An anti-gospel take on greed

A recent study found that 62 percent of Americans between 18-29 hold a favorable view of socialism, with one-third favoring full-blown communism. This trend has made its way into the Christian subculture. As a case-in-point, a recent book from Christian publisher BrazosPress declares,

Karl Marx as an economist was right about much. … But Marx does not have a monopoly on socialism or on a communalist economy. … The fact of the matter is that we see socialist and communalist economies in the Scriptures.

Those words come from The Anti-Greed Gospel by Malcolm Foley, Baylor University’s special advisor to the president for equity and campus engagement and a self-identifying “Christian socialist.” To understand younger generations’ affinity for some of Marx’s ideas it behooves us to grasp Dr. Foley’s case. (Disclosure: I had the honor of debating him in Minneapolis recently, and I consider him a friend.)

An Implication of the gospel?

Foley bristles at the language of justice as “an implication of the gospel.” He explains, “It sounds like you gotta do work to get from the gospel to a commitment to justice, as though Jesus did not tell us over and over again that what it means to love him is to do what he says. And one of the things he constantly tells us to do is to be committed to the poor and the needy.”

A dangerous equivocation occurs here. Does Jesus command us to pray, avoid lust, and love our enemies Yes. Prayer, sexual purity, and enemy-love are essential hallmarks of lives committed to Jesus. But is obedience to any of those commands essential to the gospel itself? No. Likewise, a commitment to love the poor is a Christian living essential, but that does not mean such love is intrinsic to the good news itself.

Many passages that define the gospel—for example, the evangelistic sermons recorded in Acts (2:14-41; 10:34-43) or throughout the New Testament (Romans 1:16-17; 1 Corinthians 1:17-18; 15:1-11)—do not include care for the poor as essential to the gospel. All the while, care for the poor resounds again and again as an essential for Christians to consistently live out the good news of Christ as the dying, rising, and ascended King (Matthew 25:35-40; Acts 2:42-45; 24:17; Galatians 2:10; James 2:15-16). To confuse marks of obedient Christian living with the way Scripture often explicates the gospel as salvation through the finished work of Christ alone, is to erase the Bible’s own law-gospel distinction and, thereby, compromise the best news in the universe.

Getting Free Markets Wrong

Next Foley makes a move commonly found among those with an affinity for Marx’s economics. He equates loving the poor with opposing “neoliberal capitalism” and opting for his version of Christian socialism. Yet, the moment we add any theory of economics to the gospel, and if our economic analysis has holes in it, then we have sunk the gospel itself.

Foley repeats the Marxist assumption that free-market capitalism is fundamentally based on exploitation. “Karl Marx as an economist was right about much: our current political economy was and is indeed built on the backs of the exploited.” Such attempts to baptize Marx’s economics as the Christian approach to economics fail to reckon with hard facts.

Over 1.25 billion people have risen out of abject poverty over the last quarter century. Economists largely credit this astonishing fact to China, India, and Nigeria opening themselves up to free-market capitalism. Meanwhile, poverty runs rampant in resource-rich countries like Venezuela and Russia that champion “communal” economics based on Marxist assumptions.

Moreover, contra Marx, billions of transactions in capitalist economies are not based on selfish greed. Economist Dierdre McCloskey clarifies, “Something like half of the marketed portion of national income is gotten on behalf of someone else!” McCloskey offers extensive analysis of how capitalist economies actually work and concludes, “Exchange is, as economists say ‘mutually beneficial.’ Mainstream economists therefore cannot make sense of the Marxist claim that exchange is exploitation.”

Getting Race Wrong

When Foley adds race to his Marxist assumptions, problems multiply. White Americans rank lower on the scale of Median Household Income by Ancestry Groups than several ethnic demographics in the United States. If indeed America runs on “racial capitalism” and ongoing white supremacy, then why does white wealth pale in comparison to that of Indian, Taiwanese, Lebanese, Turkish, Chinese, Iranian, Japanese, Pakistani, Filipino, Indonesian, Korean, Ghanian, Nigerian, and Guyanese Americans?

Foley contends that wealth “almost always happens at someone else’s expense, and that person is often needy. Thus, the more you have and hold, the less you love your neighbor.” It follows from Marx and Foley’s premise that all non-white demographics that have achieved more wealth must be more exploitative and less loving than their white American neighbors—an absurd conclusion.

Going farther, what if the Marxist theory of where wealth comes from (known as “primitive accumulation”) actually requires us to sin? To see someone who is wealthy through Marx’s lenses is to automatically see a greedy thief. In many cases, surely, that is how people became wealthy. However, in a great many others—particularly given free market capitalism’s unique ability to grow the economic pie and generate new wealth—the Marxist analysis forces us to slander and bear false witness, not loving our neighbors as ourselves.

So-called “Christian socialism” compromises the gospel. It conflates Jesus’s commands to love the poor with Marxist economic assumptions that have proven false time and time again. Under the shiny guise of obeying Jesus, it lures us into the darkness of breaking Jesus’s commands against slander and bearing false witness, failing to love our neighbors as we pretend to have God’s omniscient X-ray vision into their true motives. Surely there are less sinful ways for us to love the poor and oppressed. I hope and pray my friend Malcom Foley and the many who follow his way of thinking can agree.