What Is Christian
Socialism?
July 2, 2026
I am a Christian Socialist. It is, I guess, only in my later
years that I have come to call myself that, but now, in my senior years, I know
that that is what I am and that it is what I have always been moving toward. And,
of course, calling myself a Christian Socialist raises an unavoidable question:
Just what does the phrase Christian socialist mean? It, quite obviously,
contains two terms, Christian and socialist. To understand what I mean when I
call myself a Christian socialist, you have to understand what both of those
terms mean in general and, more importantly, what they mean to me personally. I
will attempt here to answer that important question.
First: What does the word “socialist” mean.” I’ve written
about the history of that term elsewhere on this blog, and I won’t repeat here
everything I said there.[1]
I don’t mean by “socialist” what the Russian communists meant when they called
their country the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Far from it.
Though in Marxist theory they are not the same thing, people tend to equate
socialism with Soviet-style communism. Soviet-style communism was a horror, a
crime against both humanity and divinity. Throughout its seventy-four years
long history it was a violent, brutal, oppressive, and radically unjust
political and economic system. It was worse under Stalin than it was both
before and after him, but it was never good. I lived under it for a year. I
experienced how depressive and drab it was in the 1960s and 1970s. I learned
something of what it did to its people, especially intelligent, curious people
whose spirits it attempted, with some success, to crush. Russia is still an
oppressive, unjust, and violent place, but, nonetheless, the world is better
off without the Soviet communists.
Rather, by “socialist” I mean the kind of political,
economic, and social system that has proven its value throughout western Europe
since the end of World War II, especially in the Scandinavian countries. Those
countries consider themselves to be democratically socialist. Their socialist
political parties may have Marxist roots, but they are not Marxist in any
meaningful sense today. Rather, they have created countries that have
capitalist economies, though heavily regulated ones. They have high taxes, and
they use that tax money to create social safety nets with real meaning and
value for all of their people.
Communism oppresses its people either both politically and
economically as in the Soviet Union or at least just politically as in the
People’s Republic of China. Democratic socialism isn’t about oppressing anyone
at all. It encourages free economic enterprise as long as the enterprises truly
work for the benefit of the people and not primarily for the benefit of wealthy
owners at the expense of the people the way big corporations mostly work in the
United States today. Democratic socialism, whether Christian or not, cherishes
individual rights and will always work to protect them. Democratic socialism is
democratic. It comes about when the people want it, and it can end if the
people don’t want it.
A democratic socialist society works to assure, to the
greatest extent possible, that everyone has the necessities of life regardless
of their station in life or the conditions of their life. This means, among
other things, that democratic socialist societies have universal, free health
care paid for by tax dollars, with the wealthy paying a good portion of their
incomes to the state in taxes. Democratic socialist societies do everything
they can to make sure everyone has a safe place to live. They ensure that
everyone has free or reduced cost access to education from preschool to
graduate school. They make childcare free or at least affordable so that
everyone who has to work or who wants to work can work and have a family at the
same time. They make sure no one has to go hungry.
While they are doing all that and more, democratic socialist
societies respect individual choice. They make all of these things available to
everyone. They don’t compel anyone to participate in them except by complying
with the tax law. In a democratic socialist society, paying taxes is mandatory.
Very little else is.
The world’s democratic socialist nations today do maintain
military establishments. I suppose they consider doing so to be a necessity in
this world of conflict and violence. They do not, however, spend anywhere near
the percentage of their gross national product on the military that the United
States does. Keeping the size of their military reasonable rather than grossly
bloated the way the American military is helps to make the social programs that
are the foundation of the society possible.
So that, in a nutshell, is democratic socialism. But I call
myself a Christian Socialist not just a democratic socialist. So we have to
consider: What does Christianity have to do with it? Isn’t Christianity
radically inconsistent with socialism? What, if anything, in Christianity would
lead one to being a socialist? I am convinced that the only way a Christian can
be anything other than a socialist is by misunderstanding Christianity in a
foundational way. I will now attempt to explain that conviction.
