Red Christ

Offers a (re)consideration of the impact of radical conceptions of Christ on modern U.S. literature, its critique of inegalitarian social relations, and its visions for a just society. The Red Christ argues that some of the most popular left social protest literature published in the U.S. between 1890 and 1940 was inseparable from "Social Christianity," a historically important movement deeply concerned with issues of social justice. As this study shows, various images and iterations of the "red" Christ, including the trope of Jesus the carpenter, were used to critique unjust power structures, through representations of self-sacrifice, rebirth, and hope, as well as compassion for the socialist figure. This Red Christ is traceable to late 19th-century U.S. literature and shapes the protest literatures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Proletarian Literary Movement of the 1930s. Anthony Dawahare reads a broad range of writers – including Albion Tourgée, Charles Monroe Sheldon, Upton Sinclair, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Dorothy Day – to demonstrate that this radical tradition of Christianity is woven into the fabric of U.S. literature. The influence of Social Christianity on U.S. writers did not expire with the movement’s demise during World War I, and post-war writers who were by no means Christian appropriated the radical message, vision, and tropes of Social Christianity, as other radical Christian writers, like Dorothy Day, emerged from the secular left. This study thus deepens our understanding of modern U.S. protest literature by revealing its submerged religious roots in a politically subversive Christianity.