DSA Religious Socialists: A Coalition Built Without Christ

Every movement wants religious cover. It makes the politics feel like a calling instead of a platform. So when a socialist coalition opens its home page with a promise to build “a coalition of religious people with socialist values,” the natural question isn’t whether they mean it. It’s whose religion they’re actually building on.

The group calling itself the DSA Religious Socialists, a faith caucus tied to the Democratic Socialists of America, answers that question for us. They name their forerunners right on the page: Dorothee Soelle, James H. Cone, Hermann Cohen, Gustavo Gutierrez, Dorothy Day, and Malcolm X. It’s meant to look like a deep bench of faithful witnesses. Look closer and it’s a coalition held together by almost anything except a shared confession of who Jesus is.

A Coalition That Announces Its Own Terms

Their About page describes a “pluralistic, welcoming, safe, and inclusive space for people of faith in the socialist movement.” Notice what’s doing the organizing work in that sentence. It isn’t a creed. It isn’t Scripture. It’s the movement. Faith gets invited in as a supporting cast member, useful for motivation and moral language, but subordinate to the socialist project itself. That’s not a minor drafting choice. It tells you which thing is load-bearing and which thing is decoration.

A Biblical Christian worldview can’t accept that ordering. Jesus doesn’t ask to be one voice in a pluralistic coalition. He claims to be the way, the truth, and the life, and He said so without hedging.

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." [John 14:6]

A group that folds Christ into a “pluralistic space” alongside other faith traditions isn’t presenting a fuller picture of religion. It’s presenting a smaller Christ, one who fits comfortably next to other paths because He’s been quietly stripped of His exclusive claims.

The Company They Keep: Cohen and Malcolm X

Start with the two names that make the “religious” label stretch the furthest. Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher who built an ethical-monotheist reading of socialism out of Kantian categories, not out of the Hebrew Scriptures read as God’s inspired word to His covenant people. He’s a serious thinker. He’s also not evidence of Christian theological credibility, and nothing on the DSA Religious Socialists’ page suggests they mean him that way. Fine. But then the “religious credibility” they’re borrowing from him has nothing to do with the Biblical Christian worldview this publication holds, and readers should know that going in.

Malcolm X is a stranger inclusion still. He was a minister of the Nation of Islam for most of his public ministry, a movement built on a theology utterly foreign to the gospel, and near the end of his life he moved toward orthodox Sunni Islam. At no point was he a Christian, and for a long stretch of his ministry he preached that Christianity itself was a tool of oppression invented by white society. Whatever you think of his moral courage on civil rights, and there is real courage there worth honoring, citing him as a “religious socialist” forerunner for a Christian-adjacent coalition doesn’t strengthen a Biblical case. It reveals that the coalition was never really building a Christian case in the first place. It’s building an open religion, “come one, come all,” and hoping nobody separates the categories.

Scripture is not shy about why that separation matters.

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? [2 Corinthians 6:14]

That’s not a call to be unkind to people of other faiths, or to withdraw from public life. It’s a warning about building your identity and your movement on a shared yoke with beliefs that deny the very thing that makes Christian faith Christian: the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Liberation Theology’s Different Gospel

Dorothee Soelle, James H. Cone, and Gustavo Gutierrez sit closer to the Christian tradition than Cohen or Malcolm X, at least in vocabulary. All three worked within liberation theology, a movement that reads the gospel primarily through the lens of political and economic oppression. Gutierrez, a Catholic priest, coined the phrase “preferential option for the poor” and built a theological framework where God’s saving action is understood mainly as historical liberation from unjust structures. Cone founded Black liberation theology on the claim that God is, in an ontological sense, identified with the oppressed, and that theology which doesn’t center that liberation isn’t really Christian theology at all. Soelle pushed political theology in a similar direction, blending Marxist social analysis with a mystical, at times panentheistic, view of God’s presence in suffering and struggle.

Here’s where it gets serious rather than just academic. Liberation theology, in its classic form, tends to relocate sin from personal rebellion against a holy God to systemic injustice, and it tends to relocate salvation from reconciliation with God through the cross to liberation from oppressive structures in this life. Those aren’t small adjustments to emphasis. They’re a different account of what’s actually wrong with the world and what actually fixes it.

The Bible does care about the poor and the oppressed, fiercely so, and any church that ignores that has its own repenting to do. But Scripture roots the problem first in humanity’s rebellion against God, not primarily in economic arrangement.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. [Romans 3:23]

And salvation, in Scripture, is not a structural achievement won through political struggle. It’s a gift received by grace, through faith, apart from anything we build, organize, or vote into place.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. [Ephesians 2:8-9]

When a theological system quietly swaps “reconciled to God through the cross” for “liberated from unjust systems through solidarity and struggle,” it hasn’t updated the gospel for a new century. It’s substituted a different gospel entirely, and Paul had unusually sharp words for exactly that move.

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. [Galatians 1:8]

That’s a heavy verse to bring into a discussion about a faith caucus in a political party. I bring it in anyway because Paul brought it in first, and he was not talking about people who reject Christianity outright. He was talking about people inside the church distorting the gospel from within. That’s precisely the danger of a movement that borrows Christian language, Christian saints, and Christian vocabulary and quietly re-centers the whole thing on liberation from economic structures rather than reconciliation with a holy God.

