Henry George And The Radical Christian Message

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An excerpt from, “The Philosophy of Henry George” By George R. Geiger, Kessinger Publishing, 2008, Pg. 336 – 338:

The one great task of religion, for Henry George, was the justifying of the ways of God to man, and at such a task institutionalized religion had tragically failed. It had failed to demonstrate, he felt, that there was indeed a fatherhood of God and a brotherhood of man, for in a world which piously accepted poverty and wretchedness and flagrant injustice, God’s ways were not mysterious but mischievous, and “fatherhood” and “brotherhood” were empty tropes. Religion had appeared to him timorous or indifferent when confronted by glaring wrongs; too often, like philosophy, it had fled to the ivory tower to be shielded from contamination, and then from its lofty seat had thundered against all evil, damning it as some elemental attribute, some primordial corruption or privation of divine essence. But to George it was smug blasphemy to declare that always there shall be the poor and the miserable. It was cowardice to flee from the squalor and brutishness of life even if the path of retreat bore the legend of individual salvation. And charity was hush-money.

Yet George was a devoutly religious man, and all his work breathed a spirit of piety. He was certain that his mission was to justify the ways of the Creator, to show that poverty, and injustice, and all the perplexing absurdities that have made even the faithful wonder, must be traced not to God’s forgetful equanimity but to the blindness and ignorance of man. Was not man’s inhumanity to man the result of the disregarding of natural law—that natural law which was the very word of God? George’s religion meant a faith that revolted against the complacent acceptance of wrong, and scorned an arm’s length warfare against it. All the fiery zeal of the prophet and the quiet confidence of the initiate were his, for he was sure that whatever vitality and worth lay in religion depended upon religion itself taking a hand in the battle against evil, and not in the issuing of proclamations condemning it. The religious spirit was to him always the crusading spirit, and it was as a crusade that he regarded his own efforts. . . . .

. . .He accepted the essential teachings of the Christian church, which as an institution he criticized, because he felt that were they correctly understood they would be recognized as a necessary corollary of economic freedom. George was not a Christian Socialist, as he sometimes has been described, for he was never a socialist, but certainly he may be considered a Christian, a Christian who followed the “cross of a new crusade.”