With a POD of 1917, have a nation which adopts Communism but is also very much Christian instead of Atheist. Bonus points if the nation is the Soviet Union.
Which church? If it was a fairly evangelical Protestant one I could see this quite easily - the way the early Christians lived their lives was very much in the communist mould (from each according to ability, to each according to need, etc.). The problem is that Marxism was quite anti-theist (religion is the opium of the masses and all that) - but if you could get a sufficiently charismatic Christian leader who believed in Communism but also in God then I think this could probably be papered over. Mao supplanted Marx quite happily in China after all...How Christian? Christianity allowed but church and state are separated? I think that it might be possible with more moderate communist leader.
But communist state where church has still important role might be impossible.
Maybe if Liberation Theology became a REALLY BIG thing in left-wing Latin American circles, to the point where they were dominant enough to impose an officially Christian character on any emergent Marxist state. Degree of confessionalism could run anywhere between Christian Democracy and Francoist Spain.
Mind you, I don't know if any of the Liberation Theologians would have been interested in such an outcome.
This was my thought as well. Some kind of amped up Liberation Theology seems like the way to go.
"When Tanganyika became independent on Dec. 9, 1961, Mr. Nyerere became its first Prime Minister, but six weeks later he suddenly resigned. He remained president of his party, Tanu, and spent nine months traveling throughout the country, meeting ordinary people and preparing a document that he issued under the title ''Ujamma -- The Basis of African Socialism.''
This was the first of two defining proclamations by which Mr. Nyerere sought to blend the major influences of his life: the cooperative forces he had observed in tribal life, with their emphasis on a constant search for consensus; the ideal of a Christian brotherhood, to which he had been exposed at school, and the goals of welfare-state socialism that he had absorbed from British Labor Party teachings while he lived in an Edinburgh housing project."
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/15/w...an-socialism-to-the-world.html?pagewanted=all
Julius Nyerere's ideological draft for African Socialism seems to be malleable enough that under the right cirumnstances he might have empahized the Christian or probalby Abrahamic (somehow he has to consider the muslims probably) origins of his idea a bit more. African leader had such a variety of ideologies that probably anyone of them could have proclaimed himself a Christian socialist.