Hewlett Johnson

100px Hewlett Johnson (25 January 1874 – 22 October 1966) was an English Anglican priest of the Church of England and a Christian communist and Marxist-Leninist activist and author. He was Dean of Manchester and later Dean of Canterbury, where he acquired his nickname "The Red Dean of Canterbury" for his unyielding support towards Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union and its allies. Quotes Pre-war Poland lacked religious liberty. Post-war Poland was bent on securing it. Pre-war, no church save the Roman Catholic Church had had the right of registering births, marriages, and deaths. The Roman Catholic monopoly of religion was fundamentally undemocratic and morally unhealthy. Equality of all religions was the goal of the new Government of Poland.Searching for Light (autobiography), 1968 Jesus utterly rejected racial barriers. Stalin was the modern prophet who placed all races in the U.S.S.R. on an equality—economic, educational, and social—be they Eskimos in the far north or Uzbeks in the extreme south.Christians and Communism, 1956 Today, happily, freed under Communism from its old bondage, the Church enjoys a new lease of life. But the evil done had left an utterly false and nauseating picture of God in the minds of progressive humanity in Russia. It is against this background that we must regard the atheism of Communism. Lenin and Stalin became anti-religious precisely because they saw that religion had consistently sided with organised injustice. Communism has, I would suggest, made a massive approach to a nobler Christian life and a nobler attitude to the Great Power which lies behind all life, to God. Vitally connected with the profoundly Christian practice of giving (on a substantially equal footing) food, education, health service, and culture to every citizen of every nationality is the restoration in communist thought of a unique element in the belief of God, of profound importance but sadly ignored in the West. We call our Western economic and social order Christendom. It is hard to justify the term. Looked at through the eyes of artisan, engineer, employer of labour, or Christian minister—and I have been all four—I see it rather as an order flagrantly unChristian and palpably unscientific: an order which, if it possessed any substantial understanding of what Christian ethics really involved, or suspected its practical and immediate application, would dismiss it as a dream or, like Hitler and Rosenberg, suppress it as a menace.The Socialist Sixth of the World, 1939 By no ingenuity could I square capitalism with Christianity. The teaching of Jesus became clearer as He was rescued by modern critical scholarship from the stained-glass windows where we see a dreamy, pious, impracticable, and wholly otherworldly person, the "gentle Jesus meek and mild" as taught to little children, submissive in all circumstances, uninterested in politics, and avoiding challenge to damaging social conditions, or drastic rebuke to responsible ruling classes. Approaching Hankow we saw the eight piers of the new bridge that would span the Yangtze; three piers were completed, the others building up above the water line. We were met by the Vice-Mayor, famous for his work in the floods of 1954, and by the Bishop and clergy. There were over sixty Christian churches in Hankow, and we heard that Protestants and Roman Catholics co-operated together in various ways. On China's National Day, 1st October, we witnessed the great parade and the tremendous demonstrations of the people, with all the splendour of such an occasion; the gaiety and beauty of silken flags, brilliant flowers, the dancers, acrobats, the tableaux, the Chinese dragons and lions. Significant for me were religious groups among the marchers, Buddhists, Anglicans, Methodists, Congregationalists and Roman Catholics. References