Meme wrongly suggests Jesus was a Socialist
There’s been a meme going around social media that claims Jesus was a socialist.
The meme originated on Tumblr and reads as follows:
“Jesus was a Jew…. He taught socialism and sharing. He loved sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors (thieves of the day), divorcees and murderers. Some of the people he respected and loves most were women. He was for racial equality. He was not an apple pie, white, blond, capitalist, meninist, anti-immigration, shaming, anti-Semitic, gay-bashing or fan of basically anything Trump.”
Though it gets a few things right, there are many the meme gets wrong. For example, Jesus wasn’t a socialist, because socialism means something very specific.
Socialism implies that a government is created to spread a collective wealth and ensure that the means to production are used to benefit the working class. Jesus didn’t believe this. Jesus believed you didn’t need wealth. He believed people should give away all of the wealth they didn’t need to their neighbors because they needed it more.
Also, people didn’t need any government to facilitate this charity. That being said, Jesus was also not a capitalist. The creators of this meme have projected current political issues onto a historical religious figure, exactly what they accuse their opponents of doing.
To address another point, the meme suggests in poor grammar that most of the people Jesus loved, and continues to love are women.
There’s no way of determining anything of the kind. There isn’t any historical text or passage of the Bible that suggests Jesus loved mostly women.
One of the main tenants of the New Testament is that Jesus loves everyone, and half of everyone is men. So, to then later say Jesus wasn’t a so called “meninist” is an example of a failure to understand the issue complexly.
Jesus may not have been a “meninist,” but if he wasn’t, he also wasn’t a feminist. Jesus believed in equality — In that sense he was an egalitarian.
The meme does get a few things right, however. Jesus was ethnically a Jew and grew up in a poor region learning about the Jewish religion. He was fluent in Aramaic, which would’ve been his first language and at least spoke Hebrew.
It’s clear Jesus was for racial equality — he hated the division between Jews and Romans, a division predicated mostly on race.
The other claims of the meme are much more complicated than its creator seems to understand. Furthermore, the meme is a textbook example of calling out racial divisions while putting down a very specific race.
Jesus wasn’t a socialist or a capitalist and didn’t belong to any current political moment. To say so represents a failure to understand issues complexly.
