Was Jesus a communist?

Because the churches are one of the primary drivers of why left wing political movements fail time and time again. Most of the population is indoctrinated against you from birth.

Only 11% attend church in Britain, yet Jeremy Corbyn and Labour were decisively defeated by Boris Johnson's Conservatives in the last election in the UK. I don't think we can attribute that failure to the church. In the USA the majority of the population does not attend church. Also not all churches espouse rightwing ideologies, plenty tend to lean more leftwing, and some just stay out of politics all together!
 
Those are very recent developments, at least in the US, and in the US the Evangelical Christian movement exerts outsized political influence beyond it's numbers just because of which states they happen to reside in.

I can't speak to the UK's internal politics. I'm not a close enough observer.
 
All governments imposed social order in the 2nd Cold War. I'm not engaging in whataboutism, I'm reiterating my point that Christ's message was curated about being a conquered people. That the variant of Christianity that survived was right-wing is memetic selection.

Hell, all variants of a surviving philosophy will eventually allow for ruling other people. The ones that don't get destroyed.
 
Because the churches are one of the primary drivers of why left wing political movements fail time and time again. Most of the population is indoctrinated against you from birth.
Don't confuse modern white American Evangelicalism with the history of churches and "left-wing/reformist" politics. In the UK, Labour drew heavily from the Dissenter and Nonconformist traditions.
Wikipedia said:
Benn's mother, Margaret Wedgwood Benn (née Holmes, 1897–1991), was a theologian, feminist and the founder President of the Congregational Federation. She was a member of the League of the Church Militant, which was the predecessor of the Movement for the Ordination of Women; in 1925, she was rebuked by Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women. His mother's theology had a profound influence on Benn, as she taught him that the stories in the Bible were based around the struggle between the prophets and the kings and that he ought in his life to support the prophets over the kings, who had power, as the prophets taught righteousness.[8]

Benn was for over 30 years a committed Christian.[9] He asserted that the teachings of Jesus Christ had a "radical political importance" on his life, and made a distinction between the historical Jesus as "a carpenter of Nazareth" who advocated social justice and egalitarianism and "the way in which he's presented by some religious authorities; by popes, archbishops and bishops who present Jesus as justification for their power", believing this to be a gross misunderstanding of the role of Jesus.[10] He believed that it was a "great mistake" to assume that the teachings of Christianity are outdated in modern Britain,[10] and Higgins wrote in The Benn Inheritance that Benn was "a socialist whose political commitment owes much more to the teaching of Jesus than the writing of Marx".[11] (Indeed, he did not read The Communist Manifesto until he was in his 50s.[12]) "The driving force of his life was Christian socialism," according to Peter Wilby, linking Benn to the "high-minded" founding roots of Labour.[12]

Later in his life, Benn emphasised issues regarding morality and righteousness, as well as various ethical principles of Nonconformism. On Desert Island Discs he said that he had been powerfully influenced by "what I would call the Dissenting tradition" (that is, the English Dissenters who left or were ejected from the established church, one of whom was his ancestor Rev. William Benn).[13] "I've never thought we can understand the world we lived in unless we understood the history of the church", Benn said to the Catholic Herald. "All political freedoms were won, first of all, through religious freedom. Some of the arguments about the control of the media today, which are very big arguments, are the arguments that would have been fought in the religious wars. You have the satellites coming in now—well, it is the multinational church all over again. That's why Mrs Thatcher pulled Britain out of UNESCO: she was not prepared, any more than Ronald Reagan was, to be part of an organisation that talked about a New World Information Order, people speaking to each other without the help of Murdoch or Maxwell."[14]

According to Wilby in the New Statesman, Benn "decided to do without the paraphernalia and doctrine of organised religion but not without the teachings of Jesus".[15] Although Benn became more agnostic as he became older, he was intrigued by the interconnections between Christianity, radicalism and socialism.[16] Wilby also wrote in The Guardian that although former Chancellor Stafford Cripps described Benn as "as keen a Christian as I am myself", Benn wrote in 2005 that he was "a Christian agnostic" who believed "in Jesus the prophet, not Christ the king", specifically rejecting the label of "humanist".[17]

In the United States, the Socialist Party was represented in the Presidential election six times by a minster, Norman Thomas. The church also played an important role in the development of unions and working class solidarity. That is without getting into the role played by the various churches in the civil rights movement. Jimmy Carter taught Sunday School and Georgia just elected a Reverend to be the Democratic Senator.
 
