CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM. In English history, the name given to the doctrines of F. Denison Maurice, J. R. Ludlow, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes (qq.v.) and several others who entered on public propaganda immediately after the failure of the great Chartist demonstration of April 1 o, 1848 (see CHARTISM).
These writers produced a journal named Politics for the Peo ple in 1848 (in which Kingsley wrote the famous phrase about re ligion being "an opium dose for ... the people" now on the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow), Tracts for Christian Socialists (185o), The Christian Socialist (185o) and The Journal of Asso ciation (1852), all of which had a small circulation and died an early death.
Industrially, their chief work was a revival of the co-operative movement and to set going small self-governing workshops, none of which was able to survive.
They also founded a "wholesale agency" which is a precursor of the Co-operative Wholesale Society, and signally aided in secur ing the enactment of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1852, which made possible the growth of the modern co-operative movement.
Later Developments. Though the Christian Socialists had never had many adherents and their movement appeared to have ended in failure, their influence was carried on till the Socialist re vival of the end of the century, when it inspired the Guild of St. Matthew, founded in 1877 by the late Stewart Headlam and claiming to be the oldest Socialist body in Britain. At the begin ning of the next century a number of small propagandist bodies, of which the most active was the Church Socialist League, were able to record great successes in appealing to the Churches; and certain of their members entertained a hope of an approaching conversion of the Churches to Socialism. The Pan-Anglican Con gress of 1908 attacked social conditions in vigorous terms: the Lambeth Conference of the same year, attended by 242 bishops and archbishops, pronounced a similar verdict and approved the 1907 report of a Committee of Convocation which had en dorsed the views of those "deep-seeing men, Carlyle, Maurice and Ruskin." Bishop Gore, in the Church Congress sermon of 1906, had summarized the aims of the revived movement : "The question which ought to hold a pre-eminent place in the interests of Church men is, how we are to return to a condition of things nearer to the intention of Christ—if it may be, without violence or revo lution; but if not, then anyhow to return." But these hopes were frustrated: the enthusiasm of 1908 had but a passing effect on the hierarchy, most of which remained hostile to Socialism, while after the War the Church Socialist League itself was rent by dissension. The C.S.L. passed out of existence in 1923 (be coming the "League of the Kingdom of God"), it being held by a majority of the members that the Church must have its own social programme, and could not adopt a Socialism from outside or ally itself with any particular Party. There are indeed many Christian social reform bodies, some of wide influence, of which the chief is "Copec" a central unifying body founded at a great interdominational conference at Birmingham in 1924, but they are not specifically Socialist.
On the continent of Europe "Christian Socialist" is used in a wholly different sense to denote parties or trade unions directed by religious leaders as rivals to the Socialist unions or parties and with the object of weakening their influence.