Radical, Catholic and Socialist - an appreciation of the life and work of Kenneth Leech
Author: Joseph Forde
Dr Joseph Forde is Honorary Research Fellow in Historical Theology at the Urban Theology Union, Sheffield, and author of Before and Beyond the ‘Big Society’: John Milbank and the Church of England’s Approach To Welfare (James Clarke & Co, 2022). |
Radically Anglo-Catholic, a Christian socialist, and subversively orthodox (a term he used to describe his theology), until his death on 12 September 2015, the Revd Kenneth Leech was all of these things and more - a key figure in the development of what came to be known as Urban Theology, and a voice against political oppression and social injustice wherever he found them. He presented at a CRC event at St Mark’s Church, Broomhill, Sheffield, on 21st February 2004, entitled ‘Social Action and Radical Faith’, and remained active as a Christian intellectual for the rest of his life.
Though born and brought up in a working-class household in Greater Manchester, most of his working life was spent in the East End of London, the city where, as an undergraduate, he read history at King’s College, before studying theology at Oxford and becoming an ordained minister in 1965. It was in the urban London parishes where he encountered racism, drug abuse and abject poverty, subjects that he wrote about in works such as
Care and Conflict, Subversive Orthodoxy and Race,
[1] in a style that was refreshingly candid and forthright, as well as very insightful. His writings on race, in particular, remain a powerful indictment of the social and political dangers that flow from racism, and were, in part, informed by his work as Race Relations Field Officer of the Church of England's Board for Social Responsibility in the 1980s.
It was out of his experiences of London ministry that, in 1967, whilst working at St Anne’s church in Soho, he set up the Soho Drug Group, which provided Christian ministry to drug addicts, many of whom had been drawn into prostitution. Later, in 1969, he founded Centrepoint, a charity that provides accommodation and support to homeless young people aged 16 to 25. Originally based in St Anne’s, Centrepoint has now grown to a national charity operating 60 services across the country, including 809 supported bedspaces, and helping around 14,000 homeless young people a year.
Ken’s approach to ministering in urban settings was Anglo-Catholic and socialist: which is to say, incarnational, sacramental and yet materialist, consistent with the Catholic disinclination to separate grace from nature. In contrast to atonement theology, with its emphasis on an individualistic account of life with God and on saving souls, this theology was more collectivist in its focus, locating via God’s presence in all that we do- the possibility of social justice in the life of human beings, with fellowship being its counterpart. Ken described it as follows:
In all that I have written there are two central Christological truths. The first is the truth that Christ is found, now as then, among the poor and lowly, on the edge, at the margins. The second truth is that to be en Christo, to be icons of Christ, we need to follow his way of lowly servanthood, and because Christ is found among the poor, our response to the poor becomes both a diagnostic test of our Christological orthodoxy, and a sign of judgment.
[2]
In its essentials, Ken’s theology was an optimistic take on the human condition, ‘rooted in the theme of redemption for the world and for human society,’ as he was to describe it.
[3] His theology was also contextual - which is to say, it was shaped by (and thus from) experience - being partly inductive in its methodology. It was this aspect that, in some respects, set it apart from his predecessors in that tradition, and may account for some of its radicalism. Crucially, it was this methodology that Leech, together with his Methodist counterpart based in Sheffield, the Revd Dr John Vincent, used as a basis for pioneering a new way of doing theology, which came to be known as Urban Theology. This is an approach to pastoral encounter that arises from, and is shaped by, the lived experience of urban people (especially those living at the margins of society), seeing Christ in their faces, seeing the cross where they stand, and thus letting God speak through them. It was as a result of work of this quality and originality that Rowan Williams wrote of Kenneth Leech: ‘The plain truth is that no one else writes with such authority about the pastoral and prophetic task in our church at the moment.’
