The Christian Case Against Capitalism

A Vision for Christian Democratic Socialism

Usually, I will only be releasing my written work on my Substack, but on the occasion of Christmas, and given there won’t be a new episode of 1Dime Radio this week, I figured I would release a voice-over reading of a manuscript I had written presenting a vision of socialism based on the principles of Christianity, and why the Christian critique of capitalism differs from Marxist, anarchist and liberal-progressive critiques. You can listen to the voice-over audio right here in the Substack app, or on any podcast platform (Spotify, Apple, etc).

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of you!

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Below is the written version of the manuscript:

The Christian Case For Socialism

It is well known that there is a long historical legacy of Christian socialist movements across the world, and many great Christian figures have embraced democratic socialist politics. You will often find leftists today who will point out the clear socialist components of Christianity in order to show how American Christian Nationalism is hypocritical in its uncritical acceptance of free market Reaganomics. Yet using the socialistic components of Christianity to point out the hypocrisies of the Christian right in America is an argument often made by people who themselves aren’t Christians or by Christians who are more leftists than they are Christians, and as a result, the argument rings a little hollow.

While I’m certainly not the first person to lay out a Christian critique of capitalism, it is rare to see one fully lay out the Christian case for socialism, or rather, the Christian case against capitalism. I emphasize Christian Case because while Christian socialism might overlap with modern liberal secular forms of socialism like modern democratic socialism, Marxism, or even libertarian socialism, the Christian case for socialism is fundamentally different.

This difference lies not just in the end goal, as Christian socialists, like secular socialists, are inevitably going to disagree on how exactly socialism is to be manifested. Rather, what truly sets Christian socialists apart from the liberal atheist forms of socialism is the reasons for being against capitalism.

And these reasons are very important for understanding why a Christian Case for socialism would be based on a fundamentally different rationale. Understanding these differences in first principles is essential to grasping why a Christian Case for socialism would constitute its own distinct political philosophy. A case for socialism based on fundamentally Christian principles.

The Promethean Fantasy of a Limitless World

While secular leftist movements locate their alternative value in liberation, whether it be individual and collective liberation, the Christian case for socialism would make freedom secondary to a higher principle of justice. From this Christian perspective, one would not believe in freedom just for freedom’s sake. And this is not just a minor philosophical quibble. It’s emblematic of a completely different political vision based in a different understanding of human nature, which has a very different justification for a post-capitalist society than what you would find in many leftist arguments today.

The inability to choose a different first principle than freedom to guide one’s political project is why socialists often find themselves competing with capitalism on capitalism’s terms.

Individual freedom was the centerpiece of many of the movements in the New Left. Yet this insistence on freedom as the highest good goes back to classical Marxism as well. Marxists and anarchists, despite their considerable disagreements about means and strategy, converge on freedom as the highest good. Yet what exactly the purpose of freedom was, was always a bit vague. Marxists and anarchists believe in freedom as the end goal, but often for different reasons.

Marxists emphasized collective liberation as the necessary prerequisite for individual freedom, and ultimately strove for a communist future in which humans would be emancipated from virtually all constraints. A society of free association, in which there were no constraints except the ones agreed upon by the individuals themselves. The communist society advocated by Marxists was essentially a world without limits, a world without borders, a world without classes, a world without states.

It was a society that would allow for, as Karl Marx put it, individuals to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner,” all without being defined by any single identity or role. Freedom from necessity, freedom from alienation, and freedom to choose one’s destiny. This is the telos of the atheist communist project. It is, above all, predicated on the notion that the obstacles to man are not man himself, but these structures around man.

Christians, however, tend to reject ultra-progressive and libertine leftist beliefs in a world without limits. The goal is not merely to deconstruct all of the orders that suppress human freedom, but to construct a moral order, not a utopian order. Not because it opposes freedom, but because it recognizes that unlimited freedom constitutes a philosophical and practical impossibility.

Human Nature and The Meaning of Satan

As Christianity accepts humanity as inherently flawed and not something that can never be perfected, Christians, like many other traditionalist groups, believe in human nature and that human nature has a tragic and self-destructive component. That doesn’t mean humans don’t change over time or that they don't evolve as different conditions and structures emerge. Still, there are certain universal tendencies in human nature across cultures and across time. The point of a Christian moral and economic order would be to contain the worst aspects of humanity rather than merely liberate humanity from all its limits.

