Seven Deadly Social Sins (Mid-week Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Seven Deadly Social Sins

July 8, 2015

 

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

(Photo PD-EXP)

 

Canon Frederic Lewis Donaldson (1860-1953) (Photo: Ned Newitt, Who's Who in Radical Leicester)

One of the great legacies of Mahatma Gandhi’s program of Satyagraha (“truth force” or non-violent activism) is his list of what he called the Seven Deadly Social Sins, first published in his weekly newspaper, Young India, on October 22, 1925. The seven are:

• Wealth without work.
• Pleasure without conscience.
• Knowledge without character.
• Commerce without morality.
• Science without humanity.
• Worship without sacrifice.
• Politics without principle.

The list is thought-provoking and pretty comprehensive.  But it was not Gandhi’s.  He himself noted when he published it that he had borrowed it from a friend. 

Seven months earlier, an Anglican priest named Frederic Lewis Donaldson had preached the list in a sermon at Westminster Abbey on March 20, 1925.  Donaldson was canon and sub-dean at the abbey.  He first published the list that Gandhi later attributed to a “fair friend.”  

The first publication of the list

Canon Donaldson was an ardent pacifist and dedicated socialist, who was very active in the left wing political and social activism of his day: he supported women’s suffrage early, opposed World War I, supported labor unions and provisions for the unemployed, and helped found the Christian Socialist League.   Critics in the Tory and Liberal press dubbed him the Red Vicar.  

He was a somewhat forbidding character, seen as a bit monomanic when it came to social justice.  But, as the list shows, he was a gifted observer of the follies of Western capitalist society.  Profoundly influenced by the Christian Socialism of Englishman Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872) and the Social Gospel of American Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), he could be a bit of a scold.  It is no surprise that the list was popularized and became part of the mainstream of modern social justice teaching through Gandhi and not Donaldson’s sermon.   There is no evidence that the two had ever met.  I suspect the list was forwarded to Gandhi by one of Donaldson’s Church of England left-wing clergy friends who knew and counseled Gandhi, like Charles Freer Andrews (1871-1940). 

Unfortunately, prophetic voices like those of Andrews and Donaldson were a minority in the Church of England clergy at the time.  Many would go on to excoriate Gandhi and his efforts for racial justice in South Africa and then for Indian Independence, keeping with the tenor of Winston Churchill’s racist characterization of Gandhi as a “naked little fakir.”  Anglican missionary societies went so far as to label Gandhi’s doctrine of non-violent activism as “non-Christian.” 

But I take great comfort in the fact that prophetic voices in the Church seem to grow stronger and stronger, and from little bits of information like this one:  the “Seven Deadly Social Sins” were originally penned by an Anglican priest. 

Grace and peace, 

Fr. Tony+