THE QUESTION:
Is socialism Christian? Is capitalism Christian?
THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:
The COVID-19 crisis has produced a nearly unprecedented degree of U.S. government intervention in the economy and more may lie ahead. This occurs at a time of surprising and rising Democratic Party fondness for more thoroughgoing socialism. Although the prime mover of this phenomenon, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is very unlikely to win the presidential nomination, his status as the runner-up in both 2016 and 2020 is significant.
While polls show growing fondness for socialism among Democrats, Americans as a whole disagree, due to opposition from self-identified political Independents and, more especially, Republicans. Some remarkable numbers show this is no business-as-usual era, as surely as did the election of President Trump.
After the 2018 election, BuzzFeed found that 47% of young Democrats (ages 22 to 37) identified as socialists, or democratic socialists, or accepted either label. Early this year. Gallup said 76% of Democrats are willing to vote for a socialist as president. Public Opinion Strategies reported that 77% of Democrats thought the nation would be “better off” by moving in a more socialistic direction.
Yet another thunderbolt came this month from a CBS/YouGov tracking poll. It showed that 56% of Democratic primary voters in Texas had a favorable view of socialism but only 37% were favorable toward capitalism. In California, voters aligned the same way, 57% vs. 45%.
All factions recognize that “markets” are the universal fact of life in modern internationalized commerce. The issue is how “free” or centralized they should be, whether businesses are owned by the government or workers or private investors or some blend, whether unguided market forces or public officials control decision-making, and the extent to which government imposes regulations and what they should be.
Looked at morally and religiously, the stature of socialism obviously suffers from the track record of its most powerful version, Marxist Communism, which is brutally totalitarian whenever it takes power. The authorities imposed state socialism through police-state surveillance, deceit, theft, violence, torture, forced labor camps, and the mass-scale slaughter of innocents. They fused centralized economies with suppression of democracy and violation of human rights, especially those of religious believers — and still do in A.D. 2020. Apart from strict Communism, we see the economic ruin under socialism in nations like formerly prosperous Venezuela.
American politicians who are socialists as opposed to traditional Democrats include Sanders and his celebrity acolyte Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Understandably, they seek to distinguish all of that carnage from their “democratic socialism.” This version advocates building centralized economies through the will of the people expressed in open elections, over against forms that overthrow governments through violent revolution and oppressive regimes.
Christian thinkers, of course, continually debate what’s the best feasible economic system from an ethical standpoint. A good starting point is Pope Leo XIII’s far-sighted encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) from 1891. It decried the wide gap between the rich and the poor and unaccountable free markets, preached protection for the working class, and endorsed labor unions as they seek just wages and working conditions. However, like Pope John Paul II’s anniversary encyclical 100 years later, Leo abhorred Marxist collectivism and violence, and laid out a vigorous Christian case for each person’s right to the “stable and permanent possession” of private property as “the law of nature.”
This month, the U.S. Catholic magazine Commonweal issued a vigorous case for socialism over against capitalism by the outspoken Eastern Orthodox thinker David Bentley Hart. In his view, America’s economics, politics and churches are pretty much corrupt failures but Americans are too deluded to realize it. He champions Britain’s 19th Century Christian socialists.
Hart thinks Americans are over-taxed by burdensome government, get little for their money, are subjected to a “cruel, inefficient, and monstrously expensive health system,” and serve as “slaves” at the mercy of government whose violence and power exploits them to help the rich.
Continue reading “Is Socialism Christian? Is Capitalism Christian?”, by Richard Ostling.