AHC/WI: Christian Socialism/Communism Becomes A Wdiespread Movement

Make these movements much more prominent during this time. Of course it would require Marx endorsing Christianity as support for his call for a classless society. But if these movements become powerful how would they affect politicos, progressive reform and religiosity?
 
OTL, there were quite a few Christian socialists, from Walter Rauschenbusch to Francis Bellamy. Just have them get some political power.
 
Because nowadays Christian Democratic parties in Europe have become catch-all parties of the center-right, we tend to forget that they once contained a powerful Christian Socialist element.

Suppose for example that Konrad Adenauer had been killed by the Gestapo in the reign of terror that followed the attempt on Hitler's life in 1944. The CDU might have become a different party from the one we know. We think of the CDU as a center-right party devoted to a "social market economy." But in its early years, the CDU contained many Christian Socialists like Jakob Kaiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Kaiser (Kaiser was closely involved with the participants in the July plot, and was wanted by the Gestapo, but managed to go underground and survive the war).

Kaiser's views are summed up as follows in Dennis L. Bark and David R. Gress, *A History of West Germany, Volume One: From Shadow to Substance 1945-1963* (second edition), p. 114:

"Kaiser's domestic economic policy called for nationalization of heavy industry and worker co-determination in operating business enterprises. He shared the Catholic socialist view that because workers were indispensable to production and had definite interests of their own as a social class, they had a right to exercise those interests in setting the terms of their employment and in enjoying a direct share in the profits resulting from their work. Concerning Germany's position in central Europe, Kaiser saw the new Germany as a bridge between east and west. He believed that a neutral, socialist German government based on Christian principles could mediate between the Soviet Union and the West and help to maintain peace in Europe by reassuring both sides that they had nothing to fear from each other or from Germany.

"In Berlin Jakob Kaiser and Andreas Hermes, both associated with the Catholic trade unions of the Weimar period, led the call in June 1945 for an alliance of all Christian and democratic forces in a Christian Democratic Union. The Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) approved the party, but only in order to bring it under control. Although he fought heroically, Kaiser was unable to prevent the German communist party in the Soviet zone, the SED, from gradually taking away his party's independence. Finally, in 1948, he abandoned the Soviet zone CDU to its inevitable fate and gave his efforts to the democratic CDU in the Western zones. He remained, however, committed to Christian socialist ideas and to a neutral, reunited Germany, which put him permanently at adds with his party leader, Konrad Adenauer."

At the CDU convention in Berlin in June 1946, Kaiser spoke of "the conventional bourgeois social order belonging to a lost generation, an order that will be replaced with an age belonging to working people, by the era of socialist forms of existence...Let us recognize what is needed: socialism has the floor." https://books.google.com/books?id=7gkUlNqDNm4C&pg=PA209

How likely was it that someone like Kaiser could come out on top in the CDU if there were no Adenauer? Of course he would face the obvious problem that the Americans would prefer someone more conservative, but was there a plausible conservative replacement for Adenauer as of 1945-8 (the years when Adenauer gained control of the party and gradually moved it away from Christian Socialism)? Erhard maybe, but he was disliked by a lot of CDU/CSU activists at first--they thought he was a liberal who would be more at home in the FDP. Indeed, "Erhard enjoyed far better relations with the Bavarian FDP than with the CSU." http://books.google.com/books?id=nFtkBXw7i38C&pg=PA154 Eventually Erhard's critics were mostly won over, but would they have been without Adenauer?
 
Of course it would require Marx endorsing Christianity as support for his call for a classless society.

A Christian Marx would radically different from the Marx we know in OTL, to the point where he wouldn't even really be the same person. At the very least, he would never have written the Theses On Feuerbach, which(depending on how you regard the importance of that essay) may butterfly away the rest of his philosophy.

And I don't think it would be simply a matter of Marx saying "Christianity = Communism" or even "Christianity is an ally of Communism", and then, suddenly, Christian Communism becomes a powerful movement. I'm not enough of a Great Man devotee to think that a few pronouncements from the guy at the top are going to radically alter the overall social composition of a movement.

To get Xtian socialism or Communism as a big player on the global scene, you might nned a POD earlier than 1900. One possibility: Socialism takes off in the USA WAY MORE than it did in OTL, and mixes with the much stronger(relative to Europe) public piety that exists in that country, with guys like Bellamy and the Social Gospel crowd becoming the leading national, and hence(due to the power of the US socialist movement) global figures. This Christian tendency dominates in the west, and finds a welcome audience in the third world during the post-colonial era(it would actually dovetail fairly well with the inherent religiousity of some of those societies).

Though you'd still have the problem of the rest of the western world being less religious than the US, which might make Social Gospel hegemony a tougher sell in those places. (In Canada, the early CCF had a strong Christian influence, only scant traces of which survive today).
 
To get Xtian socialism or Communism as a big player on the global scene, you might nned a POD earlier than 1900. One possibility: Socialism takes off in the USA WAY MORE than it did in OTL, and mixes with the much stronger(relative to Europe) public piety that exists in that country, with guys like Bellamy and the Social Gospel crowd becoming the leading national, and hence(due to the power of the US socialist movement) global figures.
And many evangelicals in the U.S. during the 1800s were interested in social uplift.
 
Make these movements much more prominent during this time. Of course it would require Marx endorsing Christianity as support for his call for a classless society. But if these movements become powerful how would they affect politicos, progressive reform and religiosity?

Easiest way is to get rid of Marxism as Socialism is older than Marxism. Either he never born, dies before he wrote Das Kapital or simply never gets popular for some reason.
 
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