How Christianity Became Socialism in the US

Horace Mann an early Progressive,
and Abolitionist and Antioch
College President

If you read journals and diaries and accounts of daily life in the early 19th century United States, you will find that Church life, mainly protestant small-town churches, were very important in organizing the day-to-day and week to week activities of people. Some churches were very severe in their discipline, in a sort of stupid, oafish way--and life for parishioners was sort of like being in a permanent childhood with a strict, domineering parent. Sundays, for example, were spent in forced lassitude. Even raising one's voice or laughing might bring chastisement.

At the same time, in the first half of the 19th century, the United States was wealthy beyond measure--there was more land than could be settled and farmed by the settlers and there were more natural resources that could ever be consumed (or so people thought). You could buy a farm for the equivalent price of a years' supply of coffee (give or take). The lumber on the land could offset the cost you paid (if you were smart). Much of the time there were severe shortages of laborers, especially skilled laborers, and if the economic conditions in one area soured, you could easily move to a new town and start over fresh.

So while the strict bible thumping churches and their clergy were trying to discipline and direct the minutiae of people's lives, the country was exploding with changes on a daily basis. As the frontier opened up, and the political system protected individualism, people sought a wilder, wide open religion in new Christian cults. More importantly, they sought to put into practice Christian ideas and build new Jerusalems. The town of New Harmony, Indiana is one example.

When people built experimental commune utopias, they also built new colleges and universities, especially in places like Ohio. Institutions like Antioch College and Oberlin College emerged from "radical" denominations of Christianity. Focusing on this world and improving the material lot of people basically killed religious Christianity off and it turned into Socialism and social activism. So the people who were agitating against the Vietnam War or for Civil Rights were informed by latent Christian ideas from those institutions. The strident Abolitionists and people who ran the underground railroad were Christians and they were strongly affiliated with those institutions.

By the 1940s, the ideals of Christianity from the US frontier towns had morphed into the socialism of factories and the Chrisitian activists became various versions of communists.