insurrectionarycompassion:

“Jesus was an anarchist/socialist/communist” obviously isn’t accurate in the sense that the political and social context in which Jesus lived is not equatable with the conditions that would later produce communist ideology. He wasn’t a socialist because there was no such thing at the time. He did express beliefs that could be called “proto-socialist” in some vague way and in that sense we shouldn’t ignore the long history of Christian heresies which took a very socialistic stance towards sex, wealth, property and labor based on a similar interpretation of Jesus.

In the modern day figures like Martin Luther King and Oscar Romero expressed similar ideologies but explicitly directed towards capitalism and the imperialist war machine. Both were assasinated as a result of their social gospel which in both cases ended up inspiring communist movements to become more active and militant.

Class conflict exists everywhere and the Church as a site of wealth and power has always had to deal with militant radicals who took the Good Word too seriously and had to be suppressed. This doesn’t make the history of Christianity good, as much as complicate our analysis of Christianity and its place within class society.