On this holiday honoring the legacy of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a Christian whose determination to see God's call for racial and economic and global justice realized in the United States and around the world eventually led him to recognize the democratic socialist message inherent to his beliefs, Religious Socialism is proud to share one story of how another religious believer came to recognize the power and necessity of socialist ideals. In future days, we hope to share many such stories, particularly as the authoritarian violence spreading in the United States is forcing more and more religious believers to confront where they truly stand.

By Karyn Carlo 

Among the goals of the DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group are the following:   to help members of the religious community who may be suspicious of socialism to understand what democratic socialism is and its relationship to various faith traditions and to help leftists who may be suspicious of the religious community to appreciate what religious socialists have to contribute to the movement. To that end, I hope some of us in the working group will share our own spiritual journeys that led us to socialism. As a Christian pastor and theologian, I am happy to share mine. 

Two Christianities 

First, let me be clear that there are actually two religions called “Christianity” that operate in the United States. There is the Christianity of the enslavers and there is the Christianity of the enslaved. They are not the same.Our nation began with the genocide of the First Nations and the enslavement of African people as a source of unpaid labor. This  was done by people who called themselves Christian. In order to justify their actions they developed a theology of white supremacy.  They constructed theories of race that claimed  Africans were inherently inferior to those of European descent. 

They developed “biblical” interpretations such as the myth of Ham. In their preaching to enslaved people they emphasized obedience above all, never liberation. In an attempt to prevent enslaved people from discovering the real contents of the Bible they published what were known as “slave bibles” that removed the liberating content such as Exodus, the prophets, the teachings of Jesus, and more. Contrary to the actual teachings of Jesus, they emphasized the salvation of individual souls for the afterlife, never bodies in this life. They saw sin as the result of  individual choices, not social systems.  

 Similarly this Christianity interpreted wealth through a quasi-Calvinist lens as a sign of divine election. (In his Institutes,  Calvin claimed that the blessings of material wealth may be a sign of divine election or pre-ordained salvation but he also said that we cannot ever be sure of that. Sadly his Puritan followers rarely noted that nuance.) Wealth and poverty were ordained by God. To further support this theology, they wedded slaver Christianity to capitalism.  Private ownership was part of the divine order and included the right to own human beings. The heirs of this theology are still with us in the more blatantly white supremacist forms of white evangelicalism and  the MAGA movement. But even much of liberal or progressive theology still suffers from its influence. 

Yet even from the beginning, there was another form of Christianity in the United States, the Christianity of the enslaved. Beginning with what was known as the “Invisible Institution,”  this was the Christianity of  liberation. Long after the enslavers had gone to sleep at night the enslaved would engage in a whole different form of worship. Meeting secretly, they would tell each other the stories of the Exodus, of God’s people breaking free from slavery, about the words of the prophets promising liberation, and of slavery itself as an evil God condemned. (For more information about these two wildly different Christianities, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South.) The heirs of this theology are also with us today in some black churches and in Black Liberation Theology.  

My Journey from Liberal to Liberation Theologian

My own U.S. Christian journey began as a white woman born in the 1950s into a segregated white middle-class home. My grandparents were fundamentalists whereas my parents were what was then known as modernists and now would be called liberals or progressives.  The theological debates that I was exposed to were part of a conflict within white Christianity that began earlier in the century known as the “fundamentalist- modernist controversy.” Conversations around our dinner table centered around questions of faith versus reason. Was the Bible the literal word of God to be read as an inerrant text or was it a human production? Are miracles such as virgin birth, bodily resurrection, etc. to be understood literally or as metaphors? Was the world literally created in seven days as Genesis has it or was Darwin right about evolution? Can religion and science be reconciled? 

All of these issues are still alive in our country today, but none of these debates address what I would call our foundational sins of genocide and slavery. The white liberalism that I was raised with was designed to address concerns about reason and progress not questions of race or economic class.

When I moved to New York City where I eventually attended Union Theological Seminary, my thinking changed. I had the enormous privilege of being able to earn my Ph.D. in theology with  the late Dr. James H. Cone, widely known as the father of  Black Liberation Theology, as my academic mentor. I learned that, for him and for the much larger community he represented, what mattered was not the problem of faith versus reason but the problem of the non-person in society. For him that meant black people. He conceived of blackness as both literal and ontological. It was literal because, worldwide, oppressed people were more likely than not to have darker skin than others. But it was also ontological in that it was a state of being oppressed. In this way the principles of Black Liberation Theology could also be applied to other oppressed groups such as indigenous people, Asians, women, LGBTQIA+ people, and more. In other words, all of what we now call intersectionality is rooted in white supremacy and God is a God of the oppressed not a justifier of the oppressor. (For more about blackness as the state of being oppressed, see James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed.)

That is why my faith practice centers on anti-racism. For me, spiritual growth means learning how life as a white woman in the United states has led to an internalized whiteness, how that whiteness has created malformations in my spirit, and how I might begin to grow past it, even while knowing that the work will never be complete in my lifetime.

My work as a liberation theologian involves teaching and learning in the global South (currently in Liberia and Burma) as well as in the city of New York. Having witnessed what  oppression does to God’s children I cannot grow closer to my God without doing my  part to try to end that oppression. For me spiritual practice involves not only prayer and meditation but social activism, doing what I can to work toward a better world where oppression ends and all people can thrive. 

From Liberation Theologian to Democratic Socialist 

That yearning for a better world brought me to democratic socialism. In my conversations with Cone about socialism he made it clear that he was not a Marxist. He had two reasons for that. First, he was suspicious of all white Eurocentric sources and second, he found that Marxist historical materialism did not account for the role of black culture and experience in empowering black people for liberation. (In this respect it should be noted that he differed from Latin American theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez for whom Marx was a major philosophical source.)

Although he in fact refused an invitation to join one of DSA’s predecessor organizations, I believe that at heart Cone was a socialist. He had no use for an economic system designed to oppress his people and acknowledged that a just society would have to involve “some form of socialism.” He never specified what form of socialism that would be.  I, however, choose to support democratic socialism with the major caveat that we need to do a much better job with race.

Unlike some of my comrades in the (let’s be honest, still majority white) DSA I will always put race ahead of class in my power analysis. That is because our two foundational sins as a nation, the genocide of the First Nations and the enslavement of the African people, were both racial.

White supremacy and racialized capitalism deprive us all, oppressed and oppressor alike, of our humanity. Internalized whiteness has damaged my soul. Therefore, my own salvation is tied up with learning how to better connect with my fellow human beings and with the earth. That means deconstructing white supremacy and all of its intersections including racialized capitalism. This means moving from the  individualist perspective that all too easily justifies oppression to more of a collectivist point of view, no longer seeing human beings merely in terms of their production value but in terms of their intrinsic worth, no longer seeing myself as one who needs to dominate others in order to have a sense of self but as one whose worth comes from my common humanity with others and as a part of something much greater than all of us, a loving universe created by a loving God in which all souls can thrive. 

This is my story. I hope that my telling it will help others to understand why a person of faith would choose to be a socialist. I hope other religious socialists from other faith traditions will share their journeys as well.

Rev. Karyn Carlo Ph.D. is an ordained American Baptist Churches minister currently serving Safe Haven United Church of Christ in Ridgewood, Queens, NY and a member of DSA NYC.

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