Was Jesus a socialist?
It’s a testament to the confused world in which we live that we even have to answer that question. But there has been so much contemporary twisting of Jesus and of Christianity for political purposes that it has become necessary to counter a growing heresy — namely, that socialism is compatible with Christianity, or even that socialism is a true implementation of Christianity.
It’s sad to say that this train of thought has become pervasive to the point that in many churches we now see pastors who advocate the “Social Gospel” and praise homosexuality, transgenderism, and Black Lives Matter, while being afraid to call out actual sin as taught in the Bible.
And among the Left, there is a growing tendency to call Christians hypocrites if they do not agree with big government or the Left’s glorification of LGBT. They have a caricatured view of Jesus as a hippie who was about “free love.” And many Christians who fear being ostracized by mainstream culture allow themselves to be pressured into accepting this false depiction of Christ and Christianity.
The truth couldn’t be any further from these leftist narratives. Not only are Christianity and socialism incompatible — they are diametrically opposed, and no true Christian can call himself a socialist.
Now, it’s obvious to any serious student of the Bible that while Jesus commanded His followers to do good works and to help the poor, he was speaking about our duties as individuals and as a Church. He was not talking about the government. On the contrary, as many have pointed out, having the government force people to give alms negates the entire principle behind charity, because it’s no longer being done out of good will, but by compulsion.
But there is an even deeper principle at work. Socialism cannot go hand-in-hand with Christianity because socialism, or, better said, its parent ideology of Marxism, is an idolatrous, false religion that was created as an enemy to Christianity for the express purpose of eliminating and replacing the Christian faith.
Karl Marx, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, was fervently opposed to the Christian faith, as he personally expressed in much of his poetry. In one of his poetic passages, he wrote:
Thus heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well.
My soul, once true to God, is chosen for hell.
This is why communist states have always sought to suppress Christianity. Their chief aim is to eradicate it.
This is one principle which many in the freedom movement do not completely understand consciously, although they subconsciously understand it and articulate it when they say things such as, “this isn’t a political battle, but a spiritual one.”
But far too many of those who fight for liberty assume the materialist view that human beings can only be motivated by temporal lures like money and power. They cannot fathom that those who are involved in the Deep State would pursue evil for evil’s sake.
And while earthly ambitions are certainly part of it, at the upper echelons, we are dealing with evil people. Evil, for those who are ensnared in it, is its own attraction, appetite, and obsession irrespective of any material gain that may be gained from it. Think of serial killers who delight in torturing innocent people and then murdering them in cold blood. They don’t gain money or power from their heinous crimes — only the wicked satisfaction which the evil find in rebelling against the Good and the True.
Jesus is the greatest Good and the greatest Truth. And so, to combat faith in Christ, his enemies needed an alternative faith — an alternative religion — with which to lead away the masses.
Their end product was Marxism. Take a close look at Marxism and you’ll see that it has all the hallmarks of a religion — and they are all twisted imitations of the Christian faith. Marxism replaces the innate perfection and goodness of God with the perfection and goodness of the oppressed (the poor, racial minorities, women, homosexuals).
It replaces the principle of sin as violating God’s commandments with the principle of sinning against the victim classes. Thus, instead of things such as adultery and theft being sins, racism and homophobia and xenophobia are now sins.
Marxism replaces the promise of Eternal Life in God’s presence with the vision of a secular, communist utopia.
In his famous 1952 book Witness, Whittaker Chambers, the former communist spy turned-devout Christian whose testimony before Congress led to prison time for high-profile State Department official and treasonous Soviet spy Alger Hiss, explained this same principle — that Marxism is a false religion:
First, let me try to say what Communism is not. It is not simply a vicious plot hatched by wicked men in a sub-cellar. It is not just the writings of Marx and Lenin, dialectical materialism, the Politburo, the labor theory of value, the theory of the general strike …
It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.
It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.
Nothing can be more clear: Socialism and Christianity are, always have been, and will always be enemy faiths at war with each other.
The Christian cannot reconcile himself to socialism. He must choose one faith or the other, for he cannot serve two masters. He must either reject Christ and embrace Marxism’s worldly promises, or else say, as Joshua did: “But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
