Jesus a Socialist? That’s a Myth

The early church was egalitarian, but it wasn’t committed to an economic system

By Alexander William Salter. 

"The idea that the teachings of Jesus are akin to socialism has been spreading around the internet for years in the form of memes, chain emails and Facebook posts. Some elected officials have a history of supporting the idea: The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a U.S. senator from Georgia, contended years ago that “the early church was a socialist church.” He’s not alone in holding this misguided belief.

A much-cited passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the first work of church history, has strong socialist overtones. Christian socialists use this passage to argue socialism was a historical reality for the followers of Christ. If they’re right, that has huge implications for a country that remains majority Christian. Fortunately, they’re wrong.

Acts 4:32-35 gives believers a picture of a highly egalitarian church. Among the believers, “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions.” Those who had property sold it and brought it to the church. The proceeds were “distributed to each as any had need.” This sounds almost like the classic Marx line—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”—but read a little further.

Acts 5 contains a harrowing account of two church members, Ananias and Sapphira, who sold their property but lied about the price. Confronted in their deceit by St. Peter, they suddenly perish. The passage states they were not punished merely for holding back their wealth. “Were not the proceeds at your disposal?” St. Peter asks, indicating the property and its fruits were theirs. The real lesson is the imperative of absolute truth before God. For those who have received the Holy Spirit, falsehood is perilous.

Later, Acts tells of St. Paul’s missionary journeys, during which he worked as a tentmaker to support his ministry. While not motivated by private profit, Paul nevertheless made recourse to the marketplace. Also, we know from his letters he solicited financial support for the Jerusalem church throughout his travels. Early Christians wouldn’t have been able to donate without producing and trading. There’s scant biblical evidence for a wholesale condemnation of ownership and commerce.

Ultimately claims of early church socialism miss the mark because they conflate two kinds of communities: organizations and orders. Organizations are consciously crafted to achieve the goals of their members. Orders are spontaneous and emergent, arising out of the interactions between organizations. Businesses, educational institutions, charities and communes are organizations. But economic systems like socialism and capitalism are orders.

Calling the church an organization in no way diminishes its divinity. It simply means one can think about the church, in part, as an intentional community with its own canons and customs. This matters greatly for interpreting early church history.

Whether discussing a 21st-century business corporation or a first-century religious society, who gets what is determined by purposefully designed rules. Those rules can be meritocratic (bonuses and stock options) or egalitarian (relief for widows and orphans). They can be consensual (committees, voting) or hierarchical (executives, commands). But they aren’t socialistic. Neither are they capitalistic. Those terms refer to orders, not organizations.

Markets didn’t allocate resources inside the church, but that’s true of any organization. In fact, the whole point of organizations, for-profit or not, is to avoid markets. They’re temporary shelters against the fickle forces of supply and demand. If we call “socialism” all attempts to suppress the market allocation of resources, then even the most profit-hungry firm you can think of is socialist. Zoom in close enough and all organizations look like central planners.

It’s foolish to apply the categories of economic systems to the church. Socialism regiments society, an unplanned give-and-take among countless organizations, according to an all-encompassing economic blueprint. That isn’t the church’s mission. Reconciling all of creation to God in Christ is. While the church has a strong communitarian ethos, it isn’t committed to a specific set of economic institutions. Exploring the church’s internal constitution can be fascinating, and the generosity of the earliest Christians should serve as an example for us. But this has no relevance to the merits of single-payer healthcare or nationalizing railroads.

Knowing whether an economic system comports with Christianity requires careful study of the church’s social teachings, but church history matters too. Historical memory and interpretation are powerful forces for shaping contemporary beliefs. A socialist can be a good Christian, but the narrative of early church socialism is a myth.

Mr. Salter is an economics professor at Texas Tech University, a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research."