Important to note that Christianity also spread amongst the poor/common/persecuted folk first. It wasn't really spread initially by any power structure or crusade.
And Christ straight up kicking out business from the church (as in he flipped their tables over, literally):
Also, it was spread BY the poor. Early Christians happily donated away all their wealth, thinking the Christ will come and bring an end to the Roman empire any day now.
There is a theory that this was a critical factor in how fast the early Christianity spread across the Roman Empire - that these newly-bankrupted believers had no choice but to travel and try recruit new members to the Church, in a Ponzi-scheme-like fashion (except nobody was cashing out).
It’s interesting to use crusade in that fashion. The origins of the Christian crusades were to help free lands with still largely Christian populations from Muslim conquerors. It wasn’t to spread Christianity.
Now the crusade’s definitely went awry and became an excuse for Venetians and others to take land and power. Especially by the fourth crusade and sacking of Constantinople, etc.
The Jewish Temple wasn't a church. Animals were sold there for people who couldn't bring animals with them to sacrifice on that Jewish holiday when they made pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There was plenty of disagreements between Jewish sects. We get the early Christianized perspective on some of the disagreements the Jesus movement had with the Pharisees and Sadducees, who also didn't agree with one another. Paul wasn't poor. He was an educated Pharisee who could write Greek, like Philo or Josephus. Some of the communities he wrote to like the one in Rome probably weren't poor either.
But the Jesus movement led by James the Just and Peter after his death probably was, if the Ebionites were their 2nd-4th century descendants.
It's still left wing coded in many non Christian areas. For example, India. It came as a surprise for my parents that Christianity is right wing in America, but all American political parties are part of the global left in general.
Yes it is. Saying you shouldn't educate the lower classes or not educate girls would be met with huge resistance from most Republicans, whereas that is a common enough sentiment in many areas. People who fought for that are considered left wing.
America is a fundamentally leftist nation. The social issues American political parties fight over are not applicable in most parts of the world. In most parts of the world left wing political movements (communists) hold the same social lines as the GOP.
From a property perspective, America never had to deal with land redistribution because America never had a feudal system that required it. This property rights make sense in America in a way they didnt in feudal systems.
For example the communist party of Kerala enacted major land reform to redistribute land, but now that the land is redistributed, ownership carries on as normal. America had the opportunity to skip the first step.
This is an interesting perspective, thank you for sharing. We often hear that (compared with Europe, I suppose) America's two parties are relatively far right. Interesting to see the opposite opinion.
Correct. A big part of "Christianity", especially as seen in the USA, could better be characterized as anti-christ, because it flies directly opposite to the teachings of Jesus as told in the New Testament. This very much applies to the USA, and is possibly owed to the fact that most christian sects and cults took the boat from Europe to the USA.
If I focus on the USA, the problem is that many religious organizations are under influence or control of the movement that wants to clear the rule of law, separation of powers, etc. There are video recordings of top-brass religious leaders that talk openly about the institution of white christian nationalist policies. It all culminated in Project 2025 and won't stop there, some of the agenda is even worse than that. Also, currently there is a concerted push targeted at American Christians that tries to undo the idea of "compassion", which indeed is very much what fascism requires.
It is quite a testament that the pope had no time for Vance today, but instead chose to visit the prisoners.
No clue why you are getting down voted. If you have even cursory knowledge of Christ's teachings, you'd know it's very easy to identify where the current status quo has veered from him anywhere in the world.
Was only calvinism a branch that said "Personal wealth is good, people deserve to strive for richness on earth for themselves as god will promote it for mostly his loved ones"?
Prosperity gospel is one mind-bending example of how you can turn one theme into the opposite. The bad thing is that this has been exported to the African continent too.
I vaguely remember that in Asian countries this is big too.
Robert Heinlein really nailed it in the 50s with the Fosterite Church of the New Revelation in Stranger in a Strange Land. Totally prescient vision of what Christianity + America was going to produce.
They can all converts to Islam. Not much changes since the 7th century. It allows wealth, polygamy and slavery. Now the Jacobin wont dare do some kind of exegesis... it would be deemed blasphemy.
“By Allah, it is not poverty that I fear for you, rather what I fear for you is that worldly riches may be given to you as it was given to those who came before you, and you will compete to attain (more of) it with one another as those before competed with one another, and you will be destroyed as they were destroyed.” (Bukhari & Muslim)
Feel free to seek out what the sharia has to say about usury (strictly forbidden) and what Islam considers a good way to use wealth (hint: giving to the poor, building orphanages, madrasa and mosques, doing pilgrimages). You will be hard pressed to find a monotheist religion which really likes the rich to be honest.
