Socialism and personal responsibility

Stephen Lewis once said, “I don’t know how a Christian cannot be a socialist.”

I say in reply, “I don’t know how a Christian can be a socialist.”

Socialism, in all of its many colours, shapes, and sizes (up to and including fascism) involves lessening personal responsibility and increasing state responsibility. Responsibility and accountability are directly correlated.

Christianity, even in its most antinomian shape, involves repentance and positive actions of love and caring, all personal activities implying responsibility and accountability. Widows, orphans, the sick and maimed are all objects of acts of love.

With increased state responsibility, there is a corresponding lessening in personal responsibility. Why give, the state will look after it?

Without the room for personal action and accountability there is no room for acts of charity. And paying taxes, even joyfully, is no substitute for an act of charity. Without choice and responsibility, can there be morality? I think not.

If this were not enough, socialism implies a faith in government and experts, which are elements of human agency, which can be, and often becomes, a substitute for the divine. Instead of trust in God, we have faith in our governments and our betters.

As the state grows, God dies; or as God dies, the state fills in. Either way, a statist view, seems to me, to be an anti-Christian view.

Stephen, I love you dearly, but you got it completely wrong.