Phil Christman in his latest book Why Christians Should Be Leftists explains why he deconstructed from the politically conservative views of his father to become a socialist. He mentions his father's political views so often that one wonders of he is rebelling against his father more than his politics. Becoming a socialist is a good way to stick it to the man as socialists in the 1960s said.
Christman teaches first-year writing at the University of Michigan. He holds an MA in English Literature and an MFA in fiction writing. At some point he attended Calvin College, which brainwashed him in Marxism. He swallowed it whole without tasting it, as one does raw oysters. He recently spoke about his book in a podcast on the Protestant Libertarian podcast. Christman says his epiphany came while reading the Sermon on the Mount with friends.
"That whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared. Or not disappeared but receded: it didn't seem inevitable or fully real anymore. It seemed like a lie that needed to be undone by the constant practice of universal, constant and unvarying love.
In other words, he saw the oppression of the poor in Jesus' day as continuing today. There is no difference other than technology. Had he bothered to read Jerry Bowyer's book, The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics, he would see vast differences. In Jesus' time, people viewed commerce as more evil than prostitution. The "honorable" ways to gain wealth were through plunder in war, kidnapping for ransom and bribery. Most of the rich had stolen their wealth. That's why New Testament writers condemn them.
The common complaint by the O.T. prophets against the governments of Israel was that the princes (government authorities) stole their wealth by bribing judges as King Ahad had. They continued that practice throughout Israel's history until its destruction in 70 AD. In the Roman Empire, many people in government grew rich through crushing taxes, the bulk of which they kept for themselves. Capitalism outlawed those means of gaining wealth and sanctified commerce so that the only way to gain more wealth was through serving customers with good products and services.
Not only is Christman ignorant of that history, he employs the faulty hermeneutics of the left. One of the chief principles of interpretation is to consider the audience when trying to determine the meaning of a passage. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus commanded his followers, not the government to care for the poor. Jesus was never a policy wonk. Concluding that Jesus intended the state to take from one group to give to another is a logical leap across the Grand Canyon, formally called a non sequitur.
And it ignores the God-given role of government found throughout the Bible, but especially in Romans 13, which is to punish evil. God gives government the authority to punish criminals, settle disputes peacefully in courts, and provide national defense. That's why Christians until the 20th century insisted on limited government.
Christman does a better job of defining capitalism than most socialists by referring to what he calls the Lockean rights to life, liberty and property. He likes the first two. He has problems with the last. He thinks capitalism leads to inequality and great concentrations of money that he equates with power. That's boiler plate Marxism. Marx predicted that capitalists would starve workers to death and force workers to revolt. Only a redistribution of wealth will stop that. Here Christman advertises his ignorance of history and the science of economics as well as being a sucker for Marxism.
As stupid as Marx was, he insisted that capitalism didn't appear until the 16th century. So, capitalism didn't exist in Jesus' day. Marx was wrong about the causes and the date. Theologians at the University of Salamanca discovered the principles of capitalism in the 16th century, but capitalism as a system wasn't born until the 17th century in the Dutch Republic that implemented those principles.
But Locke didn't invent the rights to life, liberty and property as Christman assumes. Those came from the theologians at the University of Salamanca. They derived them from natural law, but they have Biblical foundations. The right to life comes from "Thou shalt not murder." The right to liberty from prohibitions of kidnapping. And the right to property from "Thou shalt not steal."
The last is one of the Ten Commandments, but Christman despises it. He thinks he has a good feel for how much wealth a person should be able to accumulate and the government should take the rest and give it to those with less. But as Thomas Sowell asks, what right does one person have to the wealth another has worked for? If the wealthy have stolen from others, the government has failed to do its job of punishing criminals. That their wealth is mostly in the form of the value of a business shows they haven't stolen anything nor are they hoarding it.
Like many on the left, Christman often falls back on personal experiences to justify his position. But he has taught at colleges. Why do people go to college if their personal experiences are all they need to understand the world? Why read books? We do so because our personal experiences are not enough. We need to learn from the personal experiences of others to get a clear picture of reality. The science of economics is the accumulation of the experiences of millions of people over centuries.
Likewise, Christman's view of human nature comes from working with the homeless, not the Bible. Christianity's historic doctrines of original sin and the depravity of humanity is not important to him. They may be in the Bible, but conservatives exaggerate them, he writes. Paul's details in Romans one the moral descent of people who reject Christ is useless he thinks. According to Christman, the homeless are victims of a capitalist society that has oppressed them and forced them into homelessness.
He said in the interview that all people want to work and it's nonsense to think that people must be forced to work by fear of starvation. He ignores Paul's command that if a man doesn't work, let him not eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Instead, Christman adopts the view of human nature promoted by an atheist alcoholic, Marx, that people are born good and turn bad only because of oppression. But history proves that every society has a group of people who will live poorly if they don't have to work and someone else will feed them. He needs to read Marvin Olasky's book, The Tragedy of American Compassion.
If Christman honestly cared about the poor, he would promote capitalism. He needs to Google for the hockey stick graph of per capita GDP, which proves that humanity survived in near starvation poverty worse than that of Haiti from prehistory until the advent of capitalism. Capitalism created the enormous wealth that ungrateful academics like Christman despise. No country today is as poor as Europe before capitalism.
This book raises the question, why would Eerdmans hire an instructor of freshman writing to write about economics? The publisher approached him. Poverty, inequality, and concentrations of wealth are economic questions. Why not ask an economist to write about them? Human nature is a theological question. Why not have a theologian write about it? No, they sought out an instructor of writing for freshmen.
Eerdmans is typical of socialist publishers. They sought out Christman because he writes well and appeals to emotions. Christman often uses the word "feel." His opinions are based primarily on his feelings, which the psychologist Jonathan Haidt says is typical of the left. Socialism is an appeal to emotions, primarily the emotion of envy. Knowledge is distasteful to people driven mostly by envy, though they seek rationalization for their emotions.
The great economist F. A. Hayek wrote that most academics are consumed with envy because they think of themselves as the smartest people on the planet and therefore deserving of the wealth that inferiors have accumulated through entertainment and commerce. Christman's obsession with concentrations of wealth and inequality, though disguised as a love for the poor, is in reality evidence of envy. Christman advertises his ignorance of history and the science of economics in his book. But it drips with envy. He should read Helmut Schoeck's book, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.
People who can think are capitalists. Those driven by emotions are socialists.
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