Ok, here are the quotes from the Isserman article I paraphrased in my last post.  While the similarities between some of the socialist movements and it leaders coincide with christianity and its leaders more than either side would care to admit, that isn’t what I want to focus on here.  I want to use the following quotes as a sort of cautionary tale against losing hope in the way of Jesus.

All quotes are from an article written in The Chronicle of Higher Educationby Maurice Isserman.

“Shortly after Christmas 1949, [Harrington] wrote his conservative Roman Catholic parents back home in St. Louis from his apartment in Greenwich Village.  Edward and Catherine Harrington disapproved of their son’s New York venture, as they had when had, in rapid succession, dropped out of Yale Law School and then the graduate program in English at the University of Chicago.  Harrington’s reason for moving to New York – in the great tradition of young men and women of literary inclination and Midwest origins – was to become a writer.  But in his letter, he confessed to having made a terrible mistake.  The only thing Greenwich Village offered, he now understood, was a setting designed to ruin artists.  ‘It no longer means artistic freedom, it now means sexual freedom,’ he said.  ‘In this short time, I have grown afraid of these people who sit around in bars and talk literature all the time, talk of creating all the time, and never get to anything more than sitting around in bars.’”

This quote immediately struck me concerning all of the blogging that goes on about church, it is a lot of “sitting around in bars”.  I am sitting on a bar stool myself. 

Continuing on with Harrington’s life:

“Contrite, Harrington promised to re-enroll in the English department at Chicago… But…he would change his mind yet again; he was to remain a New Yorker…for the rest of his life.”

“Before another year passed, [he] had acquired his first girlfriend in New York…  In another letter to her that year, he revealed that he was considering leaving the Catholic Church: ‘I need God as I need food and sleep, but tracing his face with my fingers seems a long way off – a terribly long way.’”

That was back in 1950.  In 1951 Harrington returned to the church and joined the Catholic Worker movement.

“Harrington embraced the acetic ideals and lifestyle with the zeal of a new convert and quickly became a favorite of Day’s…  …as he approached the first anniversary of his arrival, he was drawn to explore some heretical notions.”

“At ‘the heart of Christianity,’ Harrington wrote his friend, ‘is an uncomfortable, radical proposition – do good and avoid evil.  This proposition does not make any reference to pragmatism.’  That was the standard and, indeed, essential Catholic Worker viewpoint. To compromise the movement’s commitment to its deeply spiritual, anarchist, and pacifist principles in a bid for political gain, allies, or respectability was seen as the first step down the slippery slope to a worldly and morally dubious opportunism. ‘However, in general, morality is usually pragmatic,’ Harrington wrote. ‘Therefore, a social phenomenon is evil, i.e., should be absolutely shunned, when the means are such that they clearly and inevitably lead to an evil end. Thus war. However, the state, the union, etc., though containing evil elements, are not inevitably tending toward evil.’ He added, ‘In this situation it is possible to cooperate with the means in the hope of forming them toward the good.’”

You can see where this is headed.

“Though Harrington’s point was a little obscure, he was ‘howevering’ himself right out of the Catholic Workers, coming to the conclusion that the quest for individual spiritual perfection had cut the group off from the possibility of influencing the institutional mechanisms by means of which social justice on a mass scale had been achieved historically.”

And there you have it.  He later joined the Young People’s Socialist League and left the Catholic Workers.  He wasn’t happy with the progress or speed of change taking place. Our human desire to speed up God’s process for reconciling this world with him is steeped with good intentions, but actually hinders the process.  Jesus’ way looks nothing like today’s church.

What is more, when you start looking at labor movements in England during the Industrial Revolution a lot of them started out from what Hobsbawm calls ‘hellfire’ churches in his book Primitive Rebels.  Now that the warmongering, empire-building conservative party has hijacked the church’s voting population will the church see its errors of bedding down with any political party?

Read Deer Hunting with Jesus – Dispatches from America’s Class War for a funny, irreverent look at this hijacking.

I know my sources look like I’m a bleeding heart liberal or a red-flag waving socialist, but trust me I’m not.  I’m a recovering neo-con who thought Newt Gingrich was the savior of this country at one point.  I went to an Assemblies of God church in West By God Virginia.  I grew up in a Democratic state that voted Bush into office…twice.  I’m registered Republican.  I’ve seen poverty, I lived on the verge of it growing up and early in my marriage.  A series of fortunate events opend my eyes.  So now I speak out.  Is it from a bar stool?  Maybe, maybe not.