Don't confuse modern white American Evangelicalism with the history of churches and "left-wing/reformist" politics. In the UK, Labour drew heavily from the Dissenter and Nonconformist traditions.


In the United States, the Socialist Party was represented in the Presidential election six times by a minster, Norman Thomas. The church also played an important role in the development of unions and working class solidarity. That is without getting into the role played by the various churches in the civil rights movement. Jimmy Carter taught Sunday School and Georgia just elected a Reverend to be the Democratic Senator.

The socialist and labor movements in the US were also violently oppressed by the state and the church leadership. The religious involvement with those causes has always been with their grudging acceptance or over their objections because sometimes, in a moment, people can overcome this stuff and do the right thing.

Catholics are a more interesting case because they did have a liberalizing influence in US politics for many years because their early history here is that of being oppressed and their church had zero influence over the US state. By the time the civil rights era had concluded they were almost completely assimilated.

Those protestants went all-in on white supremacy, politically, once the time came to integrate the schools. The Vatican used abortions as an opportunity to shift its congregation here from a labor coalition into the reactionary coalition. The Pope calls for recognition of civil unions while his congregation in Poland is fueling a fascist movement which centers around demonizing homosexuals as intensely as Trump campaigned against immigrants.

It's a big mistake to analyze anything in a vacuum, imo. There will be deviation, but the intent of the project is to cozy up to entrenched privilege and power anywhere and everywhere that will have them. The reason the rise of fascism in Europe was so centered around Catholicism was due in no small part to the growing political power of forces who wanted to expel the Vatican from their borders, seize church property, etc.
 
Communism is a reaction to Capitalism and the exploitation of Industrial Labor.

So no, Jesus was not a Communist, and his alleged fables and aesops and parables come from the vein of 'don't get attached too much to earth' out of concern for the spiritual sense than the effect on ones fellow, the economy, or exploitation.

Just because Jesus was against greed, and the early church may had been communal, doesn't make it Communist any more than Mazdak was. It's always a reach.

Now, of course, Jesus would probably hate the state of current Evangelical-Prosperity Christianity, but that's not my fight to give a damn about.
 
Jesus doesn't dislike it enough to provide credible Revelation that he's upset by it. So, he doesn't mind it too much. QED.
 
Only 11% attend church in Britain, yet Jeremy Corbyn and Labour were decisively defeated by Boris Johnson's Conservatives in the last election in the UK. I don't think we can attribute that failure to the church. In the USA the majority of the population does not attend church. Also not all churches espouse rightwing ideologies, plenty tend to lean more leftwing, and some just stay out of politics all together!
Nobody said we can attribute specific electoral losses (or victories) directly to the dominant Church. But the whole "Corbyn shouldn't have gone woke" thing has its roots in Christian (or at least Abrahamic) moralism, because non-hetero relationships have been culturally policed and regulated by the Church since the earliest days. These things are seen as cultural norms because they were established to be in decades and centuries gone past. Much like how the US (and other countries) fights with itself over black liberation because it was built on black (and other) slavery in its earliest days.

A monarch made his own denomination because he wanted to remarry (to another woman, to be clear - not breaking the mold exactly). And yet we have swathes of history examined through such a lens.
 
Socialism must be "woke", you can't build your coalition otherwise. What you need is to be more than symbolically or metaphorically woke and have something to offer people who don't quite see eye to eye with you. It's why religion is ultimately incompatible, because all of them explicitly cast non-believers as out-groups. Just how far we act this out on one another depends on a bunch of things, but to the pious enough anyone can be turned into an enemy.
 
I truly appreciate the video, but after 10 minutes I still don't know what the man is trying to say, and how to summon it up in a couple of sentences, or how he would summon it up instead of me guessing.
Sure, I understand. A too long/didn't watch summary would be: The kingdom of God demands a person's first allegiance.

The rich young man was an decent guy, living an excellent life and keeping the religious commandments. He thought highly of himself though, and this was a stumbling block. He built his identity on his good works and material success. His prosperity was his foremost love. He approached Jesus earnestly, but he was thinking in transactional terms. He had no problems kneeling down respectfully and asking what he needed to do. But he balked when Jesus told him to let go of what was most important to him, the thing that he ultimately served and was enslaved to.

Chicken Pizza said:
"The only way into the kingdom is on bended knee... like a little child."

I love this guy.
Jesus said that in the preceding verse, Mark 10:15: Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.

Samson said:
I am glad I am not that guys kid.
Why do you say that?
 
I've been told many times a quote that is supposed to be from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Christianity and Communism are diametrically opposed."


Actually, Christianity and conservatism are diametrically opposed. Everything about being a conservative is a refutation of Christian teaching.
 
Actually, Christianity and conservatism are diametrically opposed. Everything about being a conservative is a refutation of Christian teaching.

I understand your point and agree with the gist of it (conservative Christianity today being an aberration of its original tenets), but the thing is that Christianity as an institution definitely has conservative branches at this point. Even if its origins were more of a communal hermit spirituality thing. Christianity is by virtue of its implementaton and far reach malleable enough to be a lot of things.
 
I understand your point and agree with the gist of it (conservative Christianity today being an aberration of its original tenets), but the thing is that Christianity as an institution definitely has conservative branches at this point. Even if its origins were more of a communal hermit spirituality thing. Christianity is by virtue of its implementaton and far reach malleable enough to be a lot of things.


We are somewhat talking past each other in that regard.

What I feel is true is that conservative people are more likely to be deeply religious than people who are less conservative. And so religious organizations are both attended by, and very importantly, staffed by, conservative people. Further, when a religious organization is politically powerful and allied to the state, then they tend to push a very conservative political line because it both consolidates and increases their power. So there are tangible reasons for the religious to be conservative, if you feel that compelling others to your religion is important. Or even if just protecting it is important.

But that is generic to any religion, and has nothing to do with Christianity per se. If you instead look at what Jeus tried to teach, and compared it to the lessons conservatives took, there's a lot of disconnect. And the further conservative you go, the greater that disconnect becomes.
 
Why do you say that?
Because he equates kneeling with being a child. Now I do not have children, and it has been a long time since I was one myself, but I do not associate the two. I therefore surmised that he probably requires his children to kneel, which is unusual and unpleasant. I could be wrong.
 
A slightly wider question, one that I think about a bit, is how can we interpret the bible as a political document in the lens of today's view of politics.

We can consider the different bits of the bible, the old testament, the gospels and the rest of the new testament. If we consider politics as how to run a state the most political bit is the old testament. As well as the more famous bits with colourful stories and smiting there are large tracts of rules about how to run a society through much of numbers and deuteronomy. While the acceptance of slavery makes it quite problematic, is possible to read the rules about the sabbath (and much more besides) as early labour rights, and the rules about giving to the temple and its role in helping the poor could be seen as a early implementation of a welfare state. This was at a time when rights beyond those that you could enforce with your own sword were few and far between, and pretty much non-existent for the poor.

Jesus says more about how to live a single life than how to run a state, but it seems obvious to me that he would be on the left of most political arguments here. Another view is well expressed in the video below, Philosophy Tube talking about Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution:

Spoiler Philosophy Tube Youtube video :
The political bits of the rest of the new testament are about the running of an underground subversive movement, so that is a bit different.
Also, your donkey also gets the sabbath off. That is extension of labour rights to animals that provide labour. That is pretty progressive.
 
Top Bottom