What is it to be Christian? Most Christians, indeed most
people, would probably answer that question: To be Christian is to take Jesus
Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. Now, it’s not that I deny that Jesus
is my Lord and Savior, though I almost certainly mean something different by “Savior”
what most Christians today mean by it. Except (maybe) in the Gospel of John,
which is in no way historically accurate (though it is in some ways spiritually
accurate), Jesus never called us to “believe” in him. Rather, he called us to “follow”
him. See, for example, Matthew 16:24. There is within Christianity a minority
tradition that has always understood that that’s what he calls us to do. That tradition
stresses the “imitatio Christi,” the “imitation of Christ,” as being what
the Christian faith is all about. That is indeed what Christianity is all about
when it is being as true to Jesus the Christ as it is possible for it to be. To
be Christian is to follow Christ.
OK, but what does that mean? What actually is following
Christ and what is not? It is not hard to understand what it is to follow
Christ if we look at the three gospels in which he tells us what it means to do
so. Those are Mark and especially Matthew and Luke. In John, Jesus never really
tells how to live following him, so I’ll set John aside here. It seems
undeniably clear to me that to follow Christ the way we learn of him in those
three gospels is to live lives of compassion for all of God’s creation. Beyond
that, it is especially to support, care for, lift up, and include those the
world suppresses, oppresses, excludes, or just ignores. Jesus said: “Blessed
are you who are poor.” Luke 6:20. He said “Blessed are the meek.” Matthew 5:5.
He said “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Matthew 5:9. He said: “Love your
enemies.” Matthew 5:44. He made a hated, excluded, despised Samaritan the hero
of one of his most famous parables. Luke 10:25-37. He had the prodigal son’s
father welcome him home with open arms before the father knew anything about
what the son had done or why he was coming home. Luke 15:11-32. If you want to
imitate Christ, take these sayings of his to heart and structure your life
according to them as much as you are able to do. Jesus turned the values of his
world upside down. Christ calls us Christians to do the same thing,
nonviolently, in our world.
What, if anything, does living in imitatio Christi
mean with regard to socialism? Most American Christians would react emotionally
and in an uninformed way to that question by shouting: Socialism is utterly
incompatible with Christianity! No Christian can possibly be a socialist! I’m
sure they would react that way because their Christian nationalist preachers
have told them that socialism is evil, indeed, that it is atheistic and works
in direct opposition to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The problem, however, is
that those preachers are just flat wrong about both Christianity and socialism.
Here’s why they are.
First, one need not be a Christian to be a socialist, but
socialism is not necessarily atheistic. Marxist ideology is radically atheistic
in the way many late-Enlightenment thinkers were, but modern democratic
socialism has left Marxism, including its atheism, in the dustbin of history
where it so deservedly belongs. The democratic socialist governments of western
Europe, for the most part, practice separation of church and state though the
German government supports both the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant
churches with tax money. Many American socialists, like your humble author, are
Christians; and many Christians, like your humble author, are socialists.
How is that possible? Well, it’s possible because the values
of socialism and of true Christianity are essentially identical. Socialism is
all about social, political, legal, and economic justice for all of a nation’s
people. True Christianity is about the same thing. Indeed, socialist values are
essentially Christian values without necessarily including the spiritual parts
of that faith. Indeed, Marx’s vision of the ideal world, which he called
communism, comes directly from the New Testament. The first Christians were
essentially communists without being atheists. See Acts 4:32-35. Socialism
doesn’t advocate that kind of radical social structure, but it does advocate
the sharing of national wealth, mostly through taxes, for the benefit of all of
the people.
Christian socialism is quite strongly anti-capitalist. It’s
not that in the sense of requiring state ownership of the means of production.
