One interesting development that has occurred is that we have seen many articles being written about the supposed incompatibility of socialism with Christian values. We are told that socialism is antithetical to Christian values on the familiar old right-wing canards that it “encourages envy”, “endorses stealing” or “wants to destroy marriage and the family”. Phillip Booth, writing for The Telegraph, went so far as to argue that “the market runs through the Bible” and that the seventh and tenth of the Ten Commandments amount to the honouring of private property, an assertion that requires one to assume that anti-theft laws are necessarily the product of capitalism and have not been in the law books of various societies prior to the Enclosure Acts. I am also very hard pressed to find any verse in the Bible that gives a ringing endorsement of private ownership of the means of production for a profit. In fact, I am familiar enough with the Bible that I can quote many verses against it, see for reference Matt. 6:24; 19:21-24, Acts 2:44–45; 4:32 and 1 Tim. 6:9–10, just to name a few.

This particular genre of failed anti-socialist argument has, predictably, made its way to YouTube, and it comes to us from a right-wing Catholic YouTuber named Brian Holdsworth, who bills himself as a “creative professional and struggling thinker”. Make of that what you will. Anyway, Holdsworth has had a slew of hot takes in his YouTube career. For instance, in a recent video in which he decries the decline of story-telling, he argued without a shred of irony that humans did not have compassion or mercy before the advent of Christianity. Like any committed Catholic, he goes out of his way to defend the historical conduct of the Catholic church. In a video in which he tries to dismiss the Galileo affair he argues that the Catholic church has never been anti-science (against an indisputable historical record in which the church has sought to suppress scientific findings that contradict church doctrine), and in another particularly unhinged video, he tries to convince us that The Inquisition isn’t something to be bothered about, even claiming that it “existed to protect people from unjust persecution by ignorant and uninformed authorities”.

The focus of this article, however, is a fairly short video in which he attempts to attack Christian socialism. The video, entitled Counterfeit Catholicism, is essentially an attempt to argue that socialism and Catholicism are entirely incompatible. Given the lack of a scriptural argument for free market capitalism, rebutting him should not be difficult, and nor will it be difficult to argue in defence of Christian socialism and Christian compatibility with Marxism.

Holdsworth starts the video by attacking a supposed trend of “relativism”, which he defines as the idea that truths are created and defined by the individual (which isn’t terribly far from the actual definition of relativism: the belief that there is no objective truth, let alone objective knowledge or morality). Citing Pope Benedict, he then further goes on to describe a “dictatorship of relativism” (a subject of another of Holdsworth’s videos), so named because it “enslaves us to our emotions and desires”, and takes the opportunity to remind his viewers that “Catholicism isn’t what we say it because we merely happen to be Catholic”. This is a rather strange line of attack. What does relativism have to do with socialism or economics, or their relation to religious doctrine? Furthermore, who are the revisionists who are deviating from Catholicism and attempting to sully it with alien ideas? He doesn’t seem to immediately give an answer to this question. Instead he describes this as “the essential sin of Adam and Eve”, who he says were convinced to eat the fruit of knowledge because they “wanted to be like God”.

For all his talk of relativism, he seems to have inserted his own ideas into the Book of Genesis (Chapter 3 of which describes the fall of Adam and Eve). In the Bible it is written that Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent, and by the fact that it was “more crafty than any of the wild animals” (Gen. 3:1) did it tempt Adam and Eve. Furthermore, if we accept that the Bible is essentially allegorical as Origen did, then one has to consider that the Garden of Eden story is not an allegory of man losing paradise because he wanted to be a god, but rather it is an allegory of man developing awareness of himself and his separateness from nature, and in so doing departing from the harmony of animal existence (as represented by Eden). It represents man as a species attaining sentience and arriving at a point in their development from which there is no return.

Around two and a half minutes in he finally attempts to attack socialism, but curiously he makes no attempt to defend private property. His way of attacking socialism is to defer to Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, in which he states that:

Socialism, if it remains truly socialism, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society is utterly foreign to Christian truth.

