Jesus Was a Socialist
Thanks in no small part to folks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, everyone is talking about socialism these days. Unfortunately, many Christians seem to be under the impression that socialism is at odds with their faith.
Plenty of other Christians disagree, of course. For example, theologian David Bentley Hart has spoken about his democratic socialism on several occasions , and Sojourners Magazine recently published a short piece by Obery M. Hendricks Jr. on “ The Biblical Values of Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic Socialism .” AOC is herself a Christian , along with many other prominent democratic socialists, such as Cornel West and Martin Luther King Jr.
However, I’ve yet to find a systematic examination of the many things Jesus had to say on this subject. So that’s what I’ve endeavored to put together in this article.
My apologies for the length. If I’m not mistaken, this has turned into the longest single piece I’ve written. But I wanted to cover as much as I reasonably could while limiting my scope primarily to Jesus’ sayings in the canonical Gospels. (In practice, this has meant Matthew and Luke. Mark contains parallels to many of the passages under discussion, but little unique on this subject. And John, while in no way contradicting these themes,