Episode 53. Keir Hardie and the Labour Church
SYNOPSIS
James Keir Hardie (1856-1915), was the founding father of the British Labour Party. He was born into poverty in a working-class mining community in Scotland, Hardie’s youth and early manhood bear the same hallmark as several political activists who at the turn of the twentieth century took a new working-class party out from the shadow of the Liberal Party. .His non-religious family welcomed informal educational help from a local clergyman and encouraged James’s involvement in the Temperance Movement, which led to his Christian conversion and participation in radical chapel culture.
Soon afterwards, Keir Hardie became active in the trade union movement, rising to become secretary of the Ayrshire Mining Union before heading to England for a parliamentary career when he was elected as an ‘independent Labour’ MP for West Ham South in the 1892 General Election. This rise of a ‘cloth cap’ politician (although the bohemian Keir Hardie actually sported a deerstalker) might seem to encapsulate the old adage that the Labour Party owed more to Methodist than to Marx. Except that it fails to place politically radical Christianity accurately within the tumultuous changes of belief that were taking place in fin de siecle Britain.
This episode explores how the famed 19c ‘crisis of faith’ impacted left-wing Christian belief and practice. A participant in seances (at one of which the ghost of the Scottish poet, Robbie Burns, gave him advice on how to vote on the Irish Home Rule question), Keir Hardie counted many experimental Christians amongst his friends, not least members of the Labour Church.. For`its founder, John Trevor, the literal Religion of Socialism displaced historic, primitive Christianity, announcing the dawn of a new utopian era explained in terms of the Kingdom of God on earth. Keir Hardie adopted the rhetoric of the sacredness of human solidarity, and the episode concludes with Dr Johnson’s summary of Keir Hardie’s ‘religous’ creed.
GUESTS
Dr Neil Johnson was born and raised in the North East of England. For over twenty years he has lived with his family in Birmingham, where he serves as a Methodist minister, currently leading the radical initiative Street Banquet which is rooted in Jesus’ Parable of the Great Feast as recorded in Luke 14:15-24, where the most marginalized and disempowered people are invited and welcomed as honoured guests. Neil is at the forefront of the reconsideration of the Religion of Socialism in Britain in the late 19c and the theological views of the early Labour radicals, including Keir Hardie..
Further information on the work of Street Banquet can be found at
https://www.streetbanquet.org.uk/
Simon’s interview with Neil Johnson was recorded online on 16 September 2024.