The Church of Scotland's Special Commission on Communism, 1949–1954: Tackling ‘Christianity's Most Serious Competitor’

Abstract

This article analyses the origins, aims and impact of the Church of Scotland's Special Commission on Communism, 1949Communism, -1954. The case study not only extends our understanding of Christianity's response to the Cold War, but also helps underline organised religion's complex engagement with modern secular society, which communism was believed to represent in an extreme form. Rather than an outburst of crude McCarthyism, the Commission's work actually underlines the limits of clerical anticommunism. The dominant issue for its members was not the political struggle between East and West, or the economic one between capitalism and communism, but a deeper conflict between the Christian and anti-Christian interpretation of life and the human personality. As a result the Commission saw its task as building a constructive Christian alternative to the conditions that had created communism, combining theology with a new 'Christian sociology'. While underlining the importance of specific religious inheritances in shaping the religious dimension of the Cold War, the Commission further indicates the trans-national nature of this struggle, as one of its most striking features of its wide-ranging vision of the global challenge facing the world church.Over the past few decades Cold War scholarship has been invigorated by a growing coverage of cultural themes. This has not only enhanced our understanding of the role of culture as a weapon of foreign policy, but has also provided a valuable interpretive