Is Christianity a Socialist Religion?

It will come as a surprise to many that, this Easter, young men made up the majority of Britain’s catechumens: those receiving the sacrament of baptism and joining the Catholic Church. In France, 10,384 adult catechumens were baptized: the largest cohort since records began. This 45% annual rise is driven predominantly (42%) by 18-25-year-olds. New polling by YouGov and the Bible Society found church attendance was up from 4% in 2018 to 21% in 2024 among young men, compared to 3% to 12% for young women. Pessimists have suggested that this is solely attributable to large volumes of African migration into Europe over the last five years, but 18% of white Britons aged 18-34 are now attending church monthly, up from 3% in 2018. Anecdotally, this is the case: most of the young men I know in politics are turning to full-fat Christian denominations, like Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Catholics outnumber Anglicans among Zoomers 2-to-1; a disparity which will only grow, in accordance with birth-rate trends.

With the moral decay in Western civilization so severe, and imported Islam imposing itself on our political system, many are returning to tradition. But these same politically engaged Catholic men are the same who read acerbic satirist Bronze Age Pervert, and despise social justice for its worship of weakness. This Nietzschean strain of rightwing thought considers Christianity the precursor to socialism and the civilizational corrosive of Woke progressivism. The Bible has little to say about the state owning the means of production, so when Christianity is accused of being socialist, its critics are using the term synonymously with Marxist. But Christianity bears no likeness to communism when you compare the history of socialism to scripture.

Because hypocrisy is a grave sin for Christians (Matthew 23), socialists and progressives cherry-pick passages to convince Christians that their ideology is what Christ would have wanted. Were this the case, they would have already converted; and would not feel the need to colonize churches with Pride flags, or set up Racial Justice Sunday following the death of George Floyd. This is a manipulation by bad-faith actors for whom, like Pontius Pilate, there is no truth but power, and therefore hold no prohibition against lying. It is a Pharisaical attempt to trip up Christians with their own standards, while having nothing but contempt for Christianity, and no attempt to abide by its standards themselves.

Others paraphrase Christ in order to create a new progressive commandment: to not judge them for unhealthy lifestyle habits or perverse fetishes. They usually omit the part where Jesus said (Matthew 7:1-5; Luke 6:41-44):

““Do not judge, so that you in turn may not be judged.
For you will be judged in the same way that you judge others, and the measure that you use for others will be used to measure you.
“Why do you take note of the splinter in your brother’s eye but do not notice the wooden plank in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while all the time the wooden plank remains in your own?
You hypocrite! First remove the wooden plank from your own eye, and then you will be able to see clearly enough to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.”

To carry out Christ’s new commandment, to love one another as he loves us (John 13:34-35), we are compelled to tell each other not to sin. We are called not to abolish our capacity for judgement, but only to judge the sins we ourselves do not commit.

For doctrinaire Marxists to claim Christianity is compatible with their revolutionary historical materialism would also be absurd. Whereas Friedrich Engels believed human history reducible to “class struggles” between the haves and have-nots in “the economic conditions of their time”, Christ rebuked the temptations of Satan by saying “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4; Mark 1:11-13; Luke 4:1-13). Whereas communism promised that “such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members”, Christ told crowds that “Life does not depend upon an abundance of one’s possessions” (Luke 12:15) and that “No one can serve two masters … You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13-15). Whereas Marxists seek to consolidate power and property in a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, Christ refrains from lording over His earthly kingdom, acknowledging the only legitimate authority is God’s.

Marx not only called Christianity “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … the opium of the people”, but also believed:

“The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

Marx saw it necessary to eradicate Christianity in order to introduce communism; hence why his formulation “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is an inversion of Matthew’s Parable of the Talents (25:28-30). Pursuing this heliocentric self-worship, Marx wrote poetry about wreaking revenge against “that enthroned Lord”, whose “Almighty’s lightning shall rebound” against his “throne [built] high overhead”; and making a deal with the Devil. In his personal life, Marx broke the 6th Commandment, fathering a son, possibly through rape, with his housemaid. He left that son to be raised by Engels; and, for his other children, left the family so destitute that two other sons died of disease and exposure. Marx’s father wrote that he believed his son was “governed by a demon” which prevented him from being “capable of truly human, domestic happiness”.

Marx had a particular hatred of Catholicism: with the Communist Manifesto intended as an inversion of the Catechism. In 1854, Marx praised the Protestant Reformation in the New York Tribune for allowing “the upper classes in every European nation [to begin to] unfasten themselves individually from all religious belief, and become so-called free-thinkers”. He admired Islam’s “hatred against Christians and the hope of an ultimate victory over these infidels”. No wonder, then, this denomination is seeing renewed interest from young men, rendered persona non grata by the Woke orthodoxy that is busily importing millions of immigrants from Muslim countries.

