Religious socialism

Religious socialism is a type of socialism based on religious values and religious worldviews. Members of several major religions have found that their beliefs about human society fit with socialist principles and ideas. As a result, religious socialist movements have developed within these religions. Those movements include Buddhist socialism, Christian socialism, Islamic socialism, Jewish socialism and Hindu versions such as Gandhian socialism. Besides, there have existed radical, egalitarian interpretations of religions in pre-Modern times (e.g. Mazdakism, Lingayats).

Early modern socialism and religion

Religious socialism was the early form of socialism and pre-Marxist communism. In Christian Europe, communists were believed to have adopted atheism. In Protestant England, communism was too close to the Roman Catholic communion rite; hence socialist was the preferred term. Friedrich Engels argued that in 1848, when The Communist Manifesto was published, socialism was respectable in Europe while communism was not. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists, while working-class movements that "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" denoted themselves communists. This branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.

Some view the early Christian Church, as described in the Acts of the Apostles, as an early form of communism and religious socialism. The view is that communism was just Christianity in practice, and Jesus was the first communist. This link was highlighted in one of Karl Marx's early writings, which stated that "[a]s Christ is the intermediary unto whom man unburdens all his divinity, all his religious bonds, so the state is the mediator unto which he transfers all his Godlessness, all his human liberty". Pre-Marxist communism was also present in the attempts to establish communistic societies such as those made by the Essenes and the Judean desert sect.

In the 16th century, English writer Thomas More, venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, portrayed a society based on common property ownership in his treatise Utopia, whose leaders administered it through reason. Several groupings in the English Civil War supported this idea, especially the Diggers, who espoused clear communistic yet agrarian ideals. Oliver Cromwell and the Grandees' attitude to these groups was, at best, ambivalent and often hostile. Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Enlightenment era of the 18th century through such thinkers as the profoundly religious Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Raised a Calvinist, Rousseau was influenced by the Jansenist movement within the Roman Catholic Church. The Jansenist movement originated from the most orthodox Roman Catholic bishops who tried to reform the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century to stop secularization and Protestantism. One of the main Jansenist aims was democratizing to stop the aristocratic corruption at the top of the Church hierarchy. The participants of the Taiping Rebellion, who founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a syncretic Christian-Shenic theocratic kingdom, are viewed by the Chinese Communist Party as proto-communists.

Variants within world religions

Buddhist socialism

Buddhist socialism advocates socialism based on the principles of Buddhism. Both Buddhism and socialism seek to provide an end to suffering by analyzing its conditions and removing its leading causes through praxis. Both also seek to provide a transformation of personal consciousness (respectively, spiritual and political) to bring an end to human alienation and selfishness. People described as Buddhist socialists include Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, B. R. Ambedkar, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, Han Yong-un, Girō Senoo, U Nu, Uchiyama Gudō and Norodom Sihanouk.

Bhikkhu Buddhadasa coined the phrase "Dhammic socialism". meaning all things exist together in one system.

Christian socialism

Some individuals and groups, past and present, are both Christian and socialist, such as Frederick Denison Maurice, author of The Kingdom of Christ (1838). Another example is the Christian Socialist Movement, affiliated with the British Labour Party. Distributism is an economic philosophy formulated by such Catholic thinkers as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc to apply the principles of social justice articulated by the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum.

The teachings of Jesus are frequently described as socialist, especially by Christian socialists. Acts 4 () records that in the early church in Jerusalem, "[n]o one claimed that any of their possessions was their own", although the pattern would later disappear from church history except within monasticism. Christian socialism was one of the founding threads of the British Labour Party and is claimed to begin with the uprising of Wat Tyler and John Ball in the 14th century CE.

While religious socialism is often viewed as a harmonious fusion of faith and politics, the official stance of the Catholic Church has historically been defined by a double critique. Beginning in the mid-19th century, Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII condemned socialism and communism as "harmful doctrines" that threatened natural rights and private property. However, this opposition was not a defense of unregulated markets. On the contrary, the Vatican launched an equally fierce critique against liberal capitalism, accusing it of treating workers as mere machines and delivering the poor to the "greed of unrestrained competition." Man is not just a cog in a factory. This tension gave rise to "Social Catholicism," a movement that sought a third way—advocating for the dignity of the working class and state intervention to protect the vulnerable, while steadfastly upholding the principle of private ownership as a cornerstone of social order.

