ABSTRACT
That Religion and Society should be the theme of a volume associated with the Left may seem surprising. Hostility to organized religion is - or at least was, until very recently - a leitmotif of the socialist movement, as of the various forms of popular radicalism from which it drew its original strength. As the child, albeit a rebellious one, of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, socialism took its stand on the side of reason against revelation, science against superstition, and it was only too ready to equate religion with 'mysticism', 'obscurantism' and backwardness of all kinds. Socialists followed their radical forebears in championing freedom of thought; in equating priestcraft with feudal and monarchical tyranny, and in looking to education as the great engine of emancipation. In Catholic Europe, anticlericalism was a major component of the socialist idea, down to the 1914 war and beyond. A startling late example of this would be the burning of the monasteries during the Spanish Rising of 1931. In the Protestant countries of northern Europe relations between socialism and Christianity were more ambiguous, but taking a tilt at the clergy - or even, as readers of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist will know, the 'shining light' chapels of the small-town bourgeoisie - was a stock in trade of socialist advocacy.
