Onward Christian Socialism

By AM Saturday, March 17, 2012

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Tonight, on Patricks Day, The Pensive Quill features guest writer former Blanket columnist and self proclaimed right-wing commentator, Dr John Coulter.  He maintains that the St Patrick’s Day celebrations for Ireland’s Christian patron saint should be used to boost the concepts of Christian Socialism.

Christian socialism is the springboard which the Labour movement in Ireland, north and south, can use to save the island from the ravages of Tory-style cuts. The Occupy movement, which has set up tent camps near major Christian cathedrals, has shamed the Churches into facing up to their responsibilities in combating poverty.
  
Ironically, the Cameron-Clegg coalition has become the champion of so-called secularism and pluralism in society. These were once the bastions of extreme socialism and Marxism.  But the Tories and Lib Dems in the UK and the Centre Right Fine Gael in the Irish Republic have pinched secularism and pluralism from the hard line Labour movement.

Northern Ireland, once the heartland of the Irish Bible Belt, was one of the first UK regions to introduce same-sex civil partnerships. The Republic’s paedophile priest scandals have fatally ruptured the Church/State influence cemented by iconic Irish leader Eamon de Valera. Irish Catholicism is on the run and even the Vatican has been publicly condemned by Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

With the peace process holding in Ireland, a new conflict is emerging. The centuries-old sectarianism between Protestantism and Catholicism has been steadily eroded since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Fears that sectarianism would be replaced with racism, homophobia, even Islamophobia, have largely proved unfounded. The new Irish battle is between those with a Christian faith, and those who see themselves as militant atheists, humanists, secularists and pluralists.

It is a scenario which plays perfectly into the hands of Christian socialists, who base their political agenda on the Biblical Beatitudes of Jesus Christ. They are found in the New Testament Matthew’s gospel and list the words of Christ is what has become known as The Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew Chapter 5, verse 3 states: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” If ever there was a call to arms to combat poverty, it is contained – and symbolised – by this verse. However, the major challenge is – do Christian socialists have the will to use the churches to put Christ’s words into practical action on the ground in the island’s working class communities?

Jesus Christ was the world’s first socialist. Some theologians even claim that Karl Marx himself – in spite of Marxism’s obvious atheism - based Das Kapital on Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Just as the Methodist Church inspired many in the early Labour movement in Britain, Christian socialists now have a golden opportunity to assert their influence in the overall Irish Labour movement.

Irish Christian socialists should not be compared to the fundamentalist Moral Majority in the United States, which plays such a pivotal role in the election of Presidents. Unlike the US, Irish Christian socialism is not a hardline, radical Right-wing lobby.

However, the Irish Christian socialist fraternity faces the twin temptations of becoming embroiled in the major debates currently rocking traditional Christian denominations in Ireland – the ordination of openly gay clergy, some of whom have entered civil partnerships, and the ordination of women clergy.

Gay marriage threatens to split Irish Protestantism; the women clergy issue poses a major hurdle for Irish Catholicism. If the Churches decide to bog themselves down in theological fragmentation, the general secularist movement will have won the day.

If traditional Protestant and Catholic denominations do not take up the challenge of the Beatitudes, that baton will be grasped by the steadily growing Pentecostal movement in Irish Christianity.
  
Steeped in the theology of the Beatitudes, this movement takes its political influence from the US’s Southern black Baptist churches which were to the fore in the American civil rights crusades.