was even a Chartist church in Birmingham. The tide
was turning again.
The modern history of our movement begins
mostly obviously in 1848 when the Chartist
demonstration on Kennington Common let to a
meeting between Frederick Denison Maurice,
Charles Kingsley, and John Ludlow which
started the movement and launched Politics for
the People. They were joined by Thomas
Hughes, Edward Vansittart Neale, and others.
Maurice was the undoubted leader of the
movement and a leading theologian of the
day. Kingsley became the man who
interpreted the language of Maurice and
made him more widely accessible, and
Ludlow was the politician of the
movement.
It was a movement, and not an
organisation, based on the idea that
co-operation and not competition is
natural to humans under the creation
of God. Its leaders supported the
political aspirations of working class
organisations and founded a
number of ‘Working Men’s
Associations’ for co-operative
products. Neale was the founder
of the Co-operative Wholesale
Assocation.
Maurice and Kingsley played a
large part in forming the
Working Men’s College and
in promoting women’s
education. It was the aim of
the movement to
‘Christianise Socialism
and to socialise
Christianity’.
In the coming decades
there were founded a
number of
organisations side-byside including the
Guild of St
Matthew, the
Christian Social
Union, the Church
Socialist League,
the Catholic
Crusade, the
League of the
Kingdom of God, the Society of
Socialist Christians, the Socialist Quaker Society,
the Free Church Socialist League with varying degrees of
success. In 1930, a group of MPs led a
Christian Socialist Crusade
which merged
with
the
Society
of
Socialist
Christians to
form the
Socialist
Christian
League
which then
included
George
Lansbury,
Lewis
Donaldson, Dr
Salter, and RH
Tawney among it’s
members.
These societies either
died away or merged
with one another over
the years until the
Socialist Christian
League and the Society
of Socialist Clergy and
Ministers were the two
leading groups. At the
Malvern conference of
1941, chaired by William
Temple, passed a resolution
saying:
“in our present situation, we
believe that the maintenance of
that part of the structure of our
society by which the ultimate
ownership of the principal resources
of the community can be vested in the
hands of private owners may be a
stumbling block making it harder for
men to live Christian lives.”
It was this conference which is
regarded as the start of a movement
that persuade