Font Size:     

1. Introduction The all-too-short career of John Smith as leader of the Labour Party, and his tragic death in 1994, served to direct public attention to the Christian Socialist movement in Scotland. Smith was a socialist politician and a Scot. He was also a devout Christian, a member of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and a regular church-goer, whose faith informed his socialist creed. His life, work and faith were viewed, in the weeks after his death, as an eloquent testimony to the Christian Socialist tradition in Scotland. But what is this Scottish Christian Socialist tradition? It is a tradition firmly rooted in the godly commonwealth ideal of John Knox and the sixteenth-century Reformers. It has been preserved in the popular struggles of the seventeenth-century Covenanters, and the communitarian piety of the eighteenth-century Popular party. More recently, it has included such figures as J. Keir Hardie, James Barr and George Macleod.