The pontiff goes on to say that religious and Christian socialism are “contradictory” terms, and that as such one cannot be a good Catholic and a good socialist. Holdsworth justifies his citation of Pius XI by pointing out that forty years before the Quadragesimo Anno was published in 1931, Pope Leo XIII also rejected socialism in his Rerum Novarum, a document that similarly affirmed private ownership of the means of production while also advocating for the right of workers to form unions on the basis that “some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class”.

For anyone who isn’t as servile and unskeptical as Brian Holdsworth, a few questions arise. Exactly how is socialism foreign to Christian truth? How is Christian socialism a contradictory term? Since Holdsworth clearly has no intention of addressing these questions, it falls to me to provide an answer for them.

Firstly, the question of whether socialism is alien to Christianity is very easy to refute. If you actually read the Bible, not only does it not endorse private ownership of the means of production, it in fact does the opposite. Acts in particular describes a society in which “all the believers were together and had everything in common.” (Acts 2:44). Later in Acts 4:32 it is reiterated that “All the believers were on in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had”. Furthermore, neither Pius XI nor Leo XIII put forward any Bible verses in support of private property, and I’ve checked the rest of this video and I can say with confidence that Holdsworth doesn’t either.

Secondly we must address the question of whether Christianity and socialism are incompatible. Those who say they aren’t assert that socialism, especially Marxist socialism, cannot be compatible with Christianity on the grounds that Marxism is incompatible with religion. The standard refrain is that according to Marx “religion is the opiate of the people”, and that Lenin echoed this. What they will ignore is that Karl Marx’s opiate of the people line in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is preceded immediately by him writing “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”. By this he meant that religion offers the oppressed masses some kind of hope and meaning to their lives beyond profit making and profit keeping, and in the absence of any revolutionary program this allows organised religion (which in many ways perverts spirituality for the ends of power and control, rather like what the Catholic church has done) to have a hold over ordinary people’s lives. They will also ignore that Lenin in The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion stated that a priest may be allowed to join the Social-Democratic Party so long as the contradictions between the party programme and their own religious convictions remained a private matter, and as long as they did not propagate religious views. For sure, we Marxists remain opposed to the idea of organised religion, but monasteries and registered spiritual associations that hold no power and are not tax-exempt would hardly be problematic.

Moreover, the compatibility of a given religion with Marxism depends on whether that religious is also endorses materialist ontology. Since a lot of people tend to use the colloquial definitions of materialism and idealism, allow me first to clear up their meaning. Materialism is the philosophical outlook which holds that the physical world is born from matter, and it exists independently of humans and the human mind. Idealism holds the opposite, that the physical world is formed by ideas, and that ideas, thoughts, spirits or the mind take primacy over nature. One key difference between a materialist religion and an idealist religion would be whether or not it presupposes the existence of an entity whose existence predates all matter. So where does Christianity fit in? Unfortunately most mainstream forms of Christianity are idealist, but that does not mean that no materialist form of Christianity can exist. In fact, I would argue that a philosophically materialist form of Christianity can be found in Christian atheism, where God does not exist in the literal sense, but can be taken as a metaphorical understanding of the world or the absolute (the idea of theothanatology has been expounded on the left by Erich Fromm and Slavoj Zizek). In summary, a Christian atheist draws their beliefs and practices from the New Testament (particularly the Four Gospels) while rejecting claims of the supernatural. There is even a verse in the Bible that can support the philosophical materialist world outlook. I refer you to 1 Corninthians 15:45–46:

So it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.

Because the Christian atheist rejects the supernatural, they by definition practice a materialist form of Christianity, and indeed there is an example that can be found amongst one of the American founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the Jeffersonian Bible:

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is. […] I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

Moreover, if there was any contradiction between Christianity and socialism, then we would have to find some explanation for the political thought of Tony Benn, Dorothy Day, and Eugene Debs among others. Within the left more broadly, the Christian contingent has grown in recent years, to the point that we even see social democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making the Christian case for left-wing politics. This should be impossible if we take Brian Holdsworth seriously.

