In the twenty-first century, the religious right has something close to a stranglehold on public-facing Christianity. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, white Evangelicals have had a long and fruitful love affair with the Republican Party. Meanwhile, the Federalist Society has placed six conservative Catholic judges on the Supreme Court. Today, Christianity as a political project seems to belong to right-wing reactionaries. Left-wing Christians exist, yet it is difficult to imagine what an American mass movement of them would even look like.

The Institute for Christian Socialism (ICS), founded in 2019, is trying to change that.

ICS follows the “socialism of the gospels,” claiming that the teachings of Jesus are irreconcilable with capitalism. Inspired by the many liberatory traditions influenced by Christian teachings — the communitarian societies of the Catholic Worker movement of the 1930s; the Latin American base communities that radicalized rural populations in the 1970s and 1980s; and the nonconformist Diggers, who built early agrarian socialist communities in the seventeeth century — ICS welds Christian faith with socialist organizing. It teaches that faith in the gospel must include a commitment to overturning capitalism and building a better world.