I noticed that Christianity Today, which has turned hard left in recent years, is now openly endorsing socialism. So, I thought it might be a good idea to listen to this new episode of the Think Biblically podcast, which deals with the issue of Christianity and socialism. The hosts actually brought an economist on to define socialism, then they analyze the teachings of Jesus.
Here’s the description: (H/T Nathan)
It has not been uncommon for advocates of virtually every economic system to invoke Jesus in support of their views, though some of the most ardent advocates for both capitalism and socialism did not have any particular religious views themselves (Rand, Marx). Over the years, some of the more recent advocates of socialist type economic arrangements have appealed to Jesus and the gospels in support of such systems. Economist Lawrence Reed helps us sort out the application of the teaching of Jesus to economics and its relevance for economic life today. Join us for this provocative conversation as he tackles the question of Jesus and socialism.
who should own the means of production in socialism?
how should wealth be distributed in socialism?
what tools does socialism use to provide people with health care, employment, security, etc.
which countries have adopted socialism? North Korea? Cuba? Venezuela? How about the Scandinavian countries?
what in the New Testament has caused people to think that Jesus was a socialist?
did Jesus ever advocate for concentrating power in the government in order to meet the material needs of people?
did Jesus ever advocate for voluntary charity in order to meet the material needs of people?
in our experience, is government seen to be more compassionate or less compassionate than individual people?
does voluntary charity have any advantages over forced redistribution by a powerful central government?
what about the example of common possessions among the earliest Christians?
what is the Bible’s view of wealth? is it always bad to be wealthy, or does it matter how you obtained it and how you use it?
what does the parable of the talents tell us about socialism vs capitalism?
what does the parable of the good Samaritan tell us about socialism vs capitalism?
what does the parable of the three different shifts of workers tell us about socialism vs capitalism?
what about socialist policies and higher tax rates in countries like Canada and Scandinavian countries?
I have to be honest. I think that some of the economics reasoning about the parables was a stretch, because those parables are talking mainly about other topics, not economics. But it’s true that the parables aren’t friendly to socialism even if they are interpreted as being about economics.
This meme provides a good quick response to the challenge
I keep hearing that Jesus was a refugee from people on the left like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In fact, things have gotten so bad, that even my Southern Baptist pastor told us the same thing in a recent Wednesday night Bible study! I think we better take a look at this, in case anyone else needs a response.
U.S. Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. wished her Twitter followers a Merry Christmas Tuesday by referring to the newborn Jesus as a “refugee.”
“Joy to the World!” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “Merry Christmas everyone – here’s to a holiday filled with happiness, family, and love for all people. (Including refugee babies in mangers + their parents.)”
And here is the response, in the same article:
Mary and Joseph are not depicted as refugees in the Nativity story. According to the Gospel of Luke, Joseph brings the pregnant Mary to Bethlehem so that he may enroll in a census ordered by the Roman emperor Agustus. The couple are forced to take shelter in the stable where Jesus is born due to a lack of room at the inn.
However, in the Gospel of Matthew, Mary and Joseph flee into Egypt with the infant Jesus after King Herod of Judea orders the murder of every boy aged two and under in Bethlehem after the Magi ask him where to find the newborn “King of the Jews.” The Holy Family escape the slaughter and are told by an angel to return to Israel once Herod is dead.
The second part seems to be more like a refugee situation, until you remember that both Judea and Egypt were different states of the same Roman Empire. The strict definition of a refugee from the United Nations, recognizes persons as refugees:
“who are outside their country of nationality or habitual residence and unable to return there owing to serious and indiscriminate threats to life, physical integrity or freedom resulting from generalized violence or events seriously disturbing public order.”
Did Joseph and Mary cross national boundaries by moving from one Roman-ruled province to another? Did they cross national boundaries illegally? Did they intend to remain permanently? The answers to those questions are NO, NO and NO. So they were not refugees according to the standard meaning of the word.
People try to make the Jesus-birth narrative into an immigration situation because they want Jews and Christians to support open borders. The problem is that the Bible has a lot to say about immigration, and it doesn’t support the left’s open borders agenda.
I always find it funny when atheists on the political left want to misuse the Bible to try to get political support from Jews and Christians. It makes me wonder whether the secular leftists take the Bible seriously as an auhtority on any other issue.
Is Ocasio-Cortez willing to take Jesus seriously on marriage being defined as a commitment between one woman and one man? How about Jesus’ rejection of no-fault divorce? How about Jesus’ view of the exclusivity of salvation? I think you know where what the secular leftists would say about Jesus as an authority on those issues. Most secular leftists don’t take Jesus seriously on any issue. Many don’t even think he existed as a historical figure. But that doesn’t stop secular leftists from trying to win over religious Jews and Christians by appealing to their emotions.
What concerns me about this promotion of illegal immigration and refugees, though, is that people forget who pays the bills for all of this compassion. Ocasio-Cortez isn’t tell you what she’s going to do with HER OWN money when she promotes illegal immigration and refugees. She’s telling you what she’s going to do with YOUR money. And she’s telling you that so that you will think that she’s a very generous, compassionate person. The truth is that her supporters who click retweet and like on her stuff do that in order to communicate that they are also good and generous people.
Everyone is doing what feels good, and what makes them look good to others, but are they willing to pay for it? If Democrats had to PAY FOR the things they claim to want, then would they be in favor of those things? You need only look at the French leftists who voted for Emmanuel Macron to stop global warming, and then they rioted when he passed a gas tax that would stop global warming. Leftists shouldn’t be seen as rational people. They vote in order to feel good and look good to others. When they get what they voted for, they riot in order to get out of it. The same people who elected Ocasio-Cortez will riot against her policies once they realize that they are the ones who have to pay for what they voted for.
