At first glance, one would think that there is not much to report about the encounter between Christianity and Marxism in the United States, as freedom for capital is nearly unchallenged there and determines the horizons not just of the economy but also of culture and religion. Politically, too, the US is solidly on the side of capitalism. Both major political parties — Democrats and Republicans — support variations of capitalism, and the political spectrum extends alarmingly far to the right, always favouring capital. Nationalist and white supremacist tendencies, such as those that have been evolving under Donald Trump’s two administrations, are also deeply wedded to the metamorphoses of capitalism2. Less well known, however, is that US political shifts to the right have often been challenged by political shifts to the left. At the most basic level, this means that there are some movements towards the left within the established parties, as demonstrated by former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Both Sanders and Ocasio Cortez make no secret of their social democratic and democratic socialist leanings, and both have gained the support of large parts of the population, including many progressive Christians. In addition to political alternatives, economic alternatives to capitalism exist in the United States as well, such as a growing movement of worker cooperatives and so-called ‘worker self-determined enterprises’3.
Of particular importance in the United States are social movements, only the largest of which are known in Europe, including the classic Civil Rights movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and more recently Black Lives Matter. In addition, workers’ movements in the US are not insignificant. People of faith have been visible components and instrumental in all of these developments, although the press often obscures the full extent of this participation4. In addition, alternative political parties exist, such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and several others5. Dedicated Christians are in all of them — the DSA sponsors an active religion and socialism working group as well as a website6, and the CPUSA has a religion commission that is operated by people of faith7. More recently, an independent Institute for Christian Socialism has also been launched8.
Despite all these connections between Christians and the left, the involvement of Christians in the political right is more intense, louder, and better known. Much of this has to do with substantial financial and political support for the Christian right, starting in the Great Depression, when US corporations wanted to secure conservative Christian support as a counterweight to the progressive ferment favoured by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, as well as the growth of the labour movement and progressive religious initiatives9. More recently, Christian nationalism in particular has gained momentum under the administrations of Donald Trump. More than 80 percent of white Evangelicals voted for him in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and Trump has returned the favour by giving them special attention.
Still, US history is inconceivable without taking account of progressive Christian influences, including their substantial involvement in the abolition of slavery, the struggle for suffrage and other rights for women and minorities, the struggle against racism and environmental destruction, and the struggle for the rights of labour. Important progressive achievements have always been supported to a certain extent by religious groups.
Historical background
Starting in the nineteenth century, various European socialist movements began to connect with the United States. Utopian socialists founded communities throughout the country, which were often of brief duration and now live on only in memory. After 1848, many socialist-leaning Europeans emigrated to the United States, where some became prominent in politics and worked closely with President Abraham Lincoln, who regarded labour as preceding capital, superior to it, and independent of it. Lincoln encouraged workers to organise themselves in trade unions. He understood that not only the plantation owners of the South but also the bankers and businessmen of the North were problematic10.
Karl Marx observed and frequently commented on American developments. On the occasion of Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, Marx wrote to Lincoln that while the American War of Independence had signalled the rise of the middle class, the war against slavery signalled the rise of the working class. Yet the white workers of the American North could not achieve true freedom, Marx held, as long as the enslavement of black people continued11. Marx was quite influential in the United States as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, the most important American newspaper of the nineteenth century, which Lincoln read regularly12. Socialism made its own history in the United States, often in connection with religion. In 1877, the Socialist Labor Party was founded. The Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901, brought together prominent socialists such as Eugene Debs (1855-1926) and Christian socialists such as Reverend
In Oklahoma, the recipe for success was a pragmatic approach that combined socialist goals with the culture of the region, including a lively exchange with evangelical piety and revival movements. Jesus was celebrated as a socialist hero and the leader of the ‘legions of democracy’.
George Herron (1862-1925). It had 120,000 members and fielded 1,200 political candidates in various positions. Over 300 socialist magazines with a combined number of two million copies were in circulation, including the weekly magazine The Christian Socialist, which had 20,000 subscribers, 2,000 of whom were pastors. In 1912, Debs won 6 percent of the national vote as a presidential candidate13.
