Roger Olson, Emeritus Professor of Christian Theology at Baylor University, recently published an essay with the title, “Why I Am a Socialist: Because I Am a Christian.” He added, “I do think that laissez faire capitalism, especially its Social Darwinist variety, is contrary to the spirit, the ethos, of Jesus Christ, which is compassion for the weak, the vulnerable, the ‘little ones.’…What would Jesus advocate for if he were here, in person, physically, today?”
In other words, today Jesus would be a socialist, according to Olson. But the professor errs in his logic, hermeneutics, history, and economics.
The obvious error in Olson’s reasoning is his logical leap, called the non sequitur fallacy. Olson believes that compassion requires the state to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Otherwise, there is no compassion. What about charity? Olson never mentions it. Is there really nothing between socialism and ruthless oppression of the poor? Olson believes so. The Bible says we should care for the poor, but insisting that only the state can provide for them is an Evel Knievel logical leap across the Grand Canyon.
An unscientific survey of theologians over the past decade has shown that the dominant views are:
Jesus only cared about the Kingdom of God and nothing about government or
Jesus was a socialist.
Both are wrong. The more reasonable idea that Jesus came to establish the kingdom of God, but also cared about government, is as neglected as a teenager in foster care.
The New Testament has little to say about government. In Mark 12, the Pharisees and Herodians asked Jesus if they should pay taxes to Rome. Rabbis typically destroyed each other’s reputations by asking questions the victims couldn’t answer. They hoped to discredit Jesus as a teacher, as they had many other rabbis. But Jesus embarrassed his opponents:
Taliban fighters sit on a vehicle along the street in Jalalabad province on August 15, 2021. | AFP via Getty Images
Washington thought Afghanistan was a fixer upper. But after spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to improve it, the messy capitulation has stunned and embarrassed Americans who want to know what went wrong. However, let’s ask another question about Afghanistan: why is it so poor?
Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is the most common measure of standards of living used by economists. This year GDP per capita was $592 for Afghanistan, compared to $35,672 in the U.S. That makes Afghanistan one of the poorest countries in the world. Of course, we Boomers will remember that this poor country has been at war since Soviet armies were invited to rule in 1980. Over 40 years of war will tend to give a place a run-down appearance.
In the summer of 1976, I worked with others to smuggle Bibles into Afghanistan from Iran. Iran was poor by U.S. standards, and I had been to Mexico several times, but I had never witnessed the extreme poverty that I found in Afghanistan. Even in 1980, the per capita GDP was $273 compared to $12,575 for the US. None of these figures have been adjusted for inflation.
That doesn’t mean Afghanistan has no wealthy people. A tiny group of war lords and government officials are wealthy even by western standards. As with most poor countries, a tiny group of wealthy dominate a mass of nearly starving people. Why?
Medical team helps battle the coronavirus at Samaritan's Purse field hospital in New York City, April 2020. | Samaritan's Purse
Few families in the U.S. can afford healthcare insurance. The average premiums for family coverage is about $15,000 per year, about the same as a mortgage in Oklahoma. Then why do most Americans have healthcare insurance? Because their employers pay up to two thirds of the cost.
Those without employer subsidized insurance must be content with catastrophic insurance and high deductibles. And by the way, healthcare insurance companies aren’t getting rich. Their average profit is 3%.
One way to reduce insurance premiums would be to cut medical costs because on average 85% of premiums go to pay doctor and hospital bills. A hospital in Oklahoma City has done that for decades and its chief opponents are other hospitals and doctors.
Dr. Keith Smith created the Surgery Center of Oklahoma with a team of 11 other doctors. In a recent speech, he provided an example of the savings his hospital offers:
“One that sticks out is the patient from Georgia who required a urologic procedure, and who had received a quote of $40,000, just for the facility charge. A friend had told him about our facility and after he confirmed that our all-inclusive price was $4,000, he informed his urologist he was traveling to Oklahoma City. Having lost another patient to us the previous month, the urologist contacted the hospital and told them something had to be done, as their price quotes were causing him to lose patients. The hospital matched our price and the patient stayed in Georgia.”
