Whether that is achievable, however—or as achievable as it should be—I am not prepared to opine. In America, even democratic socialists often have only a very hazy notion of what the full spectrum of socialist thought has been in the past, and what it might be in the future. There is always the likelihood that much of the mainstream of American democratic socialism will ultimately turn into just another form of classically liberal social philosophy. I have, in an inconstant and largely flirtatious way, been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America over the years. I admit, however, that certain recent tendencies of the DSA make me suspect that, as time passes, it will look less and less like the kind of pro-labor, anti-capitalist organization it purports to be, and more and more like simply another incarnation of sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist, pro-choice American liberalism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated neuroses), which I like no better than sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist, libertarian American conservatism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated resentments). Just as we Americans have succeeded in turning “Christianity” into another name for a system of values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have every confidence that we will find a way to turn “socialism” into just another name for late-modern liberal individualism. I still support most of the genuinely communitarian aims of the democratic-socialist movement. But, in the end, it is that tradition of Christian socialism mentioned above to which I remain loyal. And I do not know if it could now flourish here.

As I have already noted, that tradition was never, especially in the Anglophone world, a centralizing philosophy. It was friendly neither to the absolute state nor to ungoverned business. Neither was it even a form of political “leftism” (however one might define that term). It emanates from a time when the political leanings we think of as right or left, conservative or progressive, had not yet coalesced into anything like the present arrangement of ideological or class allegiances. At times, its tacit social vision could be positively quaint. Thomas Hughes seemed convinced that social amelioration could be achieved only by new generations of Christian gentlemen devoted to the common good out of, in part, a sense of noblesse oblige. The single most influential figure in the British tradition of Christian socialism (though he himself never settled on a single official term for his political and economic philosophy) was John Ruskin, who was a convinced Tory monarchist. As far as he was concerned, a principled Christian “communism”—by which he meant not state ownership of property, but a prior communal claim upon the goods of the earth and upon excess resources by those in need—was the only possible civilized and truly charitable alternative to modern liberalism, whether fiscal or social. He opposed classical liberalism for the simple reason that he thought it created social injustices of a kind clearly contrary to the explicit dictates of Christian conscience.

Inasmuch as the two major political parties in America are both “liberal” in the classical sense—the one devoted a bit more to something like John Stuart Mill’s economic philosophy, the other a bit more to something like his social philosophy, and neither of them to the communal ethics of Christian tradition—it is hard for most Americans to make sense of such views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.

Even so, anyone familiar with the oldest and richest stream of real socialism in the Anglophone world understands that it was in large part a Romantic rebellion against modernity, a longing for a truly Christian understanding of community, an essentially nostalgic belief in the hierarchy of those subsidiary estates and institutions that naturally evolve out of religious, communal, and social life. At times, it proved susceptible to a mistily idealized view of the past—the Middle Ages especially—but it was essentially a Christian-humanist protest against the inhuman scale of both government and industry in the late modern age. It was not a rejection of free enterprise, but rather a critique of a system of enterprise that had destroyed the free guilds of late medieval Europe, disenfranchised individual craftsmen, produced a system of wage slavery, allowed the large-scale division of labor to disenfranchise workers, turned labor into a commodity to be traded or a natural resource to be exploited, accepted the gross superstition of the “iron law of wages,” eliminated the common lands and goods once recognized as the universal patrimony of free citizens so as to make state and capital the sole proprietors of civic wealth, radically reduced legally recognized community usufructs, removed both the means and the profits of production from the possession of laborers and yielded them over to an investment class of owners, enlarged the central state and its power of taxation, displaced the center of society from the realm of the sacred to that of commercial consumption, and created a rapacious debt-and-credit system that is little more than the chronic legal spoilation of the poor by private lenders.

This kind of socialism proposed a use of civic wealth for common human ends precisely in order to restore the Christian order of values—the Christian law of love of neighbor and faith in God’s charity—that modernity has displaced by its reliance instead on the forces of self-interest. In fact, it presumed the radical notion that charity is a more original and fertile impulse of the human soul than greed is. It was an attempt to preserve the best of the moral inheritance of Christian ethical beliefs in an age when Christian civilization had been—so the proponents of the movement believed—eclipsed by an ethos that prizes personal acquisition over communal love. It was, in short, a deeply Christian revolt against those tendencies of post-Christian modern liberal economics and social philosophy that tend toward the destruction of landscapes and cityscapes and inscapes, by reducing or subordinating everything to the impersonal mechanisms of production and consumption.

What remains of that tradition now I cannot say with any certainty. To some extent, it was always a dream of an impossible future sustained by fantasies of a nonexistent past. And some of its aspects, however well-intended—those overly rosy views of class distinction, for instance, or that gauzily gleaming pre-Raphaelite medievalism—are not worth preserving or reviving, except perhaps in radically qualified form. But I honestly cannot imagine how anyone who takes the teachings of Christ seriously, and who is willing to listen to those teachings with a good will and an open mind, can fail to see that in the late modern world something like such socialism is the only possible way of embodying Christian love in concrete political practices. I have heard American Christians claim (based on a distinction unknown in the New Testament) that Christ calls his followers only to acts of private largesse, not to support for public policies that provide for the common welfare. What they imagine Christ was doing in publicly denouncing the unjust economic and social practice of his day I cannot guess. But it should be obvious that certain moral ends can be accomplished only by a society as a whole, employing instruments of governance, distribution, and support that private citizens alone cannot command. We, as individuals, can often aid our brothers and sisters only by acting through collective social and political structures. I admit that the New Testament makes still more radical demands upon Christians (Matthew 5:42; 6:3; 6:19–20; Luke 6:24–25; 12:33; 14:33; 16:25; Acts 2:43–46; 4:32; 4:35), and I would certainly agree that it is just as bad to relinquish all one’s moral responsibilities to the state as it is to promote policies that do not oblige human government to obey the laws of divine charity. I know that Christ in the Gospels calls his followers to a different kind of “politics” altogether—for want of a better term, the politics of the Kingdom. Of this, even the wisest, most compassionate, and most provident form of democratic socialism could never be anything more than a faint premonitory shadow.

Even so, a shadow is not nothing.