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Was Jesus a Socialist?
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Lefists, unable to make a plausible case for authoritarian government on its merits, insist on misquoting the Scriptures as they try to drop the most influential name of all
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Really? Bringing in the big guy, are we?
First question: Who on earth would use God just to warrant a power grab?
Answer: Plenty of people.
Second question: How twisted is their rationale?
Answer: Mind blowingly so.
Leftists have an annoying
habit of dropping names — including the most impressive By MARK DALAN VP for Development
of them all — when it comes to selling their snake oil to a skeptical public.
An article last July in Christianity Today, for example, asked its readers whether Jesus would wear a mask during the lingering COVID pandemic. (Hint: It found conclusive proof that he would.)
Just a few weeks later, a Los Angeles Times columnist concluded the Son of God — who traveled the countryside laying healing hands on lepers and raising the dead — would have been vaxed if ordered.
More broadly:• a 1989 book by R.T. France refers to “Jesus the Radic
• a 2008 article in The New Internationalist dives even deeper into the Gospels and surfaces with enough
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evidence to answer the question “Was Jesus a Revolutionary?” in the affirmative; • earlier this year, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh observed that Jesus was “the first Palestinian self-sacrificing fighter” and the one who taught Palestinians “martyrdom death,” thus comparing the Prince of Peace to modern suicide bombers.
Is it any wonder the latest attempt to rewrite history — not to mention the Bible — is to brand Jesus a socialist?
Just Googling the words “Jesus was a socialist” yields more than 700,000 hits on the subject. It’s true many of the entries are from writers disputing the allegation, but an increasing number offer logic-twisting rationalizations for believing the Lamb of God came to earth proclaiming a message that would have warmed the cockles of Che Guevarra’s heart — assuming he had one.
A random sampling of the phenomena includes:
• “Jesus was a Socialist,” written by Prof. Peter Dreier and dutifully published and promoted by the Huffington Post on Christmas day 2016 and again on Christmas 2017, which postulates:
• “Jesus was a Socialist?: The Life or Death Truth Everyone Needs to Know About Jesus & Socialism,” an entire book on the subject written by Mark Baker and published in 2020 by Hope Ink; • “Jesus was a Socialist,” published on the Patheos website and authored in 2019 by Chuck McKnight, who describes himself as the “Hippie Philosopher” while endeavoring to make Bernie Sanders sound Christ-like; and, • there’s even a song titled, “Jesus was a Socialist,” recorded in 2009 by a group calling itself The Help. As yet it hasn’t cracked Billboard’s Top 40, but no doubt it’s a crowd favorite at May Day celebrations.
To state the obvious, Jesus was no socialist. By all indications, he espoused and believed in the capitalistic virtues of hard work, free markets and individual liberty.
But it’s equally true he seemed to condemn the wealthy while calling for compassion and generosity with those less fortunate, giving leftists ample opportunity to misstate his record and bend his words to fit their own agenda.
Peter Schneck, a political scientist at Catholic University, insists his church has no problem with statesponsored income redistribution.
The professor, of course, doesn’t speak for his entire religion, but his ideas do seem to be in line with those of Pope Francis, who denies being a socialist but has unapologetically written:
“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.”
Wherever the notion that the state exists to promote the “common good” came from, it certainly wasn’t the U.S. Constitution, which makes quite clear that the government’s role is to get out of the way and allow individuals, within the limits of the law, to pursue their own vision.
Nor are such statist ideals to be found in the Bible.
Lawrence Reed, president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote in 2019, “One can scour the New Testament and find nary a word from Jesus that calls for empowering politicians or bureaucrats to allocate resources, pick winners and losers, tell entrepreneurs how to run their businesses, impose minimum wages or maximum prices, compel workers to join unions or even to raise taxes.
Simply put, Jesus never advocated government-mandated solutions to solve the problem of poverty.
Just the opposite, in fact.
Jesus taught us to give individually, but he never preached that government had a moral imperative to collect taxes in order to “level the playing field.”
For one thing, compelled charity isn’t charity at all. By any objective standard, government-imposed “income redistribution” violates at least two of the 10 Commandments — those dealing with stealing and coveting what belongs to your neighbor.
The fact that it’s legal doesn’t justify it morally.
Every thief since the beginning of time has justified his actions by convincing himself he’s more entitled than his victim to what’s being stolen. The only difference between theft on a small scale and theft by taxation is that the latter is done under the guise of majority rule.
The renowned economist Thomas Sowell once famously asked, “What exactly is your fair share of what someone else has worked for?” In a perfect world, the answer is nothing. But to a socialist, the answer is whatever government decides.
Jesus had no great love for authority and would have appreciated more than anyone the absurdity of allowing flawed humans to decide who deserves how much of what someone else has worked for they should be allowed to keep.
And he absolutely would have exposed the hypocrisy inherent in such a philosophy.
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Jesus sides with management, not labor
Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard is cited by many as evidence that he not only wasn’t a socialist but sided with management in a fictitious labor dispute:
A landowner goes out early in the morning and hires men, agreeing to pay them the daily rate — a silver coin for a day’s work.
He hired them at various times throughout the day — 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. — and promised all the workers a fair wage.
When the end of the day came, the landowner said to his manager to pay the workers, starting with those who had been hired last.
Those who began working at 5 p.m. were given the daily rate — one silver coin.
When it came to those who had been hired first (early in the morning) they thought that they were going to receive more. When they too were given the standard daily wage they began to grumble.
They were angry because they had done a lot more work than those who had started later in the day.
The landowner did not listen to their complaints and reminded them that they had agreed to the daily rate of pay when they were hired.
He said, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
The landowner left them with this warning: “The last will be first and the first will be last.”
Even more to the point, invoking Jesus to win a political argument is either foolish or dishonest on many levels, but one of the most obvious is that politics as we know it would have been completely unknown in his time and for many years after his death, when the Gospels were being written.
It’s a historical fact that Biblical kings weren’t obliged to run for office and, as such, spent precious little time worrying about the latest public opinion polls.
Likewise, their subjects seldom congregated around the water cooler debating the finer points of economic policy.
The notion of Tiberius or succeeding Roman emperors even caring about the welfare of the enslaved residents of Judea, let alone using tax money to promote it, would have been utterly unrecognizable to Jesus or his contemporaries.
Why would he deliver his message using concepts his audience couldn’t begin to comprehend?
Like everyone else living in that time and place, however, Jesus obviously had a keen grasp of the evils of force and servitude. Consequently, it’s difficult to imagine Jesus entrusting the instrument of government and an army of corruptible bureaucrats to decide who gets to give and who gets to take.
Perhaps the best argument of all, though, for why Jesus wouldn’t have been a socialist is because it simply doesn’t work.
Didn’t then, doesn’t now.
Jesus may have been an idealist, but if he was truly omniscient, he certainly would have recognized that any system based on denying individuals the fruits of their labors while investing a privileged handful with the ability to seize what rightfully belongs to someone else and distribute it to whomever they please is a sure-fire recipe for totalitarianism.
A condition Jesus would certainly have abhorred.
It’s axiomatic that liberals are never happier than when they’re tearing down the cherished institutions of Western society — none of which is more fundamental than our Judeo-Christian religious heritage.
With that in mind, it’s more than a little cynical when those who would otherwise have little use for Jesus and his teachings suddenly discover in them validation for their own statist inclinations.
The temptation for zealots on the leftist side of the ideological divide to hide behind Jesus likely has less to do with winning an argument than it does with blasting away at the foundation on which their conservative enemies have constructed their views and lives.
As usual, liberals seem incapable of recognizing that vitriol makes a poor substitute for logic and facts.
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