Moving on apace, a full minute later and he still isn’t addressing anything to do with socialism, and is instead rambling about how Catholic socialists see the Catholic faith as incomplete, in the sense that there are some ideas about God that aren’t addressed. We can talk about divergent ideas on God any time we like, and I am more than happy to discuss my views on God in more depth than the remit of this article allows, but what does this have to do with socialism? Also if you’re worried about the idea that some Catholics consider Catholicism to be incomplete, then maybe that’s a strike against Catholicism rather than socialism, especially considering Holdsworth’s own doctrine doesn’t provide anything in scripture that allows him to argue against joint ownership of the means of production. The only thing keeping him from considering socialism is whether or not the Pope forbids it, and for a Catholic, the Pope’s word overrides all other considerations because they consider the Pope to be the literal representative of God on Earth.

And of course, the only argument Holdsworth has against socialism throughout this entire video is that it has been explicitly denounced by the Catholic Church and its Pope. If we are to take him seriously, then Christian socialism is tantamount to heresy and revisionism. The irony is course is that Catholicism represents the greatest of all deviations from the original teachings of Jesus and the original form of Christianity. Firstly, the entire message of the story of Jesus had been changed in such a dramatic way that its humanistic character had been erased. Originally Jesus was the son of man had been elevated to a God, but after the Nicene Council prevailed, it became the story of the son of God reduced to that of a man. The Marxist humanist philosopher Erich Fromm describes in detail the transformation of early Christianity into Catholicism in his essay The Dogma of Christ. Below is what I think can qualify as a summary.

In early Christianity the adoptionist doctrine prevailed, that is, the belief that the man Jesus had been elevated to a god. With the continued development of the Church, the concept of the nature of Jesus leaned more and more toward the pneumatic viewpoint: A man was not elevated to a god, but a god descended to become man. This was the basis of the new concept of Christ, until it culminated in the doctrine of Athanasius, which was adopted by the Nicene Council: Jesus, the Son of God, begotten of the Father before all time, of one nature with the Father. The Arian view that Jesus and God the Father were indeed of similar but not identical nature is rejected in favor of the logically contradictory thesis that two natures, God and his Son, are only one nature; this is the assertion of a duality that is simultaneously a unity.

Such a view evolved as Christianity developed over three centuries following the time Jesus is said to have died, as Christianity expanded across the Roman Empire and slowly found favour with the patricians, the educated and the well to do. Another thing he says changed about Christianity was that the emphasis of the old Christianity was on justice, in the sense that the rulers and the rich were responsible for the suffering of the Christian, and the deserved punishment would be meted out to them one day. What Catholicism did was turn the Christian’s reproach towards themselves. If they are suffering, then it’s their own fault because they are sinners, and only through personal hardship can one earn the forgiveness of God and his earthly representatives, and such a change could only come about from a Christianity that has been fashioned for the benefit of the ruling class.

And finally Jesus didn’t conceive of the Catholic Church as it currently exists, with a Pope that is absolutely infallible and beyond question. Yes, in Matthew 16:18–19 Jesus tells Peter that he wants him to lead the Church when he dies (and the keys in the Vatican logo are probably a reference to the passage), but that is simply Jesus naming a successor to the role of the leader of the church. The Bible doesn’t actually say anything specific about the nature of the papacy, or the powers granted to the Pope. Indeed, 1 Timothy 2:5 asserts “for there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”, and the Bible doesn’t say anything about having a bishop that holds supreme authority over all Christians. So in effect, Holdsworth is the real revisionist, because the entire enterprise of the Catholic Church is a distortion of Christianity.

