Every generation turns up a fresh crop of people who have discovered that the world would run beautifully if somebody else paid for it. That is not new. It is not even interesting. What is new is how many of them now quote Jesus while they say it.
So let me say plainly what I mean before anybody’s feelings get bruised.
I am not writing about Social Security. I am not writing about Medicaid, food stamps, the volunteer fire department, or your mother’s Medicare card. Christians have argued about those for a hundred years and will argue about them for another hundred. I am writing about socialism itself — the conviction that private property is the root of human injustice, that the means of production belong to the collective, and that the state should be the first and last provider for everyone inside its borders.
That is the thing I want on the table. Not the safety net. The system.
And my objection is not first economic. Economists can argue about incentives and I will bring the coffee. My objection is theological. Socialism is built on a wrong idea of what a human being is. Ten reasons follow.
1. Work came before the curse.
God put the man in the garden “to work it and take care of it.” That is Genesis 2, and it is worth noticing where it sits. Before the serpent. Before the fruit. Before the first bead of sweat on a human forehead.
Work is not the punishment. Toil is. Thorns and thistles were added to the assignment; they were not the assignment. Which means labor belongs to the image we bear, not to the wreckage we caused. A man who builds something is doing a small thing that resembles what God did on a large scale.
Any system that cuts the cord between a man’s effort and a man’s reward is not repairing a curse. It is tampering with a creation ordinance. That is a bigger thing to be wrong about than tax policy.
2. The field was still Ananias’s.
Somebody will bring up Acts 2 and Acts 4, where the believers had everything in common, and will announce that the first church was socialist. Fine. Let’s read one chapter further.
When Peter confronts Ananias in Acts 5, he asks him a question: “Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold?” And after it was sold, wasn’t the money his to do with as he pleased? Peter does not rebuke the man for keeping part of the price. He rebukes him for lying about it.
Read that again. In the very passage waved at Christians who defend private property, private property is assumed by an apostle. The sharing in Jerusalem was Spirit-prompted, local, voluntary, and temporary. Nobody was audited. No field was seized. And that same church took up a collection for famine relief a few years later, which is a difficult thing to do if nobody owns anything.
3. Two of the Ten Commandments assume you own something.
“You shall not steal” is gibberish unless something can rightly be yours. Theft requires ownership the way lying requires truth. Take away the one and the other has nothing to violate.
The tenth commandment goes further and gets personal. Do not covet your neighbor’s house, his field, his servant, his ox. God protects your neighbor’s property from your hands in one commandment and from your imagination in another.
Envy is the engine underneath every scheme to take what another man has and call it justice. Scripture named that engine and called it sin a long time before Marx bolted it into an ideology and called it history.
4. Paul gave a reason for working, and the reason was generosity.
Ephesians 4:28 is the verse I wish more of us knew by heart. The thief must quit stealing and go to work with his own hands — and here comes the purpose clause — “that they may have something to share with those in need.”
Work exists so that giving becomes possible. Follow the chain. Labor produces. Production creates surplus. Surplus becomes generosity. Generosity meets a real need in a real house on a real road.
Every link in that chain requires a person who owns what he made. Break it at ownership and you have not built a more generous society. You have built one where generosity is no longer available as a category. Only transfer is left, and transfer never made anybody kind.
5. Charity at gunpoint is not charity.
Paul told the Corinthians to give what they had decided in their hearts to give, “not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”
Suppose a man takes your wallet at gunpoint and hands it to a hungry family down the street. The family eats. Good. But you have not given anything. A transfer occurred. A virtue did not. No one grew. No one thanked anybody. No relationship was formed between a giver and a receiver, because there was no giver, only a courier.
This is not an argument that taxes are theft. Jesus said pay them and Paul said the same, and I have paid mine for fifty years without a sermon about it. It is an argument that taxation and charity are different in kind — and that a people who let the first replace the second will eventually forget how the second is done.
6. Responsibility starts at home and works outward.
Paul writes that anyone who fails to provide for his own household “has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” That is about as hot as Paul ever gets, and he is not talking about a stranger. He is talking about your people.
Look at the whole chapter and you find an order: the widow’s own family first, then the congregation, and only then the short list of the genuinely alone. Individual, family, church, community. Each ring picks up what the ring inside it truly cannot carry.
