British Labor and Religion
Clayton, Joseph
530 THE COMMONWEAL October 7, 1925 BRITISH LABOR AND RELIGION By JOSEPH CLAYTON THE British Labor party enjoys a distinction that marks it off from the rest of the international Labor and...
...Elsewhere throughout Europe, the Socialist organizations are quite definitely in opposition to the Christian religion in general, and to the Catholic Church in particular, and in this attitude they are in agreement with the radicals in France...
...and, individually, Jews attach themselves as easily to the Labor party as they do to the Conservative or Liberal parties...
...and being in arms against the absolute authority of Rome over faith and morals, they decided to enthrone "humanity" as an alternative authority...
...The prejudice of the Conservative party is for an established church, be the doctrine of that church what it may...
...Hence it is that Christian and non-Christian trade-unions may be found working together, sometimes as rivals, on the continent...
...The trade-unions came later into being on the continent of Europe...
...but it remains, and the antagonism is traditional...
...the decisions of committees and congresses of delegates were to be implicitly obeyed...
...For a man must work at his trade, generally for a considerable number of years—and the trade must be of national importance before he can hope to achieve high office in the trade-union world...
...Moreover, in Great Britain, the Jewish element— so conspicuously an anti-Christian and anti-clerical force in European politics—has never been an effective ingredient in trade-unionism...
...The Miners' Federation of Great Britain chose many of its most prominent leaders from the ranks of local preachers in the Methodist Church, and the note of Christian theism is still predominately sounded at Labor demonstrations...
...In fact no justification has at any time existed for such an arrangement...
...So the issue was set...
...Until such time as the social revolution was accomplished, civil obedience might be rendered as before to the state, and in matters not pertaining to the things of Caesar...
...In place of the supernatural authority of the Catholic Church, centered in Rome, and radiating throughout the world, the social democrats proposed to their followers a faith in mankind alone, and an authority vested in the persons whom an enlightened mankind should elect to the office of ruler...
...The ban having been removed from Catholics, the Conservatives, sooner or later, were...
...The founders of modern political Socialist movement were filled with the spirit of liberal free-thought, the spirit of nineteenth-century philosophy...
...Socialists were free to believe that the "spirit of humanity" was in the heart and conscience of every man—a natural law persuading him to shun evil and do good...
...With the rise of a Communist party, more fiercely atheist in tone and temper, this opposition has come to appear a comparatively mild affair...
...Nor is it likely the Jews will ever win mastery in the British Labor party...
...they were not expected to know whence came this natural law, nor required to define with any nicety the meaning of the terms "good" and "evil...
...But Catholic, Jew, and free-thinker were, to the political conservative, alike common offenders—they did not belong to the established Church of England...
...In Great Britain such rivalry has never been known, nor has any serious attempt ever been made to establish separate trade-unions for Christian and nonChristian workmen...
...No tradition of atheism or free-thought haunts the British Labor movement...
...It is neither anti-Christian, nor anti-clerical...
...But to a wealthy man, or to a determined adventurer, to the visionary idealist (the Jew in public life commonly comes under one of these labels if not under all three) both the Conservative party and the Liberal party, reduced to a remnant though the latter may be, promise an earlier arrival at high position...
...It was generally understood that man had evolved this natural law for himself, since—according to the gospel of free-thought—there was no God to implant conscience, and still less was there any divinely appointed authority to teach the ways of God to man...
...They are rarely seen at work on the railroad or at the metal furnace...
...Jews do not readily take to the labor of the mine and the cotton mill...
...True, the British Labor party is now open to all who wish to join it and are prepared to subscribe to its program...
...Its trade-unions—unlike the continental associations, preceded by many years the rise of Socialism, and were in the main the work of English Protestants...
...Only in the clothing and tailoring trades is the Jew found in large numbers, and the organization of these trades gives them no decisive vote in the British Trade-Union Congress—the governing body in trade-union politics...
...In the lists of chief officers of the unions, the names of members of the various Protestant churches are inscribed, and from time to time, especially in the last five and twenty years, Catholics have been elected to responsible posts in the government of trade-unions...
...and it resisted far more savagely and for a far longer time the claims of Catholics to civil and religious liberties than similar claims of Jews and free-thinkers...
...This made membership in the unions intolerable and impossible for Christian and Catholic workmen, and the establishment of Christian tradeunions followed in Belgium, Holland, Germany, France, Italy and elsewhere...
...and created by Socialists, naturally from the first, they looked as unfavorably upon Christian belief and Catholic dogma as did the free-thinkers who begat them...
...530 THE COMMONWEAL October 7, 1925 BRITISH LABOR AND RELIGION By JOSEPH CLAYTON THE British Labor party enjoys a distinction that marks it off from the rest of the international Labor and Socialist movement...
Vol. 2 • October 1925 • No. 22