Marxist theory rests on a fundamentally historicist anthropology that treats human nature as infinitely malleable, shaped entirely by historical material conditions and changing social structures. If humans currently exhibit greed, selfishness, and cruelty, this is because capitalism has made it so, not because capitalism has liberated the ability for humans to act on these preexisting impulses, but because capitalism forces humans to adapt in such a way to take on these characteristics that they might not otherwise have.

Both positions would be considered naively utopian from a Christian perspective. Humans are intrinsically flawed, not just because of capitalism or society or government. Humans created society. Humans rule the government. The market is not an alien imposition on humanity, but rather an aggregation of individual choices, desires, and behaviors of people who consume and produce in response to supply and demand. When the market produces destructive outcomes, this is not merely because of structural dynamics, but because those dynamics channel and amplify preexisting human tendencies and exploit them.

We possess inherent entropic tendencies toward self-destruction that no amount of material abundance or structural transformation will eliminate. The doctrine of original sin represents a sustained observation about human psychology and behavior. Across cultures and historical periods, the seven deadly sins (pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth) aren’t arbitrary prohibitions or moral platitudes, but tendencies that, when unconstrained, lead to self-destruction.

This is where the allegory of Satan becomes extremely relevant. Satan, understood not in its literal demonology but as a symbol of temptation and entropy: temptation does not present itself as obviously harmful. We are not tempted by things that feel bad or are blatantly destructive. Temptation often comes dressed as pleasure, as fulfillment, promising the satisfaction of desire. What we want in the moment frequently conflicts with what we need for genuine flourishing.

The Christian case for socialism isn’t about giving people what they want. It’s about giving people what they need. Sometimes giving people what they want is not always a good thing because our desire is fleeting. Appetites can be insatiable, and what we desire in the short term can sometimes be detrimental to us in the long term. Sometimes we need to be protected from our own desires, protected from what we want — because our greatest desires can often destroy us. The goal is not a world without limits, but one in which limits are justly ordered to promote human flourishing. A moral order over the satanic anarchy of the market.

Capitalism as the Systematization of Temptation

Markets have existed throughout human history, but capitalism is unique in that it is a system where the market dominates society and where the objective of the state is to reproduce capitalist relations. Contemporary capitalism represents a system built on the systematization and monetization of temptation.

The capitalist system profits from exploiting the gap between what humans desire in the moment and what serves their long-term well-being. The whole industry of advertising, which Christians were some of the most adamant initial opponents of, manufactures artificial desires, creates addiction to substances, gambling, pornography, social media, and the monetization of addiction more broadly becomes a profitable business model. It is neurologically tested to see if it can elicit as much dopamine as possible.

In consumer capitalism, every insecurity, every psychological vulnerability, every moment of loneliness or anxiety becomes an opportunity for somebody to make a profit. The stagnant wages of the working majority of citizens are hidden by the deceptively cheap consumer products that we consume. It is not obvious how poor most people actually are because we are able to buy so many things for cheap.

But cheap prices come at a price of another sort. The system hides our declining wealth by declining our health. Indeed, the whole food industry is rife with products that prioritize efficiency and lower production costs over the health of the people consuming them. So much of modern food contains excessive sugar, along with other chemicals intentionally designed to make us more addicted to it. It is not a coincidence that America, the society in which consumer capitalism is the most advanced, has the highest obesity rate.

The soul of man under consumer capitalism is fundamentally torn between the conflicting desires to consume as much as possible and to work as hard as possible, to enjoy and live one’s best life, while also being as productive as possible and becoming as successful as possible, because it is the market that determines human value. Those on the lower end of the hierarchy have no one to blame but themselves, and they are told that they are less valuable because they are objectively less valuable according to the market. And as the system is held together through the promise of social mobility, people are not satisfied even as they climb up the ladder, as there are constantly people to compare themselves to. And once accustomed to higher standards of living, it is much harder to go down to lower standards of living, which leads to even people with a lot of money working more just to maintain their standard of living.