According to Smith, the Center began 24 years ago with a simple mission:
“Our mission was the opposite mission of the hospitals where we had previously worked. Then, as now, hospitals are focused almost exclusively on revenue, many times inflicting surprise and bankrupting bills on their victims. As physicians working in these hospital systems, we were unwitting accessories to these crimes. We intended to operate our facility differently, intending to serve as both medical and financial advocates for our patients.”
Canadians were the first patients to take advantage of the Center’s value.
The most common story then as now for the Canadians was a patient waiting two years to see a gynecologist for a hysterectomy to stop their bleeding, bleeding usually so severe that intermittent transfusions were required. For $8,000, which covers the facility, surgeon, anesthesia, pathology, and an overnight stay at the surgery center, Canadians can end their nightmare.
The first question a Canadian asks when they call us is how long they’ll have to wait. Our answer that there is no waiting time is met with disbelief. A Canadian friend of mine has told me the old joke that no Canadian is truly content unless standing in line.
In spite of the high quality of care and charges equal to 10% of what other hospitals charged, insurance companies would not contract with the Center. Established hospitals immediately began to attack them through state law makers they owned who created a trauma task force. Of course, the task force of politicians declared that their work benefited the health and welfare of Oklahomans, but its real purpose was to close physician owned hospitals such as the Surgical Center. Sympathetic Democrat politicians shut down the task force while Republican law makers continued to battle for their large campaign contributors in establishment hospitals.
Next, hospitals tried to pass a law requiring all hospitals to receive at least 30% of their revenue from Medicare, Medicaid, or uncompensated care. The Center accepted no money from governmental agencies so the law would close them. Smith said, “Once again, a Democrat, Representative Fred Stanley, used his muscle to ensure that this legislation went nowhere.”
In another attack, the hospitals persuaded the state department of health to demand all the medical records of patients the Center had treated. The Center refused and the department attempted to invalidate its operating license. Smith sued and forced the department to back down.
Attacks on the Surgical Center will continue as long as established hospitals can buy politicians. For example, the American Hospital Association endorsed the Affordable Care Act only after it banned the construction or expansion of physician-owned hospitals.
Such behavior by doctors and hospitals wouldn’t surprise readers if they understood the history of the American Medical Association, a union for doctors that Dr. Smith and his colleagues refuse to join. The U.S. enjoyed relatively inexpensive healthcare in the first quarter of the 20th century due to competition within the industry. But the AMA was able to purchase enough Congressmen to give itself a monopoly on the supply of medical care in the country and prices began to soar, as happens with most monopolies.
When Jesus drove the money changers and sellers of livestock from the Temple in Jerusalem, he accused them of turning it into a den of robbers. How did they rob the people? Corrupt high priests had made their shekel the only money that could be given to the Temple, so people with Greek and Roman coins had to exchange their coins for the shekel and having a monopoly, the money changers charged high prices for their service.
Jerry Bowyer wrote in The Makers versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics, “This means there was a 100 percent premium on switching from the currency held by the typical Israelite to the required temple currency. As a result, worshippers paid double to participate in the system.” Bowyer documents many other corrupt practices in the Jerusalem Temple by the religious authorities that made them rich. Jesus threatened their wealth.
What the AMA and established hospitals are doing to healthcare in the U.S. is hardly different from the robbery by the Jerusalem Temple money changers and livestock sellers. Those who claim they care about the poor will want to end their monopoly on healthcare and force them to charge a just price in a free market.
Economists have proven that a minimum wage above the market rate for unskilled entry-level workers will harm the people that socialists intend to help, but socialists don’t believe them or don’t care. Socialists insist that a minimum wage is moral and should become law regardless of the consequences. In this and this article I showed that a minimum wage is immoral from two perspectives. Here is another.
In the parable of the day laborers and the vineyard found in Matthew 20:1-16, the owner goes to the marketplace several times in a day to hire laborers to work. The point of the parable isn’t a minimum wage. Jesus told the parable to illustrate salvation by grace and not works. But to do so, he relied on common law regarding labor.
According to Alfred Edersheim in his book The Life and Times of Jesus Messiah, the market had established a range of wages and an employer was required to pay the average wage for a day laborer if he had not negotiated one with the workers. Some workers trusted employers to do the right thing. Others would negotiate a wage with prospective employers, and once they agreed, that wage was binding on both the employer and the laborers and was considered a fair rate. Metaphorically, we might view the workers who negotiated a wage as Jews who had a covenant with God, and those who had no agreement as gentile believers.