I’m not going to give you about an explanation about all the way Islam has changed and become multiples since the 7th century because that would require a book length essay rather than a paragraph but you get my point.
As a Bible-believing Christian, I am appalled by the ahistoricity and the lack of respect for the plain interpretation of the text of the Bible, as displayed by the author of this article. It's mind-boggling that one would choose to cherry-pick what amounts to a few chapters of a far larger body of teachings, and re-interpret Christianity as an economic movement.
Consider: the core teaching of Christianity is that a certain person, Jesus of Nazareth, was the promised Messiah (the Anointed One, King of Jews, a role written about at length by the Old Testament), that He was the Son of God, that He had both a fully divine and a fully human nature, that He died a painful death on the cross as a price for forgiveness of all human sins and direct access to God for every person, and that He literally rose again from the dead three days after that. That's the core of the faith, that's the most important part that makes Christianity, Christianity. Those are the things you need to agree you believe in so that you can legitimately call yourself a Christian. The rest is secondary.
Now tell me, how does this have anything to do with economics or the forgiveness of literal debts? The Bible is very direct and quotes Jesus as saying: "My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm." (John 18:36). This verse outright contradicts any interpretation that Christianity is about political power or concerns on this side of the divide between mortality and the eternity (parenthetically, this is the reason why to me what American Evangelism developed into is so disturbing). It should be something of concern, but not the concern. Christianity is not communism. Christianity is not benevolent philanthropy. Christianity is none of those things that one tries to pin it down, if one adopts a frame free of God as the core consideration. Christianity is about trying to establish a connection with God, while it's not too late to do that. Trying to reduce it to a cause revolving around money in some way is absurd in the magnitude of misunderstanding on display here.
I know that many here will be sceptics or non-believers, so many will skip this comment. But if you want to critique Christianity, at least do so in the spirit of not misrepresenting fundamental claims and tenets of the faith you disagree with. I trust that intellectual honesty is the name of the game on HN, and that's all I ask for.
Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman argues that there are many versions of Christianity, and there always have been since its inception. What you are representing as the "core teaching of Christianity" is the version that was primarily articulated by Paul, and that became the orthodox version due to its eventual adoption as the religion of the Roman Empire. But even at the time of Paul there were rival interpretations. There were the Gnostics, the group led by James in Jerusalem, and even those who insisted one had to adopt Judaism to follow Jesus. And significantly, Jesus himself probably wouldn't have recognized the interpretation of Paul.
And looking beyond early Christianity, one can pick any period of Christianity's history and find numerous rival doctrines.
Well, it was until it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christians with the power of the state, at a time when religious tolerance wasn’t invented yet, were something else. Things got pretty complicated due to the bitter political disputes between the bishops of different cities.
As someone who's pretty significantly left (at least in the US political spectrum) I've become pretty fed up with Jacobin.
The author of this article is a religious historian, which explains a lot of the "circuitous" language (his word).
But to me, the whole article is just "blah blah blah", pointless exposition with no real bearing on current reality.
Whatever may, or may not, have been the case in the Levant 2000 years ago (and no one really knows); this is 2025, and according to many US "christians" the most famous quote of the little bebe jesus is "f_ck the poor, let 'em rot in the gutter". Ironically, failing to acknowledge that many of them fit into that very category.
If the author would like to differ with the ideals of christianity regarding wealth, maybe he should write to the vatican? You know, that autonomous country inside of Italy, with it's own central bank, and storehouses of looted nazi treasure. The current pope aside, they haven't exactly been a savior of the poor historically.
I'm sure many earnest, caring, giving christians will be downvoting my post. But a reality of our world, outside of philosophical sophistry. is that religion has been the source of more murder and mayhem than any other single cause.
It may have been originally a practice of the poor, but the only reason it's still a phenomenon in the modern world is because the wealthy and powerful have promoted and used it as a tool to rile the poor into dismembering each other, to see which rich guy gets the goods.
Like it politico-economical incarnation, the communism (because its ideology was an ad-hoc smear campaign against Christianity, a tree that decides to saw of its roots).
And Christ straight up kicking out business from the church (as in he flipped their tables over, literally):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple
There is a theory that this was a critical factor in how fast the early Christianity spread across the Roman Empire - that these newly-bankrupted believers had no choice but to travel and try recruit new members to the Church, in a Ponzi-scheme-like fashion (except nobody was cashing out).
Now the crusade’s definitely went awry and became an excuse for Venetians and others to take land and power. Especially by the fourth crusade and sacking of Constantinople, etc.
But the Jesus movement led by James the Just and Peter after his death probably was, if the Ebionites were their 2nd-4th century descendants.