Furthermore, what is problematized in all of this is the obsolescence of “the left” and “the right” as useful signifiers for navigating our current moment, as what passes for “leftism” has come to mean many different things ever since the original inception of the Left-Right distinction during the French Revolution. Since at least the 1960s (and to an extent, as far back as the onset of progressivism during the late 1800s-early 1900s), dominant tendencies on both the left and the right have functioned as ideological superstructures for the capitalist system. Both rationalize, accommodate, and accelerate different aspects of the capitalist economy and its effects. In various ways, ideological developments on both the left and the right have facilitated the transformation of consumerism and producerism in line with post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism and, more recently, the gig economy.

Left and Right as Ideological Superstructures

As the imperatives of global capitalism make it harder to have a family, create communities, maintain stable friends, stable relationships, and stable jobs, the capitalist system commodifies the profound lack and alienation that it causes by commodifying human relationships and intimate experiences. Both forms of right-wing and left-wing liberal ideology come in to rationalize this process of decay.

The right wing tells you that it is all about the individual, and that you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and that those who are more fortunate work harder, and that the problems in society are merely the outcasts of that society. Meanwhile, left-wing ideology, which might stand up for the outcasts and be a little bit more critical of those on the higher end of the hierarchy, nonetheless rationalizes this process of decay by supporting forms of socially progressive ideology that, in effect, deregulate social life in such a way that allow for its marketization, by opposing all forms of religious and traditional morality, social norms, customs, and taboos, all in the name of progressive liberation and scientific advancement.

It is why the new spirit of capitalism is profoundly liberal and feminine. It allows every sphere of the human experience to get absorbed into market logic. The rise of mental health that is immensely exacerbated by the decline of two-parent households, community, stable friendships, stable relationships, and stable jobs, along with the decline of religion that provides a form of coping and a haven in the heartless world, progressive ideology comes in to destigmatize mental health just so it can monetize it. It then presents the rise of mental health as merely the result of destigmatization and people being liberated to express themselves freely.

This is why the left-liberal side is more likely to promote therapeutic ideologies as solutions to the problems that the capitalist system causes. You are depressed because you have a completely dysfunctional family? You cannot find a stable job, cannot provide for your family, or even start a family? Just go to therapy, or take some pills, because you might have a neurological imbalance. Oh, and if you cannot afford those, then here is an app. Social media platforms did not cause this problem. Even if they exacerbated it, social media platforms emerged in response to this lack to profit from it.

The system functions by identifying every human weakness and exploiting it for profit. Capitalism treats human beings merely as human resources to be deployed for profit maximization. Workers are turned into appendages of a machine. It is often the case that even these self-made capitalists become even more roboticized, not knowing what to do with all the money that they have, except to consume more and accumulate more power. They have to adapt their humanity to the logic of the capitalist system to thrive within it. The system subordinates human dignity, family bonds, communal ties, and environmental sustainability to endless economic growth, thereby destroying the very fabric of the fatherland of all the world’s nations.

It is why it is not left versus right, but rather up versus down. On the right, you have conservatives willing to conserve nothing but the money in rich people’s bank accounts, who are not even conservative enough to conserve the very habitat of their motherland. Meanwhile, you have leftists who can hardly be distinguished from liberals, who are obsessed with liberating every aspect of social life, which ends up amounting to the capitalist system being able to profit from it more.

The Limits of Materialism

As mentioned at the start of this essay, it has historically been people on the radical left, Marxists, anarchists, and socialists of various types, who have provided a structural critique of capitalism. Yet the limitation of even this is that the critique is often conducted solely on materialist grounds, and the materialism is often vulgar, neglecting things like culture, morality, and the material reality of morality itself.

By this, I mean the function that morality has in securing social order, protecting humans from their own worst impulses. These tendencies are often overlooked by forms of emancipatory politics that place freedom as the highest good and reflexively dismiss such moral arguments as outdated superstitions associated with dead traditions and religions that progressive ideology sought to overcome.

Yet what they forget is that progressive ideology formed as a way of making capitalism more efficient. Progressive ideology, which people are fed in order to adapt to the demands of the capitalist system, inculcates dogmas that get people to assume that all kinds of traditional wisdom are merely dead relics of the past, the old age of mankind, which we are taught was unambiguously more oppressive.

