Jesus the Commie


Communists do not want people trusting in God for their daily bread, but want them to look to the state.


I chat with people on the Internet, via discussion forums and Twitter. I see that some people actually believe that Jesus was a proto-communist, and we ought embrace communist causes as a matter of Christian principle. On that view, being your brother's keeper and being charitable to the poor require that you endorse government schemes to take wealth from one place and bestow it in another.

I am not sure why they think Jesus would endorse a political philosophy that has done more to suppress his gospel than any other. Inevitably, centralized planning and distribution lead to the self-glorification of the apparatchiks. God is pushed aside as a superstition, the "opiate of the masses," for the state must be the biggest thing in sight and the most important. Communists do not want people trusting in God for their daily bread, but want them to look to the state.

The truth of the matter is that Christians do not need socialism. We share anyway, and not according to the dictates of those in power, who may be self-serving, or at least unwise, in how they redistribute things. Christian charity discourages long-term dependency except in the case of the truly helpless and thus permanently needy: We would rather give a hand up than a handout.

What the socialists are left with is the claim, often left implicit, that people unsupervised (by them) will not share enough, or with the right people, or in the right way. So they will supervise. Of course giving anyone the power to take what one earns and, in turn, to see to one's needs is to give them absolute power over day to day life. It always turns tyrannical because that is the way people are: fallen creatures who, upon gaining even a little bit of power over others, want more power, never less.

The reason I bring this up is that the quest for worldwide Christian unity draws together people with diverse assumptions and different political backgrounds. To some of them, communism might seem a sensible idea, while to others, the idea is anathema. How shall we deal with that?

I think it must come down to a question of priorities. Is this (or any) political ideology more important than your spiritual duty to do the kind of charity the gospel calls for? Can communist ideology really advance godly aims, or is that only a pretense? To date, in real examples, it has been altogether pretense. The talk of uplifting the poor and ending suffering is accompanied by a decline in everyone's livelihood and the loss of everyone's liberty, including religious liberty.

Occasions that seem to make communism a good idea, such as existence of a class of the wretchedly poor who have no chance to better their condition, call not for communism but for redoubled efforts in Christian charity, which is real charity: it seeks to alleviate the causes that make people poor to begin with. If the poor are ignorant we build schools. If they are chronically sick we build water treatment plants or kill mosquitos.

I am too polite to laugh in someone's face, even on Twitter, but Christian communism is so transparently a syncretic distortion that it is hard to know what else to do with these people. We are called to do charity, but not their way.


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Update: It is impossible to tell whether leaks and tell-all revelations from within the intelligence communities are real or not. There is no way to verify secret information that you have from only a single source. But here is a fascinating claim, from a former insider, that the marriage between Christianity and Marxism was a match made, not in heaven, but in the Kremlin.

 http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417383/secret-roots-liberation-theology-ion-mihai-pacepa

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