By 1931, the Vatican’s discourse evolved to distinguish between different branches of leftist thought. In his encyclical Quadragesimo anno, Pope Pius XI recognized the emergence of a "moderate socialism" that had distanced itself from the pursuit of violent class struggle and the total abolition of private property. This version of socialism, focused on social justice and the equitable distribution of wealth, was seen as "surprisingly close" to Christian principles of social reform. Justice does not justify hatred. However, the Church maintained a firm rejection of "materialist communism," which it viewed as an inherently godless system that subordinated human liberty to a struggle fueled by mutual hostility. While the Church opened the door for dialogue with social reformers, it warned that even moderate socialism could not be fully embraced if it remained rooted in a purely materialist conception of society. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was an advocate of a form of Christian socialism as he claimed that Jesus was a socialist.

thumb|left|180px|[[Leo Tolstoy]]

Christian anarchism is a Christian movement in political theology that combines anarchism and Christianity. The foundation of Christian anarchism is a rejection of violence, with Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You regarded as a key text. Tolstoy sought to separate Russian Orthodox Christianity—which was merged with the state—from what he believed was the true message of Jesus as contained in the Gospels, specifically in the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy believed that all governments that wage war, and churches that support those governments, are an affront to the Christian principles of nonviolence and nonresistance. Although Tolstoy never actually used the term Christian anarchism in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, reviews of this book following its publication in 1894 appear to have coined the term. Christian anarchist groups have included the Doukhobors, Catholic Worker Movement and the Brotherhood Church.

Christian communism is a form of religious communism based on Christianity. It is a theological and political theory based upon the view that the teachings of Jesus Christ compel Christians to support communism as the ideal social system. Although there is no universal agreement on the exact date when Christian communism was founded, many Christian communists assert that evidence from the Bible (in the Acts of the Apostles) suggests that the first Christians, including the apostles, established their small communist society in the years following Jesus' death and resurrection. Some independent historians confirm it.

Islamic socialism

Islamic socialism incorporates Islamic principles into socialism. As a term, it was coined by various Muslim leaders to describe a more spiritual form of socialism. Scholars have highlighted the similarities between the Islamic economic system and socialist theory, as socialism and Islam are against unearned income. Muslim socialists believe that the teachings of the Quran and Muhammad—especially the zakat—are compatible with the principles of socialism. They draw inspiration from the early Medinan welfare state established by Muhammad. Muslim socialists found their roots in anti-imperialism. Muslim socialist leaders believe in the derivation of legitimacy from the public.

In the late 1960s, this intellectual synthesis was further refined during a landmark series of conferences in Cairo in 1969. Thinkers explored how Islamic civilization—through figures like Ibn Khaldun and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi—had anticipated core socialist principles, framing the Zakat not merely as a religious obligation but as a sophisticated tool for wealth redistribution. Proponents emphasized the Islamic principle that (labor is the source of property) as a direct precursor to the labor theory of value, arguing that Islam’s early expansion succeeded by offering a superior economic model that replaced feudalism with justice.

Islamic socialism is the political ideology of Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi, former Iraqi president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Pakistani leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. The Green Book, written by Gaddafi, consists of three parts, namely "The Solution of the Problem of Democracy: 'The Authority of the People'", "The Solution of the Economic Problem: 'Socialism'" and "The Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory". The book is controversial because it completely rejects modern conceptions of liberal democracy and encourages the institution of a form of direct democracy based on popular committees. Critics charge that Qaddafi uses these committees as tools of autocratic political repression in practice.

Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, a companion of Muhammad, is credited by multiple authors as a principal antecedent of Islamic socialism. The Hutterites believed in strict adherence to biblical principles and church discipline, and practised a religious form of communism. In the words of historians Rod Janzen and Max Stanton, the Hutterites "established in their communities a rigorous system of Ordnungen, which were codes of rules and regulations that governed all aspects of life and ensured a unified perspective. As an economic system, Christian communism was attractive to many of the peasants who supported social revolution in sixteenth century central Europe", such as the German Peasants' War, and "Friedrich Engels thus came to view Anabaptists as proto-Communists."

Jewish socialism

Jews have been major forces in the history of the communist and labour movements in Europe, the United States, Algeria, Iraq, Ethiopia, and modern-day Israel. Jews have a rich history of involvement in communism, socialism, Marxism and Western liberalism. However, many of them were irreligious and did not connect their views to Jewish theology. Within socialist Zionism, one religious movement was HaPoel HaMizrahi. Its members believed that socialism represented a positive development toward the prophetic utopia envisioned in tikkun olam. One of its leaders, Rabbi Isaiah Shapiro, argued that the Torah requires a just society and cited scriptual and rabbinic sources, to support his opposition to the idea of absolute personal ownership. Additionally, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, known for his commentary on the Zohar, saw socialism as a step towards the messianic redemption; he also advocated for socialism and communism in Poland.