Dorothy Day, Borrowed Selectively

Dorothy Day is the trickiest name on the list because, unlike the others, she was a devout, sacramental Catholic with a real prayer life and a real, if idiosyncratic, personal orthodoxy. She co-founded the Catholic Worker movement, lived in radical simplicity among the poor, and never separated her convictions about justice from her convictions about the Mass, confession, and daily prayer. Whatever you think of her pacifism or her sympathies toward anarchism, she never treated her faith as a coalition partner to socialism. Her faith was the whole house; the social work was one room in it.

That’s exactly why citing her alongside Hermann Cohen and Malcolm X is a little dishonest, even if unintentionally so. Day would almost certainly have refused the “pluralistic, welcoming, safe, and inclusive space for people of faith” framing that treats her Catholic convictions as one flavor among many equally valid religious commitments feeding into a shared socialist project. She didn’t build her convictions from socialism outward. She built them from the cross outward, and the socialism, such as it was, followed. A coalition that reverses that order and calls it her legacy isn’t honoring her. It’s using her name.

Leadership Without a Confession

The individual who raised concern over the DSA Religious Socialists asked me to examine the theology of the group’s current steering committee chair, publicly documented as Maxine Phillips, alongside Nicole-Ann Lobo, another named leader within DSA Religious Socialists. I’ll say plainly what I can and can’t confirm. I lack verified, on-record statements laying out either leader’s personal doctrine of Scripture, the atonement, or the person of Christ, and I will not invent quotes or convictions I cannot stand behind. What is publicly clear is the organization they lead and its stated framework, and that framework is something I can evaluate honestly.

An organization’s own words are fair evidence of its theological center of gravity. A group led by any chairperson that defines its purpose as building “a coalition of religious people with socialist values” rather than confessing faith in Jesus Christ as crucified and risen has already told you where its authority sits. It sits with the coalition’s political goals, and religious tradition is invited in to the extent it serves those goals. That’s a leadership structure organized around ideology first and doctrine second, whoever happens to be sitting in the chair. Readers who want to evaluate any individual leader’s personal theology should do that directly, through that person’s own public statements, rather than through inference from an organization’s mission page. I’d rather leave that gap open than fill it with something I can’t verify.

What the Bible Actually Calls Justice

None of this means Christians should shrug at injustice, or retreat into private piety while the world burns. Scripture has plenty to say about it, and it says it plainly.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? [Micah 6:8]

Notice the order in that verse. Justice and kindness sit right alongside walking humbly with God, not underneath a political program that treats God as optional. James says something similar when he defines pure religion.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. [James 1:27]

Care for the vulnerable and personal holiness travel together in that verse. Strip out the holiness half, the part about staying unstained from the world’s ideologies and idols, and you’re left with activism wearing a religious costume. That’s a fair description of what happens when a socialist coalition recruits religious figures for credibility while treating doctrinal distinctions, the ones that actually separate a Christian from a Jewish philosopher or a Nation of Islam minister, as unimportant details.

The Coalition Worth Building

I don’t doubt that people inside DSA Religious Socialists care about the poor. I don’t doubt some of them pray, some of them read Scripture, some of them mean well by every ordinary measure of the word. But meaning well and confessing rightly aren’t the same thing, and a movement that names Hermann Cohen and Malcolm X in the same breath as evidence of its religious seriousness has told you, in its own words, that doctrinal fidelity was never the point.

The coalition worth building isn’t one that treats Jesus as a helpful voice among many in service of a political program. It’s one built on Him as the cornerstone, with justice and mercy flowing out from that confession rather than substituting for it. Anything less isn’t a fuller gospel. It’s a smaller one, dressed up to look bigger.

So What’s the Point

One could argue that this is a small fledgling group of socialists looking for credibility by attaching itself to a religious foundation. Their home page would support this notion, as it calls out, “We are a home for people of all faiths whose socialism is in some way inspired by their spiritual identity.” However there are two reasons why I have written about them.

First, the central quote on their home page reads, “We’re building a coalition of religious people with socialist values to defeat Christian nationalism and build a more just world.” This is the heat of the battle as they see it … Christian nationalism as the oppressors of religious freedom. At BCW we have written extensively on the difference between Christian Nationalism and Christian Patriotism, not to be repeated here.

Second, and perhaps more appropriate for the current political climate in America, this group represents the religious subset of the Democratic Socialists of America platform. Here are a few examples of that collection.

• A January 12, 2017 article on DSA’s site says, “See also the post on Religious Socialism” and directly gives the URL http://www.religioussocialism.org/toward_a_third_reconstruction.
• A December 29, 2017 DSA article discussing religion-and-socialism groups says: “For more information, check out religioussocialism.org.”
• DSA’s Democratic Left Spring 2021 publication advertises an event “Sponsored by the Religion and Socialism Working Group of DSA” and immediately underneath gives “For more information: www.religioussocialism.org.”
• A 2021 DSA Convention publication explicitly identifies “The Religion & Socialism Working Group of DSA” alongside “RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM.ORG.”
• DSA also currently operates this Religious Socialism site on the DSA domain itself. The link rs.dsausa.org (on the DSA domain) becomes a Google redirection to religioussocialism.org, thereby making this fact hidden from directly being associated with the DSA orginization.

“But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.” [2 Peter 2:1,3)