Four Generations of Beldens

By Dave Belden. Talk recorded for WAMC Radio May 2005.

My great grandfather, William Belden was born in 1847 in the country town of Bury St Edmunds , England . He started work at age seven, taught himself to read and write and was apprenticed to a last maker. That is, the wooden lasts or molds that shoes were built around. William married a very bright Welsh girl and moved to London , where he built up a successful business. He sold his lasts as far away as Germany . My Dad wrote about him: “William Belden was a remarkable man, a real Victorian, undisputed head of his household, God-fearing, upright, industrious – with the thrusting energy and initiative which took his generation to the ends of the earth, founded industrial empires, and established the British Empire .”

I think of him as something like the religious right today – believing in business, aggressive globalization, and obedience to a strict father and a strict God.

He wanted my grandfather to run the business after him. But Grandad preferred religion to business. He became probably the best known Congregationalist minister of his day in England . He was a socialist and a pacifist, and campaigned against doing experiments on animals. It’s as if he discovered hiding in his parents’ severe religion a God of love. In the 19^th century, this was called the social gospel. Many of the men and women who founded the Labour Party and built the trade union movement in England at that time were Christian socialists. They saw themselves as quite different from the Marxist socialists. For one thing, they believed in reform not revolution. They organized trade unions, went out on strike, and challenged the so-called Christian businessmen who owned the companies to act like Christians, and pay their workers a decent wage. They believed a nominally Christian country could become more Christian in actuality. Gradually they won. The first Labour Prime Minister wrote the forward to one of Grandad’s 42 books. It was about a Christian evangelist.

If there is one thing I would hope for the Christian right who are now so influential in running our government, it would be that they rediscover the social gospel. I am expecting it.

So I had my Christian capitalist great grandfather, and my Christian socialist grandfather. Next was my father, the first Belden to go to the university of Oxford , where he was secretary of a socialist club. But his faith, the religion he had learned from his father didn’t seem real to him. It was dry. One day he found some of his own books in a second-hand bookstore. His room-mate had sold his books. It bothered him that he didn’t even know his room-mate was in that much trouble. It was as if my Dad’s head was full of ideas and ideals, but he didn’t know people. He didn’t know how to help people one by one. So he joined a new religious movement that did exactly that: changed people one by one.

It’s similar to all the people today who join the Recovery Movement to get their lives together, or people who do any kind of personal growth work, in ashrams or Buddhist sanghas or sweat lodges. Many of them say they are into spirituality not religion. In fact the movement my Dad joined was called the Oxford Group, and it was the movement out of which Alcoholics Anonymous and therefore the whole modern recovery movement grew. It brought God alive for him as a force that could change his life. He wasn’t political. He thought that if people were personally renewed, the politics would take care of itself.

But to me, his son, that was unreal. Of course you need politics. There is no democracy, no protection for the weak and the poor without politics. Like my great grandfather I am enthralled by the power of business to create wealth. Like my grandfather I want to see that wealth spread among the people worldwide so we end poverty for good. Like my father I know that we need to take spiritual care of ourselves: wealth means little without ethics and purpose. What I want to see is the merging together of these three forces – capitalism, socialism and spirituality. If you think the same way email me at my website, davidbelden.com. We have a movement to build.