Comment on Why do most religious conservatives support capitalist ideology?
DonnieDarkmode@lemm.ee 1 year ago
An important thing to keep in mind is that the practice of religion changes over time alongside culture, and is itself a part of culture. The Christianity of people living in places like Judea and Anatolia in the 1st century CE differs from the Christianity of, say, the Teutonic (not up on my post-Roman ethnicities, so might not be using the right term) tribes of Western Europe in the 6th century. This again differs from the Christianity of indigenous peoples in the Americas post-Columbus. In all these cases, these people had pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs which Christianity syncretised with instead of wholly replacing.
The Bible has been used to endorse slavery as well as oppose it, to condone violence and warfare as well as serve as the basis for radical non-violence. It is not “univocal”, because the various people who wrote and compiled it had their own beliefs and perspectives.
The various sects of Christianity differ in their values, beliefs, and even canon literature, and that’s before you get into Christianity as cultural practice rather than strict religion. Like all religions, Christianity is wonderfully human, encompassing our wide range of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and that even includes people who don’t read the damn book! So yes, you’re going to find commonly accepted “Christian” practices which seem to clearly contradict the doctrine, but the doctrine contradicts itself, and serves people just as much as people should ostensibly serve it. The conception of Christianity as a unified religion, with 1 canon and 1 accepted interpretation, has never been accurate.
FWIW Early Christians did practice communal living and sharing of property (the New Testament tells us as much), and you can still see these things in practice today, albeit rarely. I also wouldn’t use modern terms like socialism to describe that sort of thing, because the economic order and class structures which Socialism and Communism are a response to literally did not exist at the time.