America is a fundamentally leftist nation. The social issues American political parties fight over are not applicable in most parts of the world. In most parts of the world left wing political movements (communists) hold the same social lines as the GOP.
From a property perspective, America never had to deal with land redistribution because America never had a feudal system that required it. This property rights make sense in America in a way they didnt in feudal systems.
For example the communist party of Kerala enacted major land reform to redistribute land, but now that the land is redistributed, ownership carries on as normal. America had the opportunity to skip the first step.
Americans have no idea how good they have it
If I focus on the USA, the problem is that many religious organizations are under influence or control of the movement that wants to clear the rule of law, separation of powers, etc. There are video recordings of top-brass religious leaders that talk openly about the institution of white christian nationalist policies. It all culminated in Project 2025 and won't stop there, some of the agenda is even worse than that. Also, currently there is a concerted push targeted at American Christians that tries to undo the idea of "compassion", which indeed is very much what fascism requires.
It is quite a testament that the pope had no time for Vance today, but instead chose to visit the prisoners.
---
EDIT: If you want to see how they get rid of Jesus, look at this chilling video: https://xcancel.com/YourAnonCentral/status/19101797534302990...
Edit:
No clue why you are getting down voted. If you have even cursory knowledge of Christ's teachings, you'd know it's very easy to identify where the current status quo has veered from him anywhere in the world.
I vaguely remember that in Asian countries this is big too.
https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2013/01/15/a_triu...
Feel free to seek out what the sharia has to say about usury (strictly forbidden) and what Islam considers a good way to use wealth (hint: giving to the poor, building orphanages, madrasa and mosques, doing pilgrimages). You will be hard pressed to find a monotheist religion which really likes the rich to be honest.
I’m not going to give you about an explanation about all the way Islam has changed and become multiples since the 7th century because that would require a book length essay rather than a paragraph but you get my point.
Consider: the core teaching of Christianity is that a certain person, Jesus of Nazareth, was the promised Messiah (the Anointed One, King of Jews, a role written about at length by the Old Testament), that He was the Son of God, that He had both a fully divine and a fully human nature, that He died a painful death on the cross as a price for forgiveness of all human sins and direct access to God for every person, and that He literally rose again from the dead three days after that. That's the core of the faith, that's the most important part that makes Christianity, Christianity. Those are the things you need to agree you believe in so that you can legitimately call yourself a Christian. The rest is secondary.
Now tell me, how does this have anything to do with economics or the forgiveness of literal debts? The Bible is very direct and quotes Jesus as saying: "My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm." (John 18:36). This verse outright contradicts any interpretation that Christianity is about political power or concerns on this side of the divide between mortality and the eternity (parenthetically, this is the reason why to me what American Evangelism developed into is so disturbing). It should be something of concern, but not the concern. Christianity is not communism. Christianity is not benevolent philanthropy. Christianity is none of those things that one tries to pin it down, if one adopts a frame free of God as the core consideration. Christianity is about trying to establish a connection with God, while it's not too late to do that. Trying to reduce it to a cause revolving around money in some way is absurd in the magnitude of misunderstanding on display here.
I know that many here will be sceptics or non-believers, so many will skip this comment. But if you want to critique Christianity, at least do so in the spirit of not misrepresenting fundamental claims and tenets of the faith you disagree with. I trust that intellectual honesty is the name of the game on HN, and that's all I ask for.
And looking beyond early Christianity, one can pick any period of Christianity's history and find numerous rival doctrines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
The author of this article is a religious historian, which explains a lot of the "circuitous" language (his word).
But to me, the whole article is just "blah blah blah", pointless exposition with no real bearing on current reality.
Whatever may, or may not, have been the case in the Levant 2000 years ago (and no one really knows); this is 2025, and according to many US "christians" the most famous quote of the little bebe jesus is "f_ck the poor, let 'em rot in the gutter". Ironically, failing to acknowledge that many of them fit into that very category.
If the author would like to differ with the ideals of christianity regarding wealth, maybe he should write to the vatican? You know, that autonomous country inside of Italy, with it's own central bank, and storehouses of looted nazi treasure. The current pope aside, they haven't exactly been a savior of the poor historically.
I'm sure many earnest, caring, giving christians will be downvoting my post. But a reality of our world, outside of philosophical sophistry. is that religion has been the source of more murder and mayhem than any other single cause.
It may have been originally a practice of the poor, but the only reason it's still a phenomenon in the modern world is because the wealthy and powerful have promoted and used it as a tool to rile the poor into dismembering each other, to see which rich guy gets the goods.
Sorry, I'm an evangelical atheist for life...