A Christian Critique of Communism
Why Communism Fails!
Here’s a meme I created.
There is a long tradition of Christian socialism going back into the late 19th century. This was indeed influenced by a wave of political thinking from the French Revolution, to the 1848 failed revolutions, to Marx, and to subsequent pro-worker movements. However, as I’ve argued previously, there is also a tradition in Christianity that was deeply suspicions about wealth and riches, viewing private property as a necessary and temporal evil, and attempted to usher in civil and economic reforms across society. The various Christian Social Democrats found in Europe usually represent political parties that are socially conservative but economically progressive, groups who are synthesizing this Christian tradition with socialist impetuses.
That said, I have to say, that whenever I meet a self-professed communist, I feel like I’m talking to a person who believes that they are ambassadors for the moon and believe it should be granted a place at the UN Security Council. They are advocating for a place or a system that they have never lived within.
Every single East German, Russian, Cuban, Vietnamese, and Chinese person I’ve met who actually lived under communism does not want to live under it. They might say that it had some good points, free healthcare or free childcare, but no-one thinks it was good, or something they wish they could return to. In fact, every person I’ve spoken to about their life under communism describes communism as a machine filled with horrors and hopelessness, where people are controlled by fear and terror, where there are no rights, and you can be de-personed and dissolved at any moment.
It cannot escape our notice that Christianity and Marxism have remarkably similar meta-narratives. The Christian story of creation, fall, sin, redeemer, redemption, parousia, and consummation, finds its parallel in the Marxist story of primitive society, the invention of capital, worker exploitation, the proletariat, the proletarian revolution, and communist utopian society.
The Hebrew Bible, the teaching of Jesus, the ethics of the apostles, and the social vision of the church fathers are saturated with concerns about the poor, oppression, injustice, and God’s radical reordering of power in the hereafter. As such, Marx, though a professed materialist and atheist, was “oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil” to quote Tom Holland.
The ironic problem with communism is that it is simultaneously too Christian and not Christian enough.
Communism is too Christian in that it constitutes an over-realized Christian eschatology, trying to bring heavenly justice to earth by violent revolution, attempting to manufacture the conditions where “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16 [NIV]), but instead they create a hellish landscape of violence and violation.
Communism is not Christian enough because it lacks a doctrine of total depravity, evil is what capitalists do, what the bourgeois do, what the factory owners do. But Marxists cannot accept that evil lives in the hearts of Marxists too. Marxist leaders believe that they “are exempt from error and can therefore arrogate to themselves the exercise of absolute power” to quote Jacques Ellul.
So that’s why I do not think Christians can support communism.
Always good to re-read George Orwell’s 1984 or Anna Funder’s Stasiland to remind you of why communism is a bad idea.
Mike, you seem to jump quite quickly from Socialism to Communism in this article! They're not really the same, are they?
If one reads the Creation accounts, total depravity is no where to be seen. Yes, we are capable of horrible things, but to believe in total depravity ( as close as I can come is a former president, whose popularity might be a case for total depravity!) simply isn't on order.