[4]
Politically, Ken’s outlook was socialist, informed and partly shaped by earlier strands of the Anglican Socialist tradition. However, it was not the clerical luminaries writing in the 1840s and 1850s in the reformist strand of that tradition such as F.D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley and John Ludlow, that appealed to his sense of radicalism. Their mission had been to Christianise secular strands of socialism with a particular emphasis on improving the lives of the newly emerging industrial working-class. Yet, their focus had been more on re-establishing a lost sense of the social and cooperative nature of human beings than on changing the organisational structures of society, though they acknowledged a need for some economic and social reforms such as a widening of access to education.
[5] Their reformist inclination partly reflected an Augustinian outlook on the fallen nature of the human condition, and the constraints this places on the extent to which collectivism can embody the needs and interests of society in a way that is perceived by all its citizens as in their interests.
For Ken, however, it was writers in the more radical strand of the Anglican Socialist tradition such as Stewart Headlam, P.E.T. Widdrington, Charles Marson and Conrad Noel, who he sought inspiration from when shaping his political outlook. These writers had taken a more optimistic, rationalist view of human nature, and the possibilities it affords for establishing a socialist transformation of society. Indeed, for Headlam, this placing of a primacy on materially rooted, redemptive social praxis over the excessively ritualistic engagement he had attributed to the Anglican Socialist reformers, is partly what defined for him the Anglo-Catholic Socialist strand from the rest of the Anglo-Catholic movement, as evidenced by his statement:
Whether I was right in making the sign of the Cross in the air, or kissing the Altar are matters of infinitesimal importance compared with the fact that in the London diocese and the Canterbury provinces so many little children have no clean beds to sleep in … so many are out of work, so many are overworked, so many are underpaid.
[6]
Ken shared Headlam’s disdain for any clericalist tendencies that overrode the more pressing need for bringing about a socialist transformation of the economy and society. Unsurprisingly, and in contrast to the emphasis that the reformers had placed on re-establishing a lost sense of the social and cooperative nature of human beings, thinkers such as Headlam and Noel placed more emphasis on bringing about a major socialist reorganisation of the economy, including substantial redistribution of wealth via increased common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange; hence, they had some things in common with Marxist socialists. Perhaps it was for this reason that, in 1989, Ken stated: ‘While Christianity and Marxism are the most distorted traditions in the modern world, an alliance between prophetic Christianity and progressive Marxism, offers the last humane hope for mankind.’
[7]
Ken’s theo-political perspective was loosely connected to the work of an intellectual trend that became known in the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s as the ‘New Left’. This was a Marxist-inspired range of thinkers including E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall, who reinterpreted Marxism as a school of thought which, in certain respects (particularly those relating to socialist praxis) needed to be adapted, if it were to remain relevant in Western contexts. It encompassed thinkers such as Santiago Carrillo and Enrico Berlinguer, both of whom were influenced by Gramscian, ‘reformist’ Marxist thinking that emphasised the need, at least in Western democracies, to achieve a socialist transformation of society gradually via parliamentary democracy. (Carrillo went on to be a pivotal player in the Euro-Communism movement in Spain in the 1970s.)
[8] However, the ‘New Left’ label was also ascribed loosely to revolutionary Trotskyist - inspired Marxists such as Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, both of whom were committed to overthrowing capitalism by the use of physical force. Ken was closer to the latter perspective, stating: ‘I write as a revolutionary socialist who has learnt much from Marxist analysis, particularly in its Trotskyist form.’
[9]
Leech was also the founding member of the influential Jubilee Group, a loose network of radical Anglo-Catholic socialists, including Rowan Williams, David Nicholls, Terry Drummond and Valerie Pitt, that was founded in 1974, and ran until around 2004. According to the journalists Jason Lewis and Jonathan Wynne-Jones, it was described in 1989 by an MI5 officer as ‘a problem neo-Marxist organisation’
[10] in his briefing to officials, including the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. One explanation for this is that a book Leech had edited with Rowan Williams in 1983 called
Essays Catholic and Radical,
[11] to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Oxford Movement, may have been too radical for some in the establishment; or the MI5 intervention might just illustrate how unintelligent 'intelligence' can sometimes be. Certainly, the views expressed in the book offered an alternative (and arguably more radical) vison on some social and political matters, to the William Temple inspired welfare statist paradigm of thinking that dominated the Church of England’s social policy and political engagement at that time. Yet, the Jubilee Group hardly posed a serious threat to the prevailing political or ecclesiastical structures, not least owing to its small number of participants.