The reasons for socialism’s growth were often more practical than ideological, starting with enormous disparities between rich and poor. In 1880, the Vanderbilts had an income of $30 million, while workers earned between $1 and $2.50 a day14. Strikes were commonplace but mostly suppressed, often with violence. The labour protests in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on 1 May 1886 brought 600,000 workers together. International Workers’ Day, which is not officially celebrated in the US, was established to commemorate this date. Various organisations were involved in the fight against glaring inequalities, including the Christian Labor Union (CLU), which was founded in Boston in 1872. The CLU criticised the economic exploitation of workers and supported workers’ cooperatives and the unionisation of workers with the support of the churches. The editors of the CLU publication The Labor Balance supported the programme of the Socialist Labor Party. Important financial support for the CLU came from a Roman Catholic judge, T. Wharton Collens, who considered communism to be a development of the teachings of Moses and Jesus15.
The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, was the first mass organisation of American workers. By 1896, the organisation had two million members from all sectors of the working world, including both men and women of different races and ethnicities. The founders and most members of the Knights of Labor were committed to Christianity and combated the accumulation of wealth as anti-Christian. The Knights of Labor criticised the capitalist system as a whole even more strongly than the CLU. For them, solidarity among workers was essential in the struggle for justice. Here, too, Jesus was seen as taking the side of the workers, and although churches and clergy were often allied with capital, the Knights always found some ecclesiastical support16.
In the early twentieth century, socialists won elections across the country and in 33 states they displaced Democrats and Republicans; nearly 200 cities had socialist mayors17. Two states were particularly significant. Wisconsin, in the Northeast, has a long tradition of trade unions and labour. Oklahoma, in the centre of the country, is now one of the most conservative states in the United States. Milwaukee, one of the largest and most prosperous cities in Wisconsin and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was governed by socialists for decades. So-called ‘sewer socialism’ in Wisconsin successfully focused on public facilities, infrastructure, and debt repayment, which partly explains its popularity, especially in cities18.
While the history of socialism is somewhat anchored in the memory of the North, few remember that the most vibrant socialist movement in the country was found in Oklahoma, where socialist electoral successes were commonplace until the 1920s. The recipe for success was a pragmatic approach that combined socialist goals with the culture of the region, including a lively exchange with evangelical piety and revival movements19. Christian worship of Jesus was integrated into the world of socialists in Oklahoma. Jesus was celebrated as a socialist hero and the leader of the ‘legions of democracy’. The Bible, according to a member of the Socialist Party in 1903, was ‘full of socialism’20. Christianity was thus an integral part of the socialist movement at one time. One hundred years later, the opposite is true, although some Evangelicals are still to be found on the left21.
Christianity and socialism
Socialist movements in the US were often pragmatic in nature and linked to specific challenges, and it was here that connections with Christianity were most prominent. The theologians of the so-called Social Gospel, for example, arose in the late nineteenth century in the context of poverty and the rampant exploitation of millions of working people, especially in large cities, and were interested in social movements, trade unions, and socialist parties.
The theologians of the Social Gospel sought not merely to support the poor but also to change social conditions and to strengthen the agency of working people. In doing so, they often drew on socialist ideas. Examples include Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), the most famous theologian of the Social Gospel, and Washington Gladden (1836-1918). Theologically, they emphasised what they called, in the masculinist language of the time, ‘the fatherhood of God — the brotherhood of man’. This meant that before God human beings are equal and have been constituted for egalitarian relationships. Based on those beliefs, the theologians of the Social Gospel challenged the rule of capital and its exploitation of the working majority.
Gladden understood the deep divide between workers and factory owners. Although he opposed Marxism, he advocated for worker cooperatives and the idea that workers should own the means of production. He saw this not only as a matter of social equality but as an indispensable foundation for democracy22. Still, Gladden’s socialism was linked to liberalism’s somewhat naive faith in progress and its firm belief in the perfectibility of human nature, and he tried to avoid class conflict, preferring mediation.
Rauschenbusch was the more radical thinker. He understood socialism as the result of the labour movement rather than the other way around23. Practical engagement with the tensions of capitalism was the foundation of his thinking. Despite opportunities to move into academia, he spent eleven years as a pastor in Hell’s Kitchen, one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Manhattan at the time. He, too, saw economic and political democracy as closely connected and believed workers had to have a stake in the means of production. But he understood the tensions between the classes better than Gladden and was clear about the need for Christians to take a stand with the working majority24. Christianity and socialism occasionally went hand in hand in black churches as well. Most of the early black socialists were pastors. George Washington Woodbey (1854-1937) was one of them. The only black delegate at the Socialist Party conventions in 1904 and 1908, he also published in the magazine Christian Socialist. He believed that the Bible consistently represented the interests of the poor against their oppressors and that Christianity demanded
In the early twentieth century, socialists won elections across the country and in 33 states they displaced Democrats and Republicans; nearly 200 cities had socialist mayors.
the collective ownership and management of industry. He also understood that socialism would remain unsuccessful without the support of millions of church-affiliated workers25. Woodbey saw no contradiction between faith and socialist politics and viewed Karl Marx as a descendant of the Old Testament prophets26. Woodbey and his colleague Reverend George Slater held that African-Americans and women would benefit more from socialism than anyone else, as they were the most exploited27.
