Part 1: Why Are Many Christians Randian/Miserian Influenced Social Darwinists Instead of the Socialists The Bible Prefers?
"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness."
Paul in 1 Timothy
These days many conservative Christians, mostly Protestant but also a number of Catholics, would have us all believe that the Creator is not only dead set against any wealth redistributing socialist collective, but that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated, union busting, minimal taxes especially for wealthy investors, plutocrat boosting capitalism that buts the individual above all else as the best if not ideal earthly scheme for his human creations. And many of these Christolibertarians are either direct or indirect followers of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, who were the most hard-line anti-Christian atheist/s you can get. Meanwhile many Christians who support the capitalist policies associated with social Darwinism strenuously denounce Darwin's evolutionary science because it supposedly leads to, well, social Darwinism! Meanwhile atheists, secularists and evolutionist are denounced as inventing the egalitarian evils of anti-socially Darwinist socialism and communism.
Liberals and progressives are also doing something strange. They are failing to take full advantage of The Great Theocon Libertarian Contradiction by loudly exposing the marvelous contradictions of the religious and economic right. And the mainstream press is missing the boat as it fails to cover a top factor of the ongoing cultural, political and economic wars raging in the US.
I published a short essay on this amazing situation at Washington Post/On Faith (click here). They then carried two counter views. One by Christocapitalist and Discovery Institute creationist Jay Richards who does not believe in parts of modern science like biological evolution, and who authored Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. The other was penned by David French and Jordan Sekulow out of loony tunes Pat Robertson's hard right American Center for Law and Justice. Cannot say I was impressed by the credentials of these critics. This is a more extensive discussion of this big but under considered issue, parts of my OF essay are repeated to a greater or lesser extent.
(Before proceeding further note that theoconservatives who are libertarians are the latter mainly in the economic sense, most theocons being social conservatives who object to the cultural libertarianism promoted by all out libertarians as described at click here)
The notion that there is a major socialist component to the Christian message is by no means the "wild" idea that fringe ConservoChristians French and Sekulow imagine it to be. The tradition of socialistic Christianity includes Francis (Pledge of Allegiance) Bellamy, the pro-union leftist Martin Luther King, and anti-poverty Desmond Tutu. The Popes including the latest have a long history of issuing encyclicals denouncing the extremes of capitalism and socialism in favor of a progressive mix that favors social justice at the expense of wild west capitalism. So where are these mainstream followers of Jesus coming from?
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