But a few employers would hire workers and not pay them, or withhold pay for long periods of time while the money that should have gone to the workers was invested and earning a return. When the Bible condemns employers for oppressing workers, it usually refers to that and not to how much employers paid.
In Jesus’ parable, the vineyard owner negotiated with only the first group he hired early in the morning: “He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.” A denarius was the usual wage. The owner didn’t negotiate a wage with the other groups he hired. They trusted him to pay a fair wage.
When the sun had set, the owner began paying his workers, but he gave them all a denarius regardless of how many hours they had worked. Normally, owners would pay workers by the number of hours they had put in. None of the short-term workers had negotiated a wage and accepted their pay as fair. But the workers whom the owner had hired first complained that they had endured the hottest part of the day and received the same pay as the others.
To that, the owner responded, “I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
Of course, the early workers were consumed with envy, but the economic point here is that Jesus relied upon a common law principle to support his illustration of salvation by grace. It’s unlikely that Jesus would have used that principle if he thought it unfair or in any way evil. And that law said that any wage agreed to by the laborers and the employer was a fair wage, regardless of what others thought.
Theologians at the University of Salamanca, Spain, during the Reformation relied on the same principle when people insisted that Spain institute a minimum wage. Not only would it cause unemployment and make poor workers poorer, they wrote, any wage agreed upon by two parties was a just wage if one didn’t coerce the other. Theologians had spent centuries trying to discover just prices, including wages, and had finally determined that the closest humans can come to knowing a just wage is in a free market.
Today, socialists argue that labor markets aren’t free. Employers have all the power and laborers must take the crumbs that businesses offer because there are always far more people applying for jobs than jobs available. But notice it was the same in Jesus’ day. The reason day laborers stood around in the marketplace, sometimes all day, was because there wasn’t a lot of work to go around. When large projects ended, such as building the temple, the supply of labor would greatly exceed the demand. Day laborers were among the poorest people in the land not counting beggars. And until recently, working on another man’s property instead of one’s own made the laborer not much better off socially than a slave. At the same time, an owner of even a small vineyard would have been relatively wealthy.
Socialists insist that they know how much an employer should pay for unskilled labor. But they don’t. They are merely arrogant in claiming to know something they can’t possibly know. The great economist F. A. Hayek wrote that the main purpose of the science of economics is to convince us of how little we know about the things we think we can control. Jesus would agree.
Socialists don’t know what any job should pay. Those who claim they do merely advertise their ignorance and arrogance. The principle of free market wages that Jesus employed applies to unions as well. Unions coerce employers with explicit threats of strikes and implicit ones of violence and so violate Jesus’ principle of freely negotiating wages.
According to the principle that Jesus used, every worker has a right to negotiate a wage rate with his employer and the wage they agree on is just and fair. No one has the authority to substitute their opinions in place of a laborer and employer’s right to negotiate wages, least of all arrogant socialists.
How you answer the question “What would Jesus say about inequality?” depends on how you define the “words of Jesus.” Many “scholars” limit them to no more than “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Others include only the quotations in the Gospels attributed to Jesus. Most Christians see the entire Bible as the words of Jesus because, being God, he wrote it.
Let’s start with the Gospel quotations. One passage that comes close to dealing with inequality is the parable of the Ten Talents (Matthew 25:14-30). In it, a rich man gave one servant five bags of gold, one two bags, and the third got one bag of gold to invest, “each according to his ability.” Jesus recognized that different abilities will result in different outcomes, although he is vague about the rewards they receive.
The religious left refers to their ideology as “progressive Christianity,” even though their economic ideas regress to the middle ages and most deny the fundamental truths of Christianity that Jesus is God and he rose from the dead. Still, the left covets the power that the name “Jesus” holds on real Christians and wants to use it to lure them into their socialist dark web.
A recent venture in the tradition issues from an Anabaptist blogging as the Hippie Heretic. Anabaptists tried to create a communist city during the early 16th century in the Netherlands, another example of regression.