When the outermost ring absorbs the work of all the others, the inner rings do not get relief. They get weak. A muscle you never use does not stay strong out of gratitude. Families that are never needed stop knowing how to be needed, and churches that are never asked stop knowing how to answer.
7. Equal dignity is not identical outcome.
Every person carries the image of God. That is the deepest equality there is, and the church of Jesus Christ ought to be the loudest voice in the country saying so. Equal in dignity. Equal in worth. Equal at the foot of the cross, where the ground is famously level.
Equal in gifting, energy, health, opportunity, discipline, and appetite for risk we plainly are not, and Scripture never once pretends we are. It hands out different assignments and expects faithfulness with what was handed out.
The biblical demand is justice, mercy, and generosity. The demand is not sameness. Blurring those two is how a nation talks itself into treating envy as a moral principle and calling the result compassion.
8. Samuel already told us what it costs.
First Samuel 8 ought to be read aloud more often. Israel wants a king to fight its battles and manage its affairs, and Samuel tells the people exactly what a king does.
He takes their sons. He takes their daughters. He takes the best of their fields and vineyards and olive groves. He takes a tenth of the grain and the flocks. He takes the servants and the cattle. And then comes the line that ought to stop us cold: the day will come when you cry out because of the king you asked for, and the Lord will not answer you.
They wanted somebody else to carry it. God let them have him. Every generation wants a king. We have simply learned to call him a program.
9. God’s own welfare program required a man to show up.
Leviticus 19 tells the landowner not to reap to the very edges of his field, not to go back over the vineyard a second time, and to leave what falls for the poor and the foreigner.
That is a welfare policy written by God Himself, and look at how it is built. The landowner is obligated — this is law, not a suggestion, and a hard man could be prosecuted for ignoring it. The harvest is genuinely left in the field. But the poor man walks out and gathers it with his own hands.
Read the book of Ruth and watch it work. She gleaned. Boaz did not means-test her and he did not have it delivered. He noticed her, protected her, told his men to leave extra on purpose, and let her carry it home herself. Dignity was engineered into the design.
God’s arrangement obligated the strong without confiscating the field and served the weak without erasing their agency. Three thousand years later we have not improved on it, though we have spent a great deal of money trying.
10. It puts the evil in the wrong place.
Here is the heart of the matter, and it is the reason I said at the top that this is a theological quarrel rather than an economic one.
Socialism teaches that human beings are basically fine and that our troubles come out of bad structures. Repair the structure and you repair the man. Scripture teaches the reverse. The heart is “deceitful above all things.” Jesus said what defiles a man comes out of him, not into him. The problem is not primarily around us. It is in us, and it followed us into every system we ever built.
Follow that fork all the way out. If evil lives in structures, then concentrating power is perfectly safe, because a good system in good hands will manufacture good results. If evil lives in the heart, then concentrating power is the most dangerous act a society can commit, because you have just handed unlimited leverage to fallen men and asked them to be careful with it.
That is not a policy disagreement. That is a different doctrine of sin. And wherever you find a different doctrine of sin, look a little closer and you will find a different savior standing behind it.
Socialism is not merely poor economics. It is a rival gospel with a rival redemption — salvation by system, sanctification by policy, a new man produced by a new arrangement of old men. The twentieth century ran that experiment at enormous scale and buried the results by the millions.
We already have a Savior. He works from the inside out, and He has never once needed a committee.
Now a word to the comfortable.
If you have read this far nodding along, stay in your seat. The same Bible that refuses to make the state your father refuses to let you off the hook.
Proverbs says the unplowed field produces food for the poor, “but injustice sweeps it away.” There it is in one line — poverty caused by wrongdoing rather than laziness, and God noticing. Amos thundered at men who trampled the needy while keeping their religion tidy. Isaiah described the fast God actually wants: share your food with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, clothe the man who has nothing.
Into your house. Not into a program. Isaiah did not tell Israel to fund something.
A Christian who opposes socialism and does nothing for the poor has not defended the faith. He has embarrassed it, and he has handed the other side its best argument free of charge. Every word in this article is only worth saying by people who are already doing the work — sitting with the widow, feeding the family down the road, hiring the man nobody else will hire, opening their own hands and their own doors before anybody makes them.
Otherwise we are simply another crop of people who have discovered that the world would run beautifully if somebody else did the loving.
Soli Deo gloria.
Books by Mo Hodge
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