The African-American bishop Reverdy Ransom (1861-1959) also emphasised that socialism could not prevail without the support of black workers. Ransom saw Jesus as a hero of the working class who valued people more than wealth28. Ransom influenced A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), one of the most important black union leaders. Randolph’s work brought together insights from Marx, the labour movement, and the Wesleyan Holiness Movement. He knew that the church was often driven by business interests, but he also saw it as a basis for cooperative economic activities of the black working class29.
Especially during the Great Depression in the 1930s, the black church was often a point of reference for African-American communists and socialists. Unfortunately, the black church did not always return this sympathy. For the most part, it suspected both communism and socialism of atheism and lack of patriotism and denounced them30.
Christianity and socialism also came together in other perhaps surprising areas, including the temperance movement. Frances Willard (1839-1898), president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), broadened the movement’s horizons beyond alcohol abuse to include women’s suffrage and what she saw as the relevance of Christ to all areas of life. In her presidential address at the WCTU’s annual meeting in 1893, she claimed that there was a socialist in every Christian and a Christian in every socialist. She may have done more than any other person to introduce the idea of socialism into the heartland of the US31.
Interest in socialism and Christianity was by no means limited to pastors, theologians, and other elites. Church members themselves were often heavily involved in social movements. Trade unions were particularly important in this regard. An important difference between Europe and the United States is that in the United States, the working class never turned its back on the church. This is still the case today to some degree, especially in the Southern states, which means that religion is still important to labour organising32.
At the same time, tensions and challenges were greatest in the Southern states, often involving violence and death threats against socialist Christians. One example is the pastor Claude Williams (1895-1979), founder of the People’s Institute of Applied Religion, which was considered by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to be one of the most malignant communist organisations. The People’s Institute was supported by reputable church organisations such as the Methodist Federation for Social Service, the Anglican Church, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the National Religion and Labor Foundation33. Exiled from the Southern states, the People’s Institute established itself in Detroit, mainly with preachers from black churches who also had day jobs. For Williams, the Bible was the most important text, a book of the people describing the struggle of the humble in ancient times; Jesus was a class-conscious organiser of a revolutionary movement against ‘fascist’ Rome. In his parsonage hung pictures of his three heroes, Jesus, Eugene Debs, and Vladimir Lenin. Although Williams worked closely with communists and was suspicious of liberalism, he also criticised communists who did not operate in close contact with the people but advocated abstract ideas, including atheism34.
Further developments in the twentieth century
The so-called ‘Red Scare’, triggered by the 1917 Russian Revolution, resulted in Woodrow Wilson administration’s actions against liberal and left-wing organisations (the ‘Palmer Raids’).
Previously, in 1908, the Episcopal Methodist Church had adopted a ‘Social Creed’ that unambiguously sided with the working class. Among other things, it called for the ‘most equitable division of the products of industry’ and the ‘reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practical point’35. A few months later, this creed was also adopted by the Federal Council of Churches, which included 31 Protestant and Orthodox churches. Other demands of the Social Creed, such as the end of child labour, protection for women, and reduced working hours, were successfully implemented in collaboration with the labour unions and socialist parties.
The 1930s saw a resurgence of interest in Marx and the Soviet Union in the United States, partly as a result of the Great Depression. In 1933, Protestant churches advocated for US official recognition of the Soviet Union. A 1934 survey of theology students showed 50 percent in favour of socialism, 36 percent in favour of drastically reformed capitalism, 2 percent in favour of capitalism, and 2 percent in favour of communism. In this context, the Communist Party USA (founded in 1919) realised that religion was not necessarily the enemy, especially in the black churches. In 1935, the CPUSA organized 24 public Christmas celebrations in New York alone36.