He then goes on to say that “Catholicism is about the whole truth”, on the grounds that the word “Catholic” means “according to the whole”. Of course that’s simply wrong. The word “Catholic” comes from the Greek “katholikos”, which translates into English as “universal”. His only argument against it is that he believes the word supposedly can be associated with ideas alien to Catholicism. I have no idea how he came to such an asinine conclusion considering the rigidity of Catholic doctrine, but he is in absolutely no position to talk about “the whole truth” when he has seen fit to ignore parts of the Bible that undermine his arguments regarding socialism.

He then remarks that “Catholicism may have an intellectual tradition that is neglected but it is certainly not incapable of answering our questions”. Of course, there are all manner of political questions that Catholicism seems incapable of answering. For all his approving praise of the Catholic social teaching of Leo XIII, this philosophy is incapable of tracing the injustices inflicted on the working class back to their roots in capital, and it cannot because Leo XIII affirmed private property, and if all Catholic thought is to be dictated by the Pope, then the Pope has practically prohibited the faith from being able to answer the questions that many people in the modern world have. If he is so confident that we do not need Marxism to explain the political questions of our time, then how does he intend to explain that Marx was right when he described capitalism as an unstable economic system that is prone to crises, and that his predictions have proven to be so accurate that even liberals who used to dismiss Marxism, such as Francis Fukuyama, have had to admit that Marx was right?

And no, at no point in the video does he attempt to prove why Marxism is incorrect, and nor does he intend to debunk the Biblical arguments for socialism or communism. He just repeated the mantra of “Catholicism answers all the questions for us” while admitting that Catholicism doesn’t answer everything. Well if it doesn’t answer everything then surely that’s your reason for why you get Catholic socialists, Catholic liberals, conservative Catholics and so on and so forth. He has already undermined the closing part of his argument so skilfully as to imply that he wants to sabotage his own argument, although it would be more accurate to suggest that he can’t actually make a good argument against Christian socialism, because he knows that the Bible is practically against him on that front. All he can do is defer to the authority of the Pope and papal documents, because that’s all a Catholic can do.

Having failed to make any case against socialism whatsoever, he ends by stating that if you’re a Catholic, you either accept the whole thing or none of it. And that’s fine if you actually believe what the Bible says, but Holdsworth seems to ignore the parts of the Bible that actually confirm that the Christians imagined a communist society. If he actually accepted the whole thing, he would be a leftist of some sort, and not the annoying reactionary that he actually is.

And so ends Holdsworth’s diatribe on Christian socialists, in which he fails to actually demonstrate why you can’t be a Christian socialist. Now I feel that I must conclude by explaining why it is that we see such hostility to the idea of a Christian left emerge in recent years? Well, simply put it, because the left is learning to argue from Christian values. I notice that Bernie Sanders and parts of his movement have been learning to do this with some success, and this obviously has put fear into the hearts of some conservative Christians who realise the threat posed by a Christian left that, if it takes off and becomes a serious political force, would put them out of business. You see this with Brian Holdsworth too in his recent video on storytelling, he randomly inserts a clip of Bernie Sanders and talks about how “politicians have adapted the language of mercy”. That’s him taking notice of the Christian undercurrent of the Bernie movement and the strong Christian left support that it has, and I think he would be lying if he said he wasn’t remotely panicking about that.

Holdsworth and other reactionaries may scoff at the notion of a Christian left, but in the end they are powerless to argue against it, and they probably know that Jesus, if he were alive today, would not stand for the economy based on greed and on profit making that we have now. And you can be sure that the establishment will react to an ascendant Christian left with terror. When Eugene Debs’ brand of Christian-inspired Marxism, they reacted by throwing him in prison, and a big part of Debs’ success was that it was a form of socialism that could speak to its intended audience, and that included the Christians. Debs is not the only impactful Christian socialist I can point to. Hugo Chavez has also said that the Bolivarian revolution was “very Christian”, and even described Jesus as “the greatest socialist in history” on swearing the oath of office for his second term. Derision, dismissal and falsification are the only way that the right-wing Christians can face the Christian left, and that is the surest sign of the bankruptcy of the Christian right.