Socialism means the denial of private property to a great or even total degree. It means the use of State power—violence inherent in the power of the sword and gun—to redistribute property according to the dictates of some officer or committee of officers. Violence is therefore inherent in Socialism. Why some Christians see this as a means of fulfilling God’s will defies both reason and revelation.
The “Christian” Wedge
The Social-Gospel historian C. H. Hopkins notes that Unitarians formed the seedbed of the Christian Socialist movements and planted some early seeds in it. To those familiar with the liberalism associated with Unitarianism, that socialistic activism grew out of it will come as no surprise. I would like to mention the links between socialism and violence in the context of allegedly Christian activism. In short, since violence is inherent in socialism, “Christian” socialism—whether its proponents call it by that name or not—will necessarily rely on violence as well. To the extent it relies on violence beyond the few instances God’s law allows the civil ruler to exact punishment, to that extent—which is nearly the whole of it—we must understand Christian socialism to be anti-Christian in essence.
As early as 1826, although the idea of redistribution of property already abounded, few Christian or Unitarian representatives had begun calling for State coercion to effect it. Instead, Unitarian ministers (and others) organized private Christian social services, such as Joseph Zuckerman’s “ministry at large.” In fact, some Unitarians vehemently defended the sanctity of private property. Harvard Professor of Moral Philosophy Francis Bowen wrote in 1856, “No nation has ever been discovered on earth, so low and brutal in their inclination and habits, so destitute of any idea of right, that the institution of property, to a greater or lesser extent, does not exist among them.”
The literary critic and radical abolitionist William Ellery Channing some twenty years earlier had argued from the principle of private property against socialist movements among workers in Boston. He urged them not to be “so insanely blind to their interests [or] so deaf to the claims of justice and religion,… as to be prepared to make a wreck of the social order, for the sake of dividing among themselves the spoils of the rich.” Channing, in fact, argued against the ownership of slaves by acknowledging private property as a
sacred law, not merely a civil law. In this sense, some of the pro-slavery crowd subverted society by making property rights (and thus the right to own slaves) dependent upon civil legislation:
Of all radicals, the most dangerous, perhaps, is he who makes property the creature of law; because what law creates it can destroy. If we of this Commonwealth have no right in our persons, houses, ships, farms, but what a vote of legislation or the majority confers, then the same masses may strip of them all.
This devotion of the sanctity of individual property unfortunately did not stick. Channing’s nephew, William Henry Channing, who had moved into Transcendentalism while remaining a Unitarian minister, had a greater appetite for government force and even violence if necessary to bring in a socialistic society. In 1848 he published
The Christian Church and Social Reform—his opinion that a collectivist society would be the literal fulfillment of Christ’s kingdom on earth. When pulpits and scholarship would not be enough to persuade, the radical nephew would set the tone for revolutionary activism: “The next thing is guerilla war … at every chance.”
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Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
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