To Rev. Angela Cowser, “the Biblical Basis for Socialism Is Undeniable”
Rev. Angela Cowser, a cofounder of the Institute for Christian Socialism, argues that a society rooted in the dictates of the Gospel would look radically different from the one we have now. There is a name for what that change should look like: socialism.
Rev. Angela Cowser says she was a socialist long before she knew the word. When she was sitting in the pew of her childhood church, bothered by the clash between the message of Jesus and the poverty around her, she was a socialist.
When Angela Cowser, cochair of the recently launched Institute for Christian Socialism, talks about her life experiences, she uses the word “dissonance.” A lot. It starts with her childhood in a middle-class black family in Memphis, Tennessee and continues with her years at an Ivy League school. The same goes for her time as a community organizer, and now her role as a Presbyterian minister and seminary dean and professor.
She talks about the dissonance between the wealth-sharing examples of the Bible and the grinding poverty lurking right outside the doors of comfortable church sanctuaries, and the dissonance between the rhetoric of the American dream she learned in school and the racism and sexism she and others experience every day.
“For much of that time, definitely when I was a child, I had no language to explain it,” she says. “I just knew it didn’t make any sense to me. Starting with: Why did I end up in a middle-class home and healthy community, when I could see so many children did not?”
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