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It has not been uncommon for advocates of virtually every economic system to invoke Jesus in support of their views, though some of the most ardent advocates for both capitalism and socialism did not have any particular religious views themselves (Rand, Marx). Over the years, some of the more recent advocates of socialist type economic arrangements have appealed to Jesus and the gospels in support of such systems. Economist Lawrence Reed helps us sort out the application of the teaching of Jesus to economics and its relevance for economic life today. Join us for this provocative conversation as he tackles the question of Jesus and socialism.

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More About Our Guest

Dr. Lawrence Reed is President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Freedom, having served also as professor of economics and founder of Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He has authored over 1,000 newspaper columns and articles, dozens of articles in magazines and journals in the U. S. and abroad. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, among many others. He has authored or co-authored five books, the most recent ones being A Republic—If We Can Keep It and Striking the Root: Essays on Liberty. He is frequently interviewed on radio talk shows and has appeared as a guest on numerous television programs and lectures around the world annually.

Episode Transcript

Scott Rae: Welcome to the podcast, Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. I'm your host, Scott Rae, dean of faculty and professor of Christian ethics at Talbot School of Theology here at À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ. Our guest today is Mr. Lawrence Reed, who is the President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education. He has actually just recently stepped down from that role. I don't think it's quite accurate to say that you're retired, because you've got lots of projects, in particular writing projects that you're looking forward to doing over the next few years. Larry, welcome to our time today. You spent a lot of time thinking about a very provocative topic that you'll be speaking about later at [Acton] University, entitled Was Jesus a socialist? So I appreciate the opportunity to ask you some questions about that and to flesh that out a bit for our listeners.

Lawrence Reed: My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Scott. I appreciate it.

Scott Rae: Well, let's first define what you mean by socialism so that we're all on the same page as we begin this discussion.

Lawrence Reed: I'm very glad you started with that question, Scott, because the views of what socialism is are all over the lot. Some people think socialism is just helping people, sharing things with people, doing good. But, of course, all of those things you can do under capitalism. That's not enough of a definition. I think socialism should be defined as a system in which you have central planning of the economy by the government or government ownership of the means of production or the forcible redistribution of income by the government. In most cases, when you have socialism, you've got some of all three. Of course, the most extreme versions will have all three, where the government runs everything, owns everything, and redistributes wealth according to its liking.

In any event, no matter what version of socialism or the degree to which you have it may be, the distinguishing feature of socialism is force. If it's voluntary, it's not socialism. You can do that under capitalism. What differentiates socialism is that, for those various purposes that I mentioned, government is the main player, and it uses coercion or the threat of it to do its job.

Scott Rae: I think that's a helpful definition, especially those three prongs that are to it. I wonder if maybe the best way to define socialism would be to shatter some misconceptions and tell us what it's not. You say it's not just a desire to help people.

Lawrence Reed: That's right.

Scott Rae: Are there other misconceptions about socialism that we need to debunk here at the start?

Lawrence Reed: Well, I think most if not all of those misconceptions come down in some form to the idea that government is going to be helpful to people. It's going to give them health care. It's going to provide them employment. It's going to give them security and assuredness for their economic lives and so forth. In one version or another, that's what it reduces to. But what distinguishes it from any other system, from capitalism in particular, is how that is to be done. Socialism does it by means of the concentration of power in the hands of government. It doesn't do it by voluntary civil society organizations, by mutually beneficial free commerce in the marketplace. Those are attributes of capitalism. Socialism does the job it's supposed to do ... No matter how poorly or how well, it does it through coercion, through force.

Scott Rae: So what countries would you say are predominantly socialist economies today around the world? Give us an example of some of those.

Lawrence Reed: I wish I could give you an example of one that is both socialist and that is a model in some way, but those two things don't seem to go together. The most extreme application of socialism would be in such places as North Korea, where the government is in charge of everything. Close behind would be places like Cuba or Venezuela. But some people mistakenly claim that Scandinavia is socialist, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway. They have extensive welfare states, but they're really not socialists. They have globalized economies, lots of private ownership. I have reasons to object to some of the welfare stateism and its effects, but they're not quite socialism. So if you really want true socialism, I'm sorry, you're going to have to look at countries that frequently employ the use of force to do things even if they seem to be good things to do.

