taking rent for public uses” (George 1879, p. 406).
This tax would:
– eliminate speculative holding of land
– reduce inequality by socialising unearned land rent
– allow the abolition of other taxes that penalise labour and production
– fund public services without discouraging economic activity
A land tax was not a new idea. Before the creation of income tax, almost all taxes were land taxes, which naturally affected the wealthy more than the poor. George believed that a new land tax would create a just society. The kind of just society where every person could access the means of livelihood.
The need to pay rent was what ultimately drove the worker into poverty. If the worker owned their land. Or the land was held in common. Then a whole structure of poverty would be dismantled. It was the landlords and large landowners who kept the structure in place. Taxing them would help to end it.
Links Between Henry George and The Salvation Army
Henry George was not a Salvationist. But his ideas directly influenced William Booth and the early Salvation Army. This is particularly true for their social reform programmes.
The Darkest England Scheme (1890) proposed land colonies and agricultural settlements as a remedy for unemployment and urban destitution.
The establishment of Hadleigh Farm Colony is fairly well known. Less well-known was the Boxted smallholding scheme. Hundreds of acres of land were acquired by the Army. The intent was to provide work and settlement opportunities for the poor.
The Boxted scheme, for example, involved:
“Priory Farm and Old House Farm and 400 acres of land… acquired [by the Salvation Army]” to settle Londoners on smallholdings (Hadleigh & Thundersley Community Archive n.d.).
While the Army did not adopt or campaign for George’s single tax proposal, it was influenced by the broader Georgist critique of land monopoly.
The Salvation Army’s early agricultural colonies were therefore practical expressions of a Georgist‑adjacent social theology, even if Booth’s solutions were more paternalistic and less explicitly economic.
Chartism, land, and cooperative villages
Chartism is absolutely fascinating for me. William Booth considered himself a Chartist in his early years. Without Caughey’s intervention, Booth may well have entered radical politics rather than radical religion.
Chartism is usually remembered for the six points of the People’s Charter. But for many working‑class radicals, the “land question” was just as central.
Between the 1840s and early 1850s, Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor developed an ambitious plan to resettle industrial workers on smallholdings. They used a national land company funded by working‑class subscribers to purchase land. This land was used for a semi- operative village.
This experiment in land reform and semi‑cooperative village life sits in a long genealogy that runs back to Gerrard Winstanley, through Henry George, and forward into the land‑colony schemes of The Salvation Army.
The Chartist land plan and the National Land Company
After 1842, Feargus O’Connor turned from purely political agitation to a land‑based strategy. In 1845, he launched what became the Chartist Co‑operative Land Company. It was later renamed the National Land Company (NLC). The aim was to buy estates and divide them into small farms. They would then settle urban workers on the land.
This would remove the poor from cities and give them a fresh chance. Like Ball, Winstanley, and Booth, returning to the land was understood as the answer to poverty.
The scheme was simple in outline. Sell up to 100,000 shares to working‑class investors. Use the money to purchase estates. Then allocate plots of two to four acres by lottery.
Between 1846 and 1848, the NLC attracted around 70,000 shareholders, raised over £100,000, and acquired about 1,118 acres across several sites. In reality, only about 250 smallholders were ever settled before the company collapsed amid legal and financial difficulties. It was later dissolved by Act of Parliament in 1851.
Feargus O’Connor’s Collective Treasury
O’Connor’s land plan was not just a welfare scheme. It was a political–economic strategy. He believed that land monopoly underpinned both political exclusion and industrial exploitation.
The 1832 Reform Act had extended the county voting franchise to certain landholders and leaseholders. So O’Connor reasoned that giving workers small freehold plots would both secure a livelihood and qualify them to vote. The more working-class people who could vote, the more likely it was to get political reformation.
Land and Political Reforms Go Together
In a widely cited article, “The Land! Its Value: And How to Get It” (1844), O’Connor attacked the way private property and political patronage reinforced each other:
“Patronage, which is a consequence of, and springs from, the Large Farm System, withholds the land from you; while the law of primogeniture, and the barbarous law of settlement and entail, prevents such as are able from buying small allotments of land… [T]he land of a country belongs to society; and … society, according to its wants, has the same right to impose fresh conditions on the lessees that the landlord has to impose fresh conditions upon a tenant at the expiration of his tenure. Society is the landlord, and as society never dies, the existing government are the trustee.” (O’Connor 1844, cited in Chase 2013)
Chartist land politics were a serious attempt to challenge the social power of large estates. They wanted to re‑imagine citizenship through access to land.
The NLC’s holdings were divided into individual plots. However, the estates functioned as semi‑cooperative villages. Land was purchased collectively. The settlements were imagined as model communities of independent smallholders, combining economic self‑reliance with mutual support.