In the 1930s, one of the most prominent theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), also considered himself a ‘Christian Marxist’, but then increasingly distanced himself from Marxism. His so-called ‘Christian realism’ was later used primarily against liberation theology and taken up by neoliberal theologians. In Catholicism, the Catholic Worker movement emerged at this time, represented most prominently by Dorothy Day (1897-1980), who also had certain sympathies with socialism but rejected Marxism as atheistic and totalitarian. Like the papal encyclicals, Day criticised both capitalism and socialism. Harry Ward (1873-1966), professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary and co-founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, was also critical of the optimism of the Social Gospel. He believed that democracy needed more than free individuals and required an economy that contributed to the welfare of all. His reading of Marx helped him expose perennial American myths, for example that there were no classes in the United States, that capitalism was economically efficient, and that social mobility would be the reward of hard work37. Other theologians had engaged with Marx but refused to acknowledge their affinities openly. In 1960, Paul Tillich (1886-1965) successfully prevented the publication of one of his articles on class struggle in an anthology of his writings because he felt it would ruin his reputation in the United States38.
In Frances Willard’s presidential address at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s annual meeting in 1893, she claimed that there was a socialist in every Christian and a Christian in every socialist. She may have done more than any other person to introduce the idea of socialism into the heartland of the US.
The cultural climate changed dramatically with the onset of the Cold War after World War II. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s systematic anti-communism in the early 1950s suppressed socialist and communist movements through his role in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and his impact on the much longer lasting HUAC. Suspecting, not entirely without reason, that communism had infiltrated the American churches, McCarthy’s committee also went after many religious clergy39. After this thorough purge of the left in the country, including the churches, a liberal theological consensus set the tone, which was strongly opposed to Marxist influences. It was not until the 1960s that political and theological perspectives in the churches opened up to the left again. In the Roman Catholic world, the Second Vatican Council led the way, while in the Protestant world it was the Conference on Church and Society, organised by the World Council of Churches in 1966, which played a similar role. Clearly, social developments provided significant inspiration. The 1960s saw movements such as the Civil Rights movement, the War on Poverty, and protests against the Vietnam War. In this context, a number of Christian-Marxist dialogues emerged in theological faculties, inspired by similar dialogues in Europe40. Their aim was to build mutual understanding by learning from each side’s way of thinking.
However, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that more in-depth critiques of capitalism resurfaced again, in connection with the increasing power of multinational corporations and US intervention in Latin America. In this context, Marxist ideas attracted interest as well, inspired by Latin American developments, especially Latin American liberation theology, closely linked to practical matters and concrete social engagement41.
In 1975 in Detroit, the Theology in the Americas conference brought together, for the first time, the diverse concerns of participating liberation theologians, whose work developed in different contexts and independently from each other. The climate was tense, as Latin American representatives of liberation theology felt that their North American colleagues lacked class analysis, while North American black theologians highlighted racism and North American feminists sexism42. In this context, socialist approaches surfaced briefly in feminist theology as well, pursued by Beverley W. Harrison and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Unfortunately, this impulse did not carry over into the next generations of feminist theology.
Special mention should be made of the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr, who read Marx’s Capital and the Communist Manifesto during the 1949 Christmas holidays. King appreciated Marx’s critique of the problems of capitalism, his effect in increasing the self-awareness of the masses, and his challenge to the churches. He rejected what he saw as Marx’s metaphysical materialism, ethical relativism, and totalitarianism. Marx’s critique of capitalism was reflected in King’s progress from protests against racism to the Poor People’s Campaign and a deeper understanding of the connection between racial oppression and class exploitation43. The contributions of black women to the Civil Rights movement, such as Nannie Helen Burroughs, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer, also deserve to be remembered, as women often saw the connections between race, gender, and class more clearly44.
The encounter of socialism, Marxism, and Christianity today
In the United States, Christian engagement with socialism and Marxism has mostly derived from practical concerns rather than theoretical debates. Even if Christian socialists did not always refer to Marx, there were important common perspectives, such as the exploitation of the working majority, the issue of class, the question of ownership of the means of production, and a basic interest in the question of economic democracy.
Although Soviet style state socialism had not been embraced by the majority of the US left in the post-60s United States, after the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s socialism was nevertheless declared dead in the United States as well. At that time, many felt that alliances between Christianity and socialism were anachronistic, and identity politics received a major boost. Issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality now almost completely overshadowed the issue of class. The class question disappeared even in the theological engagement with postcolonial thought in the United States, which began in the 1980s, largely ignoring postcolonial class-awareness existing elsewhere45. When class was still mentioned in theological discourse, it was usually connected to notions of ‘classism’, as if the main problem had to do with prejudice against certain classes rather than with the ever more intense exploitation of working people that pitted workers in the North and South as well as workers of different identities against each other.