Scott Rae: So there really aren't a whole lot of examples of the pure socialist ideal being practiced today.

Lawrence Reed: No, there really aren't. Those countries that dabble in some degree of socialism, usually, if they seem to be doing well, it's not because of the socialism they have. It's because of the capitalism they haven't yet destroyed. So even those halfway houses still depend for what capitalism they have left to pay the bills of the socialism they have.

Scott Rae: So it sounds like what you're suggesting is, if we looked at this on a continuum of pure socialism on one end and pure capitalism on the other, that most economies are mixed.

Lawrence Reed: That's right.

Scott Rae: They belong somewhere along this continuum.

Lawrence Reed: Exactly. I think that describes overwhelmingly most of the countries of the world.

Scott Rae: Now let's go back to the New Testament part, which is the heart of what you're going to be talking about here at Acton. What in the New Testament makes people think that Jesus was a socialist?

Lawrence Reed: Some people think that, again, socialism is sharing. It's caring. It's compassion. It's just people helping people. If that's what you think, then you might be inclined to believe that Jesus was a socialist because he talked about caring for the poor and so forth. But he never once advocated the tools that socialism uses to do those things. He never advocated for the concentration of power. He never advocated for the government ownership of the means of production or the forcible redistribution of wealth or the central planning of an economy. I mean, first of all, he was interested in other things, your soul, first and foremost. But on earthly matters, Jesus never suggested in any way that he was calling for the use of concentrated political force to do good things.

Scott Rae: So it sounds like, if I asked you to finish the sentence, "Jesus was not a socialist because,"-

Lawrence Reed: [crosstalk]

Scott Rae: ... that would be the main thing.

Lawrence Reed: That would be it, absolutely, never advocated the use of concentrated political force to get something done.

Scott Rae: But Jesus did advocate what I would refer to as extreme voluntary generosity, where his followers were pretty clearly mandated to hold all their possessions pretty loosely. But that's a far cry from what you're describing as socialism.

Lawrence Reed: Oh, yeah. I mean, he never said, "And if you don't do it, I'm going to call Caesar and have him force you to do it." He felt very strongly that a person doing something good from his own heart is ... That's what he was looking for. That makes all the difference in the world. You don't make somebody a religious person by taking him to church at gunpoint. You want an inner change. You want, from within a person, a rebirth, a renaissance in such things as character and compassion. That's what makes all the difference in the world. Jesus was more interested in what's in your heart than he was in what you wanted a politician to do. That didn't concern him much at all.

Scott Rae: I think that strikes most people as intuitively pretty correct, that if you're mandating me to do something and you're twisting my arm in order to get me to take out my wallet and give some money to the homeless guy down the street, that sort of wipes out the virtue-

Lawrence Reed: Oh, absolutely.

Scott Rae: ... for me.

Lawrence Reed: What we should really want in society is people who do the right thing, do the compassionate thing because they want to, not because they have to, not because there's a gun at their back.

Scott Rae: But the cynic would say, if we just left it to that, most people are not going to do that.

Lawrence Reed: You hear that a lot, but I reject the idea that government is more compassionate than the people it supposedly represents. There are a lot of temptations within government that often take good people and grind them up. So if anything, I think, as a rule, government is less compassionate than the ordinary citizen, less capable even of providing real care to a person in need. When you and I do it, we're interested in things like accountability. We're interested in the person. We're interested in suffering with them, getting to know them. Government just writes a check and pops it in the mail. I mean, that often takes a problem and makes it worse, not better.

Scott Rae: I appreciate that that's the idea of compassion, which is to suffer with someone, as you know. It's the idea that we have a relationship with the person that we're showing compassion towards.

Lawrence Reed: That's right.

Scott Rae: All right, let's go to the early church. A lot of people suggest that the early church held all their possessions in common and that Ananias and Sapphira, for example [crosstalk].

Lawrence Reed: Yeah.

Scott Rae: That sounds a lot like the forcible redistribution of wealth and property from that text in Acts 6, when they held something back. There were pretty serious consequences for them on that. That sounds a lot like coercion to me. How do you understand the early church and as Acts describes that holding all things in common?

