Jonathan McGREGOR. Communion of Radicals: The Literary Christian Left in Twentieth-Century America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2021. pp. 256. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN 9780807172828. Reviewed by Daniel L. SMITH-CHRISTOPHER, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, 90045.
Jonathan McGregor, who teaches writing at Southern Methodist University, has produced a thoughtful and insightful survey of important progressive Christian literary figures of the 20th Century. McGregor’s work now takes its place among a rising number of historical works re-thinking the legacy of the Christian left in the USA, and not a moment too soon, given current levels of religious fanaticism on the right in the USA. A preliminary list of important works that McGregor’s now joins would include: Cantwell, Drake, and Carter, eds., The Pew and The Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (Univ. Illinois Press, 2016); Heath Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015); Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (University of Illinois Press, 2010); Jarod Roll and Erik S. Gellman, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America (University of Illinois Press, 2011); and Matthew Pehl, The Making of Working-Class Religion (University of Illinois Press, 2016), among many others.
McGregor, however, covers an area heretofore largely untouched, literary figures rather than activists and theologians. As he himself observes, his work fills in (and does so admirably, in this reviewer’s opinion) a missing aspect of Alan Wald’s important trilogy on left-wing literary figures in the USA (American Night, Trinity of Passion, and Exiles from a Future Time, all from Univ. North Carolina Press). In this work, he focuses on “the rebellious writing of socialists, anarchists, and Catholic personalists such as Vida Scudder, Dorothy Day, Claude McKay, F. O. Matthiessen, and W. H. Auden”. McGregor often pairs his subjects because they actually did work together, or because they are arguably representative of a particular perspective.
A survey of each of the chapters will give a good impression of McGregor’s approach. After an Introduction” where McGregor defines a Literary Christian Left, he discusses Four Traditions of Dissent,”– “…two of which I define ecclesiastically and two regionally, which coalesce into an underrecognized spiritual current powering the literary Left in the twentieth-century United States” (13). These four are:
1. Anglo-Catholic Socialism focusing on Vida Scudder and Ralph Adams Cram, but also taking up the legacy of Auden and T.S. Elliot. There are significant surprises on Auden, especially, in McGregor’s reading. McGregor firmly challenges what he sees as a common 'dismissal' of Auden in his later life, especially those who argue that his religious interests tempered his political radicalism. The use of monasticism as an ideal community, after all, can be marshalled as a living criticism against Imperial states - serving as a counter-community rather than simply a "withdrawal". McGregor sees Auden using just such a theologically informed, but still socially radical, criticism that invokes monastic societies not as a wistfulness for the past, but a revolutionary challenge to wider society.
2. Roman Catholic personalism developed from French Social Catholicism, and exemplified in Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement. McGregor also includes an important discussion of Harlem Renaissance author and poet, Claude McKay, an African-American convert to Catholicism.
3. The first of two chapters on Southern Protestant and Catholic agrarianists focus on John Crowe Ransom, James Dombrowski, and Will Campbell. This is followed by a further development of The Socialist Fellowship of Southern Churchman, which was reorganized as The Committee of Southern Churchman, as McGregor discusses the work of James McBride Dabbs, Walker Percy, and Wendell Berry.
4. The final “section” returns to New England, especially Boston, where McGregor charts the successors of Anglo-Catholic radicalism, where McGregor takes up the legacies of John Brooks Wheelwright, Robert Lowell, and finally discussing the ‘Queer Christian Socialist Criticism’ of F.O Matthiesen.
McGregor is aware that he has chosen a fascinating group of literati and religious commentators, as indicated by the title of his summary final chapter, “Weird Christian Socialism”. But I would insist “weird” in a fascinating sense! There are so many wonderful side-streets along the journey that McGregor takes us – agrarianist radicalism, especially Southern agrarianism; questions of sexuality and particularly queer sexuality, especially in relation to Anglo-Catholicism. Finally, there are reflections on modern monastic life, medievalism, and the porous relationship between many of these Christians and secular socialist movements in the United States.
McGregor’s work will hopefully inspire a great deal more thoughtful appreciation of these radical figures. As an answer to Christians whose literary tastes tend to be dominated by the more conservative thought of Tolkien, Sayers, and Lewis, McGregor’s insightful introduction to other literary and theological figures will prove startling and fascinating.