Eugene Debs was perhaps the most influential socialist in the United States. He ran for president on a socialist ticket multiple times, receiving as much as 6% of the popular vote, and gained a wide following in the early-20th-Century United States. A student of Marx, his views on labor, imprisonment, and war made him a target of the Wilson administration, but gained him fame among those who had tired of laboring for little to no fruit.
But beyond that, he exemplified — perhaps even foreshadowed — the modern socialistic argument that it is not God who is supreme: it is man. Man’s freedom to self is the highest priority, but man’s freedom to property must be regulated. Arguing vehemently for the rights of the worker, he invoked the language of Christianity frequently, and came to the conclusion that Christ himself was a Socialist.
As I feel it is always wise to know the background of modern ideologies, I offer this excerpt from the writings of Eugene Debs (Footnotes in the excerpt are my annotations):
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Jesus, The Supreme Leader
It matters little whether Jesus was born at Nazareth or Bethlehem. The accounts conflict,[1] but the point is of no consequence.
It is of consequence, however, that He was born in a stable and cradled in a manger. This fact of itself, about which there is no question, certifies conclusively the proletarian character of Jesus Christ. Had his parents been other than poor working people — money-changers, usurers, merchants, lawyers, scribes, priests, or other parasites — He would not have been delivered from His mother’s womb on a bed of straw in a stable among asses and other animals.[2]
Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as every other babe ever born in the world. He was of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of mankind.[3] The scriptural account of his “immaculate conception” is a beautiful myth,[4] but scarcely more of a miracle than the conception of all other babes.
Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an intellectual, moral and spiritual human being.[5]
The chronicles of his time and of later days are filled with contradictory and absurd stories about him and he has been disfigured and distorted by cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their blind bigotry and savage superstition, but there is no impenetrable myth surrounding the personality of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary or allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and others have shown us, a flesh and blood Man in the fullness of his matchless powers and the completeness of his transcendent consecration.[6]
To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and pervasive as a historic character as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln or Karl Marx.[7] He has persisted in spite of two thousand years of theological emasculation to destroy his revolutionary personality, and is today the greatest moral force in the world.
The vain attempt persisted in through twenty centuries of ruling class interpolation, interpretation and falsification to make Jesus appear the divinely commissioned conservator of the peace and soother of the oppressed, instead of the master proletarian revolutionist and sower of the social whirlwind — the vain attempt to prostitute the name and teachings and example of the martyred Christ to the power of Mammon, the very power which had murdered him in cold blood, vindicates his transcendent genius and proclaims the immortality of his work.
Nothing is known of Jesus Christ as a lad except that at twelve his parents took him to Jerusalem, where he confounded the learned doctors by the questions he asked them. We have no knowledge as to what these questions were, but taking his lowly birth, his poverty and suffering into account, in contrast with the riches of Jerusalem which now dazzled his vision, and in the light of his subsequent career we are not left to conjecture as to the nature of the interrogation to which the inquisitive lad subjected the smug doctors in the temple.
There are but meagre accounts of the doings of Jesus until at a trifle over thirty he entered upon his public “ministry” and began the campaign of agitation and revolt he had been planning and dreaming through all the years of his yearning and burning adolescence. He was of the working class and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood to the very hour of his death. He hated and denounced the rich and cruel exploiter as passionately as he loved and sympathized with his poor and suffering victims.
“I speak not of you all; I know whom I have chosen,” was his class-conscious announcement to his disciples, all of whom were of the proletariat, not an exploiter or desirable citizen among them.[8] No, not one! It was a working class movement he was organizing and a working class revolution he was preparing the way for.
“A new commandment I give unto you: That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” This was the pith and core of all his pleading, all his preaching, and all his teaching — love one another, be brethren, make common cause, stand together, ye who labor to enrich the parasites and are yourselves in chains, and ye shall be free![9]
These words were addressed by Jesus not to the money-changers,[10] the scribes and Pharisees,[11] the rich and respectable,[12] but to the ragged undesirables of his own enslaved and suffering class. This appeal was to their class spirit, their calss loyalty and their class solidarity.
Centuries later Karl Marx embodies the appeal in his famous manifesto and today it blazes forth in letters of fire as the watchword of the world-wide revolution: “Workers of all countries unite: you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain.”[13]
During the brief span of three years, embracing the whole period of his active life, from the time he began to stir up people until “the scarlet robe and crown of thorns were put on him and he was crucified between two thieves,” Jesus devoted all his time and all his matchless ability and energies to the suffering poor, and it would have been passing strange if they had not “heard him gladly.”[14]
He himself had no fixed abode and like the wretched, motley throng to whom he preached and poured out his great and loving heart, he was a poor wanderer on the face of the earth and “had not where to lay his head.”
Pure communism was the economic and social gospel preached by Jesus Christ,[15] and every act and utterance which may properly be ascribed to him conclusively affirms it. Private property was to his elevated mind and exalted soul a sacrilege and a horror; an insult to God and a crime against man.[16]
The economic basis of his doctrine of brotherhood and love is clearly demonstrated in the fact that under his leadership and teaching all his disciