Salon.com has published an article heralding a new socialist movement in America led by Bernie Sanders and supported by the media. The Salon reporters write: “The new US socialist movement is without a single “line” or monolithic political position. That’s a strength of the movement, since none of us has all the answers. Still, many people in the movement, ourselves included, feel strongly about certain approaches to strategy. One approach we feel strongly about is what we call “the democratic road to socialism,” or the idea that we need to make good use of the democratic structures and processes available to us (and to improve and expand them) in order to advance our cause. Notice the words “we” and “us.”
The Democratic Party is housing communists. The news media is starting to come out of the closet and proclaim their communist sympathies—even though discerning people have seen through them for a long time. Themes such as guaranteed minimum salaries and mandatory healthcare are just their pry-bars to undo the free market system, and with it, freedom. As Salon writes: “the capitalist class holds the entire system hostage with the threat of devastating economic retaliation if things don’t go their way, the system does have some basic democratic elements that its citizens largely affirm and occasionally participate in.” This is selling a horrible bill of goods because everywhere in the world where socialism/communism exists, it fails. It pulls people down, rather than aspires exceptionalism.
With guaranteed government jobs and mandatory healthcare the government would have control over the financial and physical lives of every individual in the nation. This is where the guarantees of free speech and freedom of religion come into play. Jesus said in Luke 4:18,19, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” He commissioned us to make disciples and to carry on his mission. The fundamental mission of government is far different than that of church.
From a Christian worldview, it is Christ’s people, not a centralized government, that must minister to the poor, and provide healing, restoration, comfort and vigilance over Liberty. The earliest account of American history provided by Mayflower leader William Bradford indicates that the ability to worship freely was the central theme of the Pilgrims. And in that, he writes, “We are knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves straightly tied to all care of each other’s good.” And they proved this when they were dying sometimes two or three per day in their care for one another’s health.
When the Pilgrims were starving while trying to grow food communally, Bradford gave them their own land to till, which turned the colony around. He says, “The failure of this experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times–that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God….community property was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit and comfort.” Beware of communists in political party clothing lest we repeat this disastrous example.
