That’s how a writer named Gregory Paul describes — wait for it — early Christianity. Writing in the Washington Post last week in a much-shared column, he went even further, calling socialism a “Christian invention” and its early Christian incarnations “a form of terror-enforced-communism imposed by a God who thinks that Christians who fail to join the collective are worthy of death.” He also claims modern evangelicals reject their historical socialism because they’re in thrall to Ayn Rand. This is merely the strangest (and angriest) form of an argument sadly gaining increasing traction in evangelical circles, that Christianity compels redistributionist policies.
It’s an argument that demands a response. And yesterday in the Post, my ACLJ colleague Jordan Sekulow and I fired back:
There is a reason why Christians have overwhelmingly rejected socialism, and that reason is not found in the pages of Atlas Shrugged, but instead in the pages of a much older — and better — book.
God’s people should “strengthen the hand of the poor,” not create poverty. Yet socialism impoverishes. How can a Christian be socialist?
Read the whole thing, and — if you feel so moved — sally forth to defend truth in a comment board filled with ignorance.