G.K. Chesterton said it perfectly: “Tradition is the democracy of the dead.” Closely related is his famous warning not to tear down a fence until one understands why it was put up. This is not to say that we should or can go backward. It is to question the presumption that progress itself is inherently good. Capitalism itself is progressive, but it is leading us on a road to nowhere, a bleak post-human future.

Marxists often assumed that the capitalist superstructure would naturally change on its own after the revolution. As capitalism is abolished and socialism is gradually built, it is assumed that human nature will follow. Or if you are an anarchist, that human nature was already socialistic the whole time. Some Marxists who are a little bit more nuanced about the base and superstructure have imagined all kinds of approaches towards establishing a new “communist culture”, a socialist “new man.” Yet, they have been oblivious that the socialist culture they are looking for was right in front of them the whole time, in the very religious tradition it had disavowed.

Christianity is itself already socialist. What kind of socialism, or whether one wants to even call it socialism, is a matter of debate. But one thing is for sure: Christianity is not capitalist, in that it would not support a system in which capital and the market dominate all of human society. As C.S. Lewis articulated in works like Mere Christianity, the economic structure of a truly Christian society would have features that some might call socialistic. The theological term for elevating money and material accumulation above all other values is mammon worship. A system built on capital accumulation as its core organizing principle is built on serving mammon. It is, in the most precise theological sense, idolatry.

Libertarianism vs Limitarianism

Freedom in a liberal capitalist society does not serve any intrinsic, meaningful purpose. Liberal ideology tries to make virtue out of relativism by framing this as liberating. “Anyone is free to discover their own purpose,” they say. This is especially relevant in the gig economy stage of capitalism, where people lack stable jobs, identities, families, relationships, ideologies, and traditional structures that give them a sense of continuity, security, and purpose. Progressive ideology often tries to paint this breakdown as “progress” towards a freer, limitless world. Yet the unprecedented rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and mental illness in general suggest that such developments have brought about more decay rather than any sort of enlightenment or positive evolution for the human race.

We need to unlearn the libertarian ideology that sees any form of limits, rules, or norms as something inherently oppressive that should be opposed. Guardrails are often necessary and helpful because humans are prone to error and lapses in judgment. Limits protect the possibility of reaching your destination. Limits protect you not just from destroying yourself, but also allow for the possibility of you reaching your destination. So even if they might seem to restrict freedom in the short term, they can actually expand and improve freedom in the long term. This kind of freedom is especially needed in a capitalist gig-economy world that is bent on self-enslavement and self-exploitation.

A socialistic politics informed by Christian principles would seek to impose a moral order on the chaos induced by capitalism, but this order would not be an arbitrary order for order’s sake. The kind of order that I am interested in would be fundamentally skeptical towards arbitrary authority and the concentration of power. After all, it is constantly reiterated time and time again throughout the Bible that humans are equal under God and that no human authority is absolute. Therefore, power must always legitimate itself.

A democratic socialist vision founded on Christian principles would be democratic politically and socialistic economically. If democracy is to mean anything, it would be the distribution of political power, not merely rule in the name of the people’s interests. For plenty of false prophets and demagogues have claimed to rule in the people’s interests and concentrate power for themselves. By socialistic, I mean the distribution of economic power, which I believe is crucial to avoid an order in which economic power is all in the hands of the state, in which the bureaucrats would merely be the new ruling class.

The Christian vision is not of equal wealth, but of a society where no one is so rich or so poor as to face these spiritual dangers of either extreme. Extreme wealth corrupts. This is not a Marxist observation about ideology, but a psychological truth that everyone intuitively knows. Poverty is not just dire because people do not get access to nice things. It poses great spiritual dangers when you cannot feed your children, when eviction looms, and when medical care is unaffordable. You face temptations towards desperation. You get pushed towards crime, prostitution, and drug dealing. These things become rational responses to deprivation.

Christian socialism would seek to construct a society where people are neither so rich that they lose their humanity, nor so poor that they lose their dignity. No human life shall be reduced to the existence of an animal, and no man’s power shall be elevated to that of a God.