Lawrence Reed: That's right. Well, it's clear from subsequent passages that, although the early Christians were expected to hold much in common and not to focus on material wealth, that they didn't sell everything they had, because they continued to meet, in many cases, in their own private homes. But you have to consider the context too. This is a new faith in a hostile land, occupied by foreigners, Romans in this case, who did not like the idea of these religions popping up and challenging perhaps Roman authority. So it was very important that the early Christians have certain standards in order to be convincing, persuasive, and maybe even to keep them out of trouble sometimes from the Roman authorities. There's nothing in the New Testament that says the way the earliest of Christians were expected to conduct their economic affairs is therefore the way that all people in all times are to conduct their affairs. Christ never said, okay, you folks, we need you to behave this way, and therefore 2,000 years from now, we want everybody doing the same. They had certain standards they had to meet at that time to get the faith off the ground. So you have to consider the context.

Scott Rae: But you would hold that there are certain moral principles, certain virtues that do transcend time and culture, like their generosity-

Lawrence Reed: Oh, yeah. I think that's-

Scott Rae: ... and their lack of materialism, things like that.

Lawrence Reed: That's right. But, see, I think that, to be truly generous, one has to do it of his own free will-

Scott Rae: Voluntarily.

Lawrence Reed: ... and of his own money. You're not generous just because the government tells you you have to do it or because you support a politician who says he'll get it done for you.

Scott Rae: Larry, a lot of people today are very skeptical about the accumulation of wealth, particularly about the exercise of power that goes with that. Now I think, in the first century, when Jesus and the early church were around, I think [inaudible] was a little different than today, because power was used in order to accumulate wealth, where I think today it's more accumulated wealth is used as a means of exercising power. In some cases it just reflects cronyism and protecting yourself from competition. But there are a lot of people who hold that the Bible teaches that the accumulation of wealth itself is morally problematic, especially when you have so many needs that could be met. How do you understand the scripture on that?

Lawrence Reed: I don't see the Bible in any way as suggesting the mere accumulation of wealth, per se, is wrong or bad. I think what determines whether it's right or wrong is how you come about the wealth and what you do with it. I mean, if you've come about it through the use of political connections, where political power is employed to maybe stifle your competition or to get something from people that you wouldn't otherwise freely get in the marketplace, then, yeah, I'd be the first to blow the whistle on that. If you use your wealth, even if it's obtained entirely through voluntary, peaceful, productive means, but then you use it to buy political power, I'd say you're crossing a line, that that's a bad thing too. It all depends on how you come about it. If it's free, legitimate, voluntary, peaceful, fine. It's a measurement of how much, typically, you've contributed to the rest of society. Just don't use it, once you get it, to oppress people through your alliance with those in political power.

Scott Rae: I think that's a very big difference in the way wealth was accumulated in the ancient world, in Jesus' time, and it is today, because as you know it was unusual for people to become wealthy in the ancient world without doing some of those very things that you're referring to.

Lawrence Reed: Exactly, political connections.

Scott Rae: Or it was by theft or extortion or oppression, which I think is one of the reasons why Jesus made the statement, the remarkable statement, that it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, not because there's anything, as you said, intrinsically problematic about wealth. But the way in which it was obtained was so often morally compromising.

Lawrence Reed: That's right. I think he was also saying with wealth come such things as great temptation. So he's saying don't allow your wealth ... Even if it's secured entirely in a peaceful, productive fashion, don't allow your wealth to become the central object of your life. Don't worship wealth. Don't fall into temptation that comes with it. He says be careful. Be mindful of it. But he'd say that about a lot of things. I mean, I think he would say it's easier for a guy in great shape to climb the fence than a man who's broken both legs. That doesn't mean he's opposed to the guy who's broken his legs. He's just saying you've got more challenges.

Scott Rae: Now you cite several passages in the Gospels that have a lot to do with economics, where Jesus either makes economic assumptions or is directly teaching about some aspect of economics, so things like the parable of the talents, the good Samaritan, the parable of the workers in the vineyard, rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. So if we could, spell out a little bit further. What do you think Jesus had in mind about economics with the parable of the talents? We'll start with that.

Lawrence Reed: I think Jesus was primarily calling us all to very high standards of character. He wasn't opposed to the accumulation of wealth. He wasn't opposed to entrepreneurship. I wasn't opposed to the wealthy, per se. Again, it's all a matter of how you obtained your wealth and what you do with it. In the case of the parable of the talents, he tells th