New Books In Christian Studies

“Christianity and socialism go together like fire and water,” remarked August Bebel, Germany’s leading socialist, in 1874. The anticlerical violence of revolutions in Mexico, Russia, and Spain in the early twentieth century appears to confirm his verdict. Yet, not everyone in interwar Europe accepted the incompatibility of religion and socialism, as we learn in this interview with political theorist and Professor at Queen’s University Belfast Vincent Geoghegan. The dynamism of Stalinist Russia in the early 1930s sent shockwaves through Depression-era Britain, leading a group of intellectuals to rethink their Christianity. In his new book Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth (Routledge, 2011) Geoghegan explores the efforts of four intellectuals to fuse the two in theory and in the form of a short-lived political party called Common Wealth. Our conversation begins with the pivotal theorist in Common Wealth, the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. Macmurray saw in communism a c