His followers echoed his contempt: with Lenin calling Christianity “opium for the people … a sort of spiritual booze” and “medieval mildew” to be “cleansed”. He rejected the 10 Commandments as bourgeois morality, and told the Third All-Russia Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, “we do not believe in God. … We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts.” In Romania’s Pitesti prison, priests who refused to renounce their faith endured mock-crucifixions, were beaten to death, and forced to consecrate and consume excrement.

Even so, some, like historian Tom Holland, believe the seeds of Marxism sprouted from early Christianity. They point to Pelagius insisting that renouncing all possessions was the path to salvation for proof. Others, trying to make “the Catholic case for communism”, cite the book of Acts: in which the apostles “owned everything in common” and “would sell their property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to all according to what each one needed” while founding the early church (2:44-45; 4:32-35). But nobody compelled them to forfeit their belongings by force; unlike the bloody “authoritarian” revolution by “bayonets and cannon”, advocated for by Marx and Engels. As for Ananias and Sapphira: both were struck dead for lying before God, not for failing to give the apostles all the proceeds of the sale of their land (5:1-11). The lesson is not that profit is theft, but that you may pay a greater price for dishonesty than you stand to gain.

Marxists might cite Matthew 19:21-24, insisting that Christ called renounce of all possessions:

“If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven … it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven”

But they would have to ignore Christ reiterating the 8th Commandment, “You shall not steal”, 6 verses prior, because that would make the forceable expropriation of property a sin. More directly, Christ told Rome’s soldiers “Do not extort money from anyone, do not falsely accuse or threaten anyone, and be satisfied with your wages” (Luke 3:14). Jesus regarded tax collectors as sinners who must repent (Matthew 18:17; Luke 5:27-32; Luke 15:1-2), meaning that socialists cannot outsource their charitable duties to state-welfare programs and claim to be virtuous.

In one of the few stories told in all Gospels, Christ banished merchants from the temple (Matthew 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-18; Luke 19:45-46; John 2:14-16). But Christ did not oppose profit, property, or commerce: rebuking Judas Iscariot for suggesting that Lazarus’ sister, Mary, should have sold her ointment for three hundred denarii and redistributed the proceeds among the poor (John 12:3-8; Mark 14:1-9). Much like Judas, Marxists purport compassion for the poor and dispossessed, but, as George Orwell wrote,

“even if the theoretical book-trained Socialist is not a working man himself, at least he is actuated by a love of the working class. …

But is it? Sometimes I look at a Socialist – the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation – and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chess-board. …

Poverty and, what is more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be abolished from above, by violence if necessary; perhaps even preferably by violence. Hence his worship of ‘great’ men and appetite for dictatorships, Fascist or Communist … The truth is that to many people, calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders.”

It was Orwell’s opinion that socialists are not motivated by a love of the downtrodden, but an envy of the successful, and fantasize about revenging themselves upon them. Indeed, while revolutionary bloodshed was described in gleeful, graphic detail, Marx and Engels neglected to explain how the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which would collectivize and redistribute all property, should dismantle itself to instantiate stateless, classless communism. Either both men presumed so much benevolence on behalf of the working classes that the property which corrupted the bourgeoisie would be of no temptation to them; or, the bloody revolution and “authoritarian” dictatorship, not the vague promise of productive, egalitarian communism is the true goal of Marxism. The fact that it has produced genocide everywhere it has been tried leads me to believe the latter.

That innocence and guilt could be collectively attributed is the core division between Christianity and socialism. Marxism believes that the inequitable hoarding of wealth makes one a member of “the vampire property-holding class”, to be slain with “revolutionary terror”. Christ told his disciples that “It is not what goes into one’s mouth that defiles a person; what comes out of the mouth is what defiles him” (Matthew 15:11-19; Luke 6:45). In being made Imago Dei, and all given the chance for redemption through faith and works, because Christ consigned Himself to crucifixion, we each possess the capacity for moral dignity. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, after 11 years in the Soviet gulag system: “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” Marxism and Christianity have incommensurate views on moral responsibility.

I contend that the reason young men are returning to Orthodoxy and Catholicism rather than Anglicanism, or other denominations which have liberalized under the auspices of “modernizing”, is because they don’t want the same lessons in tolerance and equality that they already receive from ideologically captured secular institutions. Men want to be called to responsibility; to find their place in a natural hierarchy; to fulfill duties to their family; to find a woman to marry who is unsullied by the temptations of our libertine world — or, at least, seeking repentance and redemption for misspent youth. They want to be given purpose as men, not denigrated as avatars of patriarchal oppression, and told to “do the work” to cleanse themselves of racial original sin. They want discipline, and to ready themselves as if for an unknown hour of judgement (Matthew 24:36-39; Mark 13:32-33; Luke 17:26-30).

All of the manifest evils in the world today, brought about by Marxism and its Woke stepchildren, has created an inverse Pascal’s Wager: presenting Christianity as the only and forgotten bulwark against the excesses of modernity, and bringing them back to the pews. The promise to vanquish these evils in “the fiery lake of burning sulfur” (Revelation 21:7-8) appeals to them. While the Nietzscheans have declared Christianity dead, they forgot that he resurrects.