But capitalism is grounded in people being selfish. It is grounded in an ethic
that says everyone gets not what they need but what they have earned. Unless it
is far more tightly regulated than it is in the United States, it leads to
gross income inequality. It leads to a very small class of ultra-wealthy
individuals while an enormous percentage of the population struggles just to
make a decent living. Its law says a corporation’s purpose, and indeed its only
purpose, is to increase the financial return to the corporation’s investors. That
standard leads to environmental degradation, unsafe workplaces, wages below the
poverty level, the unavailability of health insurance, unaffordable higher
education, and politicians purchased by the wealthy so that the government will
regulate the economy even less that it already does. Surely true Christians can
support none of those things, and Christian socialists do not.
A great many Americans will shout that socialism, democratic
or Christian or otherwise, is un-American. About that they are essentially
wrong. President Franklin Roosevelt was a democratic socialist in effect if not
in name. For example, he introduced Social Security, a governmental system intended
to reduce poverty among the elderly (and that reduces poverty for your humble
author today). That is a socialist system. This country created the Medicare and
Medicaid system in 1965. That system is intended to, and does, make affordable
healthcare available to retired persons and others unable to provide for themselves,
You humble author’s badly disabled twin brother would probably be dead without
Medicaid, and your humble author would have no access to medical care without
Medicare, which might well mean that he would also be dead. This too is a
socialist system.
Democratic socialists, Christian or otherwise, advocate
expanding the socialist systems our country already has in place while adding
others to meet unmet societal needs. We advocate, for example, Medicare for
all, something that would give us a universal, tax-based healthcare system at
least a little bit like the ones every other industrialized country in the
world has.[2]
We advocate a radical restructuring of the country’s tax system so that the
wealthy actually pay a meaningful share of their income in taxes so that the
government has the money it needs to address problems like homelessness, mental
health, the opioid crisis, the environmental crisis, the unaffordability of
health insurance and higher education, and other social ills in a meaningful
way. The higher taxes we advocate, by the way, are not unprecedented in American
history. The marginal income tax rates in the 1950s, under Republican president
Dwight Eisenhower, were as high as 91%, while today they do not exceed 37%.[3]
Democratic socialists, whether Christian or not, advocate
tackling our culture’s underlying faults in meaningful ways. At the top of the
list for those faults sits racism. Our country was founded in slavery and
racism, and racism permeates our culture to this day. Look, for example, at the
disparity in incarceration rates between white and Black convicts or at the
efforts in Florida and elsewhere to stop the public schools from teaching the
truth about American slavery. I have no magic cure for American racism. Racism
is rooted very, very deep in this land. I do know that ignoring it or denying
that it is still a problem will never rid us of it. Socialists do not deny it
or ignore it the way American fascists do today.
So, I am a Christian socialist. I
believe that being Christian means to live as much as one can in the imitation
of Christ. I believe that living in the imitation of Christ unavoidably leads
one to the values of democratic socialism. As democratic socialists, Christian
socialists will be allied with many other socialists who are also Christians,
who are followers of other faith traditions, or who are not adherents of any religious
faith. That’s not a problem. What matters is common values not common spiritual
beliefs, as important as those beliefs must be to the individual believer of
any faith.
Democratic socialism, Christian
or otherwise, is the only way out of the myriad social, political, and economic
problems our country faces today. It is the way for us to overcome the MAGA
fascism that rules our federal government and several state governments today. The
United States will never become truly democratic socialist as long as money
controls our political system, for the wealthy will never let it happen. That’s
why we need a mass, nationwide democratic socialist movement. We need a
nonviolent democratic socialist revolution. Christians can and, indeed must, be
part of that movement if they are to be true to the one they (we) call Lord and
Savior. May it be so.
[1]
See my post On Democratic Socialism, posted on this blog on June 1, 2026.
[2] It
is your humble author’s opinion that our country’s failure to have such a
system of universal health insurance is one of its most appalling disgraces
today.
[3] “Marginal
tax rate” doesn’t mean a person’s entire income is taxed at that rate. It means
that income over curtained specified amount is taxed at that rate. Because the
marginal rate applies to only some of a person’s income, and then only if that
income is high enough, a tax payer’s actual rate will be lower than the
marginal rate.