Identity politics, which had entered US theological discourse in the late 1960s and early 1970s, dominated progressive theological discourse for several decades. In some cases, US representatives of emerging liberation theologies challenged class analysis openly, as in the above mentioned 1975 Theology in the Americas Conference. At best, class was then seen as the domain of Latin American liberation theology’s ‘preferential option the poor’. For many theologians in the United States, as for many thinkers of the New Left, class analysis hardly seemed relevant and, if addressed at all, now became tied to identity issues rather than economic exploitation and labour. In contrast to earlier efforts to engage race, class, and gender together, for instance by the queer African American socialist feminists of the Combahee River Collective that inspired early womanist and feminist theologians of the Mudflower Collective, class analysis and with it interest in socialism and Marxism, faded from view. And while the topic of class was never abandoned altogether, it remained an under reflected discourse that has only been gradually rediscovered again in recent years.
Among male African American theologians, Cornel West is one of the few who keeps engaging race and class, noting that class contributed more than race status to fundamental powerlessness in the United States. West suggests that black theology needs to take a closer look at the connections between racism and economic exploitation, while Marxists need to develop an appreciation of the liberating aspects of popular culture and religion46. In the younger generation, Joshua Bartholomew is carrying on the discussion of race and class among black theologians47, and among African-American womanists Keri Day has kept the conversation going48.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s identity politics received a major boost. However, some theologians are now reclaiming a sense that class is a matter of labour relations rather than merely a matter of status or identity and thus the locus of intersectional solidarity.
In the United States today, those who are working on the relation of religion, economy, and politics, are once again grappling with the class issue in connection with intersectionality, as well as with the issue of labour. In conversation with socialist and Marxist traditions, some theologians are reclaiming a sense that class is a matter of labour relations rather than merely a matter of status or identity, and thus the locus of intersectional solidarity49. After all, the working class is where the greatest racial, gendered, and ethnic diversity in the world is found. Issues of class, socialism, and Marxism are once again being engaged by religion and theology in various ways, including in a working group of the American Academy of Religion on ‘class, religion, and theology’. The Institute for Christian Socialism, mentioned above, does educational work through its membership and its online publication The Bias50. In universities, the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University does research and education at both academic and popular levels and connects faith communities with the solidarity economy51.
Finally, there is a time-honoured tradition of public protest in the United States that has been picked up by a religious movement that seeks to continue Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Reverend William Barber and his team have been organising protests in local communities in the South for many years and now lead national protests against policies and politics that disregard the poor. Barber’s movement emphasises the plight of both black and white poor people52, arguing for a ‘fusion politics’ that combines many different political traditions. Nevertheless, this fusion politics, which has a long tradition in the United States, rarely engages the left and focuses on policy work without offering a sustained critique of the specific exploitative economic structures that affect the working class as a whole, including all of the 99 percent who have to work for a living.
One of the questions about protest movements, which is increasingly being raised, is whether, in the long term, they are able to produce the desired results, especially in the face of increasingly authoritarian governments that are less and less responsive to public outcries53. Another question is whether the focus on policy, without attention to building alternative economies, can lead to the needed transformations. In response to these concerns, deepening awareness of the predicaments of our age as well as a new sense of what might be called ‘solidarity under pressure’ provide new opportunities for critical and constructive engagement between Christianity, Marxism, and socialism that deepen but also reshape various traditions according to the interests of the many rather than the few.
Notes
1 This essay incorporates a text previously published in German: ‘Die Christen, Marx und die USA’, in Alle Verhältnisse umzuwerfen ... und die Mächtigen vom Thron zu stürzen: Das gemeinsame Erbe von Christen und Marx, ed. Michael Ramminger and Franz Segbers, Hamburg: VSA, 2018, used by permission.
2 Already during the first Trump administration 2016-2020 I described these tendencies that are now rapidly expanding during Trump’s second administration beginning in 2024. See Joerg Rieger, ‘National Capitalism: Religious Resonances and Alternatives’, in Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump, ed. Miguel De La Torre, New York: Orbis, 2017.
3 See, for instance, the work of the Marxist economist Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, Chicago: Haymarket, 2012, and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, https://www.usworker.coop/en/.