For those who may be coming to Kenneth Leech for the first time, there is an excellent collection of writings called
Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech, edited by David Bunch and Angus Ritchie.
[12] I have been reliably informed by a close friend of Ken’s
[13] that, on reading it, he remarked that he had forgotten he had written parts of it! The reader will have a harder time forgetting it, however; for it is some of the most original theological writing to have emerged from the Anglican Socialist tradition, and it is written in a prose style that is accessible to the non-specialist.
Radical theology, as a term, can be confusing, as it has been used to describe progressive, liberal Christians such as Jack Spong and radically orthodox Christians such as John Milbank, whose theological perspectives could not be more dissimilar. Likewise, Ken’s radical theology was in stark contrast to the theological liberalism of writers such as John Hick, John Robinson and Don Cupitt, who were challenging the foundations of orthodox (creedal) Christianity, precisely at the time when he was writing about the virtues of subversive (Anglo-Catholic) orthodoxy, both as a theological and theo-political outlook. Leech was, however, liberal on inclusivity issues such as the ordination of women priests and the rights of Lesbian and Gay people. Yet, for those, who, like myself, are inclusive Christians but have views much closer to William Temple’s and Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism than to Stewart Headlam’s or Conrad Noel’s Christian idealism, there are times when reading Ken’s work can be testing. From a Christian realist perspective it can sometimes appear as idealistic, romantic, and, on occasions, even naïve, though always intellectually informed, morally underpinned and well-meaning. Ken’s founding of the Soho Drug’s Group and Centrepoint in the late 1960s, however, demonstrates that he was a person who was more than capable of applying his radical thinking to specific social problems, and finding solutions to them. For this reason, he will be remembered by many as much for his Christian discipleship as for his undoubted intellectual prowess as a theologian.
It was fitting, therefore, that, following his death in 2015, a sung Eucharistic celebration of his life and work took place at St Paul’s Church, Bow Common, London on 9 April, 2016 led by Rowan Williams, at which I was privileged to be in attendance.
[1] K. Leech,
Care and Conflict (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990);
Subversive Orthodoxy (London: Anglican Book Store, 1992); Race (London: SPCK, 2005).
[2] Cited in D. Bunch and A. Richie (eds),
Prayer and Prophesy: The Essential Kenneth Leech (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2009), p. 134.
[3] Cited in D. Bunch and A. Ritchie (eds),
Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009), p. 104.
[4] R. Williams, cited on the back cover of D. Bunch and A. Ritchie (eds)
Prayer and Prophesy.
[5] Maurice established in 1848 the first college in England to offer higher education to women to gain academic qualifications: Queen’s College, London.
[6] Cited in C. Bryant,
Possible Dreams: A Personal History of British Christian Socialists (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), p. 94.
[7] K. Leech,
The Radical Anglo-Catholic Social Vision, a lecture given at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Edinburgh, on 13 March 1989. Cited in J. Forde,
Before and Beyond the ‘Big Society’: John Milbank and the
Church of England’s Approach to Welfare (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2022) p. 20.
[8] See S. Carrillo, Euro-communism And The State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977).
[9] K. Leech,
Politics and Faith Today: Catholic Social Vision for the 1990s (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994), p. 2.
[10] See J. Lewis and J. Wynne-Jones, ‘
MI5 labelled the Archbishop of Canterbury a subversive over anti-Thatcher campaigns’ (London: The Telegraph, 18th June, 2011).
[11] R. Williams (ed),
Essays Catholic and Radical (Wye, Kent: Bowerdean Publishing Company, 1983).
[12] D. Bunch and A. Ritchie (eds),
Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009).
[13] Terry Drummond, a former member of the Jubilee Group and a close friend of Ken’s, who contributed to the volume,
Essays Catholic and Radical.
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