Male and female happiness throughout America’s adoption of radical feminism
I was reading this article by a feminist fiction writer on Vox, where she explains that although feminists have gotten what they wanted (careers, contraceptives, promiscuity, abortion, no-fault-divorce, daycare, etc. it hasn’t made them happier. So, what does this feminist fiction writer think would make feminists happier?
She gives two reasons why women women are still unhappy after feminism has been adopted by our society:
men don’t do enough housework
women are not as successful as men because they are discriminated against, the so-called “glass ceiling”
I think those complaints are pretty popular among feminists. Let’s take a look at some studies to see if her opinions are supported by peer-reviewed studies.
Researchers at the University of Illinois examined data on nearly 1,500 men and 1,800 women, aged between 52 and 60. Their well-being was evaluated through surveys.
The researchers first found that men’s well-being decreased once they had exited the workforce to become home-makers.
Meanwhile, the inverse was not so for women: Women’s psychological well-being was not affected by leaving their jobs to become stay-at-home mothers.
A study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” which appeared in The American Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more equal, the sex in these marriages will improve, too. Instead, it found that when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less sex. Specifically, if men did all of what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming — the kinds of things many women say they want their husbands to do — then couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn’t just the frequency that was affected, either — at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.
Regarding the pay gap, that is entirely caused by women’s own choices. E.g. – the choice to study creative writing instead of petroleum engineering, the choice to work 35 hour weeks instead of 70 hour weeks, etc.
When the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] reports that women working full-time in 2018 earned 81.4% of what men earned working full-time, that is very much different from saying that women earned 81.4% of what men earned for doing exactly the same work while working the exact same number of hours in the same occupation, with exactly the same educational background and exactly the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience, and with exactly the same marital and family (e.g., number of children) status. As shown above, once we start controlling individually for the many relevant factors that affect earnings, e.g., hours worked, age, marital status, and having children, most of the raw earnings differential disappears.
This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.
I think that women are entitled to make their own decisions, but they aren’t allowed to force the rest of us to subsidize their failures and celebrate their destructive outcomes.
I could go on, but I think enough has been said to show that research is very much at odds with feminist rhetoric. They feel they know what will make them happy and we gave them everything they asked for. They eliminated shaming of promiscuity with sex education. They get preferential treatment in the schools in a female-dominated education system.They are hired because of affirmative action quotas. They get expensive daycare, government schools, welfare and other programs. Taxes are raised to equalize outcomes for divorced women who choose men for feelings, and then nuke their own marriage enterprise. We have been on a long experiment of giving feminists everything they felt they wanted, at the expense of men’s rights and children’s rights, and it hasn’t even produced the results that feminists felt it would.
The social costs of feelings-based decision-making
Let’s look at two examples of policies that feminists asked for in the past, which didn’t work out the way they wanted.
I can understand why feminists would introduce sex education. They felt that “if everyone is having sex, then I won’t be the only one chasing attention from hot no-commitment bad boys by giving them recreational sex before marriage”. They wanted to eliminate the standards of chastity and marriage-focused dating and normalize fun-focused drunken promiscuity. And they got that. But since they didn’t consult any research and evidence about how that would affect their future marriage stability and marriage happiness, they are even more unhappy than before.
How about no-fault divorce? No-fault divorce was brought in by a coalition of feminists, Marxists and trial lawyers. The Marxists want to destroy the family in order to increase dependence on the state. The trial lawyers wanted to make money. And the feminists thought that the standard approach to courting and marriage was just too much work. They didn’t want to be chaste. They didn’t want to be sober. They didn’t want to evaluate a man for traditional husband and father roles. The no-fault divorce laws gave them an escape from the messes caused by their own feelings-driven choices. But divorce just makes makes men and women much poorer, and passes the costs of supporting single mothers onto taxpayers.
And the costs of the failures of feminism are passed onto taxpayers.
This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.
We are already $22 trillion in debt, partly because of feminism’s replacement of husbands and families with higher taxes and big government. Every time we transfer money from tax-paying men to feminists to fix their mistakes, it leaves less money in the hands of the men who actually want to get married. The declining value of marriage after feminism for men explains why marriage is being delayed, and why marriage rates are plunging.
The Christian view of marriage
In other places, I have written about the evidence for a Christian worldview:
If Christianity is true, then we have inherited a design for marriage and family which includes male and female roles.
Here is what Jesus says about marriage and divorce in Matthew 19:4:
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Jesus does not approve of no-fault divorce.
And here’s what Jesus said about premarital sex (“fornication”) in Mark 7:20-23:
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them.21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder,22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.
Jesus does not approve of premarital sex.
Christians should not show even a hint of sexual immorality, (premarital sex and no-fault divorce), nor should they partner with those who approve of sexual immorality and no-fault divorce, according to Ephesians 5:
3 But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.4 Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving.5 For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.[a]6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient.7 Therefore do not be partners with them.
Christians should not partner with feminists.
And this is one of the most famous passages on male and female roles in the Bible, also from Ephesians 5:
22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her26 to make her holy, cleansing[b] her by the washing with water through the word,27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.29 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—30 for we are members of his body.31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Christians do not approve of egalitarian marriage which erases sex differences in husband and wife roles.
Most women in the church, and most of their “conservative” pastors, don’t believe that Jesus is an authority about chastity, marriage and male headship. They agree with feminists about premarital sex and no-fault divorce and egalitarian marriage. But the feminist design for women isn’t working out for women – that’s undeniable. Should we really be surprised that feminist’s feelings were not better for women than the Creator’s own design?
WINTERY KNIGHT 