Quinn Delamater/Washington Stand
Is socialism biblical? Editor for the Journal of Markets and Morality Peter Jacobsen doesn’t think so.
“The idea of Christian socialism is a bit of an oxymoron,” he said during an appearance on “Washington Watch” on Wednesday. “It’s a self-contradiction, because I think socialism and Christianity, to some extent, are in competition about the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the nature of the problem we face.”
Socialism is gaining popularity ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, as many candidates identifying as Democratic Socialists continue winning primaries across the country. According to a Brookings Institution report, 123 Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed candidates have won their primaries at the local, state legislative, statewide, and congressional levels as of August 12.
“What Christian socialists would be implying is that they believe that the proper economic system for a Christian to support would be a social system, which means social ownership of the means of production,” Jacobsen continued. “Perhaps someone might mistakenly call themselves that and just believe that we should have a welfare system or something like that. But that’s just misunderstanding what socialism is fundamentally.”
Jody Hice, senior fellow at the Family Research Council and former congressman from Georgia’s 10h Congressional District, added that this view of socialism is also a misunderstanding of Scripture as a whole, noting that Christian socialists often cite passages such as Acts 2 on the early church to defend socialism.
Jacobsen argued that Scripture does not make a biblical case for socialism. “There’s several problems with this interpretation of the text. The first is, of course, the Acts 2 description of the early church is descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, it’s laying down what people are doing, not necessarily some sort of rule about how the church should operate,” Jacobsen explained.
He added that the right to private property is clearly stated in God’s word, which can be found in Exodus 20:15-17: “You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”
“In other words, it must be possible for an individual to own things in order to steal things from them,” Jacobsen clarified. “Jesus in his parables talks about the parable of the talents. And granted, parables are also descriptive in nature, but he assumes in that parable that you can have certain resources or be the steward of certain resources that belong to you, and you can use them well or poorly. Again, that all hinges upon this idea of ownership. So, ownership is so deeply ingrained into the text of Scripture that it’s not even stated as some sort of command. It’s just assumed in all of the other texts.”
The idea of private property can be traced back to Christian theologians like John Calvin and Martin Luther. “They have all supported the idea of private property as being necessary for people to have the right incentives to take care of resources and steward God’s creation in order to be peaceful with one another, in order to be orderly,” Jacobsen described. “We see the arguments both from the natural law and from Scripture in favor of private property.”
Often, believers who identify as “socialists” misinterpret the duty to provide for the poor. Christians are called to extend charity and voluntary giving to those in need, but the Bible doesn’t say that this is at the behest of the government through redistributed wealth.
“It is really kind of a strange and silly idea to think that you could compel someone to virtue, that you could compel someone to do a good thing,” Jacobsen asserted. “As soon as you’re compelling someone to do something, you’re actually taking away their ability to do a virtuous thing. If someone is forced to do something they’re not doing out of good, they’re not doing it out of charity or love.”
“I think Christians do have a moral obligation to help people; but on a personal level, the people they know in their lives,” he continued. “That way they can use the knowledge that they have about the people they know, and their circumstances, and the institutions that surround them to help effectively, rather than just taking money from and property from all sorts of people, perhaps even without a just foundation and then distributing it in a wasteful manner. To me, that’s the difference between the charity that is expected of Christians and the unfortunate bureaucratic state that we have.”
Jacobsen argued that the anti-socialist system of capitalism urges people to be good stewards of the resources God has blessed them with. “It ties our incentives to our actions. It uses the knowledge people have in their day-to-day life, and in so doing, creates value for the impoverished and lifts them out of poverty. That’s why the median income in the United States is so much higher than all these countries that have tried socialism in its true form, or communism. … It’s because as capitalism incentivizes entrepreneurship, innovation, and cutting prices to beat your competitors, it also lifts up the poor.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand
