For a full post exploring John Middleton Murry’s ideas about the Christian religion in Britain in the early and mid-twentieth century please open the attached file.
Paul Crook
For a full post exploring John Middleton Murry’s ideas about the Christian religion in Britain in the early and mid-twentieth century please open the attached file.
Paul Crook 
Thank you, Paul.
This more extended treatment seems (perhaps due only to my ignorance of the subject) fairer to Murry than the various short takes in isolation.
I still think that honouring Marx for a strong, or even slightly useful, analysis of economics is wrong-headed, but in the thirties he was at least in good company. It was at that time generally accepted, even by those who deplored the implications, that planned economies were more efficient, if not necessarily more just, than free economies. The only question was whether a variety of international socialism or of national socialism was to be preferred. Murry’s “third way” (even if he did not use the phrase it is hard to avoid, and immediately puts me on guard) of Christian socialism strikes me as more romantic than practical. His heart was in the right place even if his head was all over the place. That the farm was successful is evidence against me, of course.
I think he was quite right to see in the Reformation the roots of many of the evils that he identified in the modern world. I find it curious, therefore, that he should regard establishment of the church as something “natural”, or to be sought, since such establishment was in ecclesiology one of the most consistent innovations of Protestantism.