4 Religious participation in the Civil Rights movement is well known. For religion in the Occupy Wall Street movement see Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-Lan, Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude, Harrisburg: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
5 Membership figures for left-wing groups are usually not published. After the 2016 presidential election, DSA grew to 30,000 members, https://x. com/DemSocialists/status/920146080758751232, official DSA Twitter. Membership figures for the CUPSA are significantly lower. Other very small parties include the Social Democrats USA (SDUSA) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
6 https://www.religioussocialism.org.
7 https://www.cpusa.org/authors/cpusa-religion-commission/.
8 https://christiansocialism.org.
9 Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, New York: Basic Books, 2016.
10 John Nichols, The ‘S’Word: A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism, London: Verso, 2011, pp. 64, 72-74, 92.
11 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lin-coln-letter.htm. Signed by the Central Committee of the First International, with positive response by Lincoln through his ambassador in London.
12 Marx’s articles published there comprise almost seven volumes of the total fifty volumes of his Collected Works in English. See Nichols, p. 80.
13 John C. Cort, Christian Socialism: An Informal History, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988, pp. 222, 242.
14 Cort, p. 224.
15 Cort, pp. 225-6; Robert H. Craig, Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992, pp. 17-28.
16 Craig, pp. 29-43.
17 Nichols, p. 104.
18 Nichols, pp. 106-9, 127.
19 This is Jim Bisset’s conclusion in his Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
20 Bisset, pp. 88-89, 94
21 See, for instance, Sojourners, https://sojo.net. Black Evangelicals fundamentally differ from white Evangelicals as most of them support the Democratic Party.
22 Cort, p. 227, Ken Estey, ‘Protesting Classes through Protestant Glasses: Class, Labor, and the Social Gospel in the United States’, in Religion, Theology, and Class, ed. Joerg Rieger, New York, 2013, pp. 125-129.
23 Cort, p. 247
24 Estey, pp. 129-134
25 Cort, p. 247.
26 Juan Floyd Thomas, ‘Seeing Red in the Black Church: Marxist Thought and African American Christianity’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 1,12 (November 2010): p. 19.
27 Black Socialist Preacher:The Teachings of Reverend George Washington Woodbey and His Disciple, Reverend G.W. Slater, Jr, ed. Philip S. Foner, San Francisco: Synthesis, 1983, p. 2.
28 Cort, p. 259, Thomas, p. 21.
29 Thomas, pp. 25-27.
30 Thomas, pp. 28.
31 Cort, p. 262.
32 See Joerg Rieger and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities, St. Louis: Chalice, 2016, available in German translation.
33 Ralph Lord Roy, Communism and the Churches, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960, pp. 271-274.
34 Roy, pp. 274-75, 280.
35 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Creed_(Methodist).
36 Denis R. Janz, World Christianity and Marxism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 56-57.
37 David Nelson Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx: Harry F. Ward and the Struggle for Social Justice, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003, p. 58; Craig, pp. 186-199.
38 Gary Dorrien, Imagining Democratic Socialism: Theology, Marxism, and the Making of Social Democracy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
39 Janz, p. 59
40 Arthur F. McGovern, ‘United States’, in Three Worlds of Christian-Marxist Encounters, ed. Nicholas Piediscalzi and Robert G. Thobaben, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985, pp. 61-62; such dialogues were often the result of individual efforts.
41 McGovern, pp. 63-64.
42 Sergio Torres and John Eagleson (eds), Theology in the Americas, Mary-knoll: Orbis, 1976.
43 Thomas, pp. 30-34.
44 See Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion, New York: Knopf, 2010.
45 There are exceptions. See, for instance, Rieger und Kwok.
46 Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982, p. 115. Cornel West, ‘Black Theology and Marxist Thought’, in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, vol 1, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993.
47 Joshua Bartholomew, Black Theology and the Black Panthers, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2023.
48 Keri Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
49 For some examples of how class is addressed in theological discourse see Religion, Theology, and Class: Fresh Engagements after Long Silence, ed. Joerg Rieger, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, and Joerg Rieger, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2022 (German translation forthcoming).
50 https://christiansocialism.com/biashome/.
51 See the work of the so-called ‘Solidarity Circles’, https://www.religion-andjustice.org/solidarity-circles.
52 William J. Barber II, with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, New York: Liveright, 2024.
53 For the history and an assessment of global protest movements along those lines, see Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, New York: Public Affairs, 2023.