History, Politics, Religion, Thoughts

Jesus was a socialist and also the world’s greatest revolutionary

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What would Jesus do? – by Mehdi Hasan

Conservatives claim Christ as one of their own. But in word and deed, the son of God was much more left-wing than the religious right likes to believe.

Was Jesus Christ a lefty? Philosophers, politicians, theologians and lay members of the various Christian churches have long been divided on the subject. The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev once declared: “Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.” The Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, went further, describing Christ as “the greatest socialist in history”. But it’s not just Russian ex-communists and Bolivarian socialists who consider Jesus to be a fellow-traveller. Even the Daily Mail sketch-writer Quentin Letts once confessed: “Jesus preached fairness – you could almost call him a lefty.”

That conservatives have succeeded in claiming Christ as one of their own in recent years – especially in the US, where the Christian right is in the ascendancy – is a tragedy for the modern left. Throughout history, Jesus’s teachings have inspired radical social and political movements: Christian pacifism (think the Quakers, Martin Luther King or Bruce Kent in CND), Christian socialism (Keir Hardie or Tony Benn), liberation theology (in South America) and even “Christian communism“. In the words of the 19th-century French utopian philosopher Étienne Cabet, “Communism is Christianity . . . it is pure Christianity, ” …

Read more : Newstatesman

One thought on “Jesus was a socialist and also the world’s greatest revolutionary”

  1. I would agree that the right “claiming Christ as one of their own” has been disastrous and wrong. Jesus, contrary to opinion, was not a capitalist, freemarket type of guy. At the same time to suggest he would be on the left I think is wrong too. As Greg Boyd illustrated brilliantly in his book ‘The myth of a Chrstian Nation’ one cannot take the words and actions of Jesus and put that into any form of government or political policy. Jesus was political, but he was political by his own actions, not what he wanted governments to do. So Jesus was not a right wing guy, at the same time he was certainly not a socialist.

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