O’Connor argued that resettling surplus factory workers on small farms would raise wages in the towns. This was because it would reduce the labour pool and restore dignity to workers by giving them direct access to the means of subsistence.
The Family Resemblance
Feargus O’Connor did not explicitly invoke Gerrard Winstanley. However, the family resemblance is striking. Winstanley’s insistence that land belongs to the whole community finds an echo in O’Connor’s claim that “the land of a country belongs to society” and that the government, as trustee, may impose new conditions on landholders. Both understood the idea of the common treasury.
Henry George’s later analysis in Progress and Poverty (1879) offered a more systematic economic account of why land monopoly produces poverty amid progress.
O’Connor’s land plan differed from George’s single‑tax proposal. O’Connor wanted to redistribute land ownership, and George to tax land values. But both shared a conviction that structural injustice in landholding lies at the root of modern poverty.
In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), proposed a network of city, farm, and overseas colonies to address urban destitution. Booth did not adopt the Chartists’ lottery model or George’s single tax, but his land colonies share key assumptions with both.
Early Salvation Army social reform, land, and liberation
The early Salvation Army tried to redesign the social and economic conditions that produced destitution. By 1890 The Salvation Army had developed a programme of social salvation. This included land colonies, training centres, and experiments in model village‑style communities.
Frank Smith, Henry George, and the birth of the Social Wing
Frank Smith (1854–1940) bridged radical economics and Salvationist practice.
A Christian socialist and early Salvationist, Smith became the first leader of the Army’s Social Wing after returning from service in the United States. On the voyage to America, he read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. This introduced him to Georgist ideas. Those ideas became the unsaid theoretical influence on the Army’s reform work.
In 1890, Smith produced the writing notes and structure for In Darkest England and the Way Out, which W. T. Stead then wrote. William Booth had the final say but was less involved in the book’s creation.
George’s analysis that poverty persists because land values, created by society, are privately appropriated as rent shaped Smith’s imagination for social reform. Smith drew from this structural lens to influence The Salvation Army’s social work. He emphasised that poverty was not simply an individual failure but a product of unjust economic arrangements.
Smith resigned twice before becoming a Labour MP.
“In Darkest England and the Way Out”: colonies and social salvation
In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) is the foundational text of Salvationist social work. It proposed a network of “City Colonies,” “Farm Colonies,” and “Over‑Sea Colonies”, each conceived as:
“self‑helping and self‑sustaining communities” providing “food, work, and shelter for the needy.”
The scheme combined relief with reformation. People would be rescued from urban “Darkest England”. Then, when ready, they would be taken to structured communities where work, discipline, and Christian worship were integrated.
The colonies were imagined as communities in which people contributed labour and received training. They were not meant to be one‑way charitable institutions.
At the same time, the design is paternalistic. The Army owns the land, sets the rules, controls in- and outflows, and defines “rehabilitation” in moral and spiritual terms. The poor were not co‑designers of the scheme. They were its objects.
Resonances and tensions with liberation theology
Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation famously describes liberation theology as a movement that “made an option for the poor, placing the exploited, the alienated, and the economically wretched at the centre of a programme” of theological reflection and social transformation.
Several features of early Salvation Army social work resonate with this:
– Preferential concern for the poor. The Army was raised by God to serve the most vulnerable in our society. Specifically, those in poverty.
– Structural analysis. The Army didn’t just react. It understood it was fighting against structural sin, not just trying to save individuals.
– Praxis and reflection. The Army brought together faith, practice, and reflection. Each informed the other.
Yet there are also sharp differences:
– Paternalism vs. participation: Liberation theology insists that the poor are subjects of their own liberation. The Salvation Army colonies largely treated them as recipients of a pre‑designed programme. Decision‑making remains with Booth and his officers, not with colonists.
– Evangelical moralism: Booth’s scheme ties social uplift to conformity with Salvationist moral codes. Liberation theology is more suspicious of using aid as leverage for religious conformity.
– Limited structural challenge: Whereas George attacks land monopoly and Gutiérrez speaks of “structural sin,” the Army’s programme works within existing property relations.
Conclusion
Early Salvationist social reform can be read as a proto‑liberationist practice with evangelical and paternalist limits. It saw poverty as structural, centred its mission on the destitute, and experimented with land‑based alternatives.
However, it stopped short of empowering the poor as agents of political transformation. Nor did it challenge the wider economic order in Georgist or later liberationist terms.
There has been a thread woven throughout Christian history. A thread where the common treasury and social salvation were brought together. This thread eventually leads to The Salvation Army.
I am not saying that every person or every movement I have explored is directly related to each other. I am saying that they are part of the same family.
The family of dissenting and reforming Christians who took seriously what the Kingdom of God looked like in practice. A family which understood poverty was the result of structural sin. The family that understood salvation to be social salvation. Eventually, that family grew to include The Salvation Army.
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