Having grown up as a Jew in Poland then Vienna at the turn of the last century, Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economist of the 20th century, had every reason to hate Christianity because they had murdered Jews for centuries. But worse for Mises, Christian intellectuals promoted socialism as Godly economics. Mises saw no way to reconcile economics and Christianity, as he wrote in his book Socialism: An Economic and Social Analysis, published in 1922:
The Gospels are not socialistic and not communistic. They are, as we have seen, indifferent to all social questions on the one hand, full of resentment against all property and against all owners on the other. So it is that Christian doctrine, once separated from the context in which Christ preached it—expectation of the imminent
Kingdom of God—can be extremely destructive. Never and nowhere can a system of social ethics embracing social co-operation be built up on a doctrine which prohibits any concern for sustenance and work, while it expresses fierce resentment against the rich, preaches hatred of the family, and advocates voluntary castration…
[Our] evidence leads to the negation of the question asked above: whether it might not be possible to reconcile Christianity with a free social order based on private ownership in the means of production. A living Christianity cannot exist side by side with, and within, Capitalism.
