Religious liberty derives from property rights.

• Author: Arn, Larry P.
• Position: Religion

MANY CHRISTIANS, while they cherish religious liberty, seem to believe that property rights, and the commerce that arises from the establishment of property rights, are somehow un-Christian. At the same time, a lot of free marketers seem to think that all we need are property rights and the rest will take care of itself. Neither of these views is correct, and I will explain why with reference to Pres. James Madison and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Pope Francis is one who sometimes seems to be an example of the Christian who reads the New Testament as pointing in the direction of socialism. Commerce appears, in some of his writings and speeches, to be a grubby business purely based on self-interest--maybe even on exploitation, the opposite of charity. This reading of the New Testament--which I think flawed, by the way--is why Karl Marx, although he famously was an atheist and militantly opposed to Christianity, praised Christianity in one respect: that it declaimed against private property in the name of an otherworldly denial of self.

In writing my book on Churchill, I spent a number of months reading about the founding of the Labour Party in Britain--Churchill detested the Labour Party from the beginning, so I was interested in its origin--and I found that Christians cooperated in its founding, and thus in the founding of British socialism.

There were two strains of Christianity involved, one of them sounder than the other, I think. The first was a strain that took its inspiration from Jesus' insistence that we take care of the poor. The second strain--one that is much less sound in exegetical terms--held that, since Jesus came down to Earth, our task as Christians is to build a heaven on Earth. Lots of Quakers in particular seem to have thought that. Although many socialists were atheists, many Christians took up with them for either or both of these reasons.

Today in the U.S., we can see as well that at the heart of the leftward movement in our government is a claim against property. The claim goes this way: the divisions among us are as deep as they are because of economic inequality and, if we do not address that inequality today, it will worsen tomorrow. Many well-meaning Christians think this way.

On the other side, recognizing that property is at the heart of the political argument we are having these days, are those who say that all that is needed is to protect property rights. Get money right and get property right, these people think, and leave it at that--leave morality and religion out of the political equation. However, that way of thinking, too, is foolish.

The most formidable enemies of property rights are formidable precisely because they know better than to separate the issue of property rights from the issue of other freedoms, including freedom of conscience and religious liberty. They know better because they see that human beings are an odd integrity of body and soul. Marx is clearsighted about this. He understands that, if you like the way the human being is organized--if you like this integrity--then you are going to have to protect it all and, if you do not like it, you are going to have to uproot it all. Thus, he makes clear in the Communist Manifesto that overthrowing the age-old institution of property will involve "the most radical rupture with traditional ideas." If private property is going to be abolished, everything will have to be abolished. Marriage and religion are two prominent examples in Marx's writings.

Several decades later, in the Fabian Essays in Socialism that led to the founding of the British Labour Party, George Bernard Shaw and others tried to downplay that side of Marxism. They claimed that they only intended to destroy property rights--that socialism is not about getting rid of the family or religion, but they were not entirely convincing. Shaw, for instance, wrote that "a married woman is a female slave chained to a male one; and a girl is a prisoner in the house and...