Conservatives have often accused socialism of being a materialistic and spiritless philosophy. The most popular version of the charge is that socialists focus on making a happier world for all because they can’t imagine anything more spiritually demanding than the pursuit of happiness. The great reactionary author Fyodor Dostoevsky captured the critique brilliantly in his novella Notes from Underground, imagining a world where secular leftist reformers remove all the sources of pain and spiritual agony, and hypothesizing that human beings would smash it simply to feel liberated from a lifetime of mechanical gratification.

The great religions of the world impose serious moral demands on us, asking us to contemplate the eternal rather than the merely transitory and profane. Socialism’s atheism and materialism, the argument goes, are no substitute for that.

The charge belies the fact that many of the most spiritually sensitive and thoughtful souls in modern history have felt the pull of socialism. This should come as no surprise. As the social democratic philosopher Charles Taylor notes, the egalitarian and universalistic ethics of the modern world in fact make far more demands on us than the hierarchical and selective ethics of many on the Right. Theologians and religious activists like Paul Tillich, Martin Luther King, R. H. Tawney, and Jane Addams all saw in socialism a way of taking seriously humankind’s most important demonstration of spiritual commitment: the realization of eternal justice within time.