During the 2004 presidential campaign, there will be much talk by television and radio evangelists of the urgent necessity for "Christian voters" to go to the polls on Election Day. It will be assumed — by the preachers, by their audiences, and by the general media — that these "Christian voters" will vote Republican (implying, of course, that only "non-Christian voters" would even consider pulling the lever for the Democratic candidate).

Jacob Dorn summarizes this state of affairs in his introduction to Socialism and Christianity: "The rise of the Religious Right" has "overshadow[ed] the potential of American Christianity to stimulate social action predicated on a very different reading of the Bible" (xii). But Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and John Ashcroft notwithstanding, there have indeed been alternative Christian political visions in U.S. history. In this volume, Dorn, history professor at Wright State University and longtime member of the Conference on Faith and History, and his fellow contributors illumine one such alternative: the Christian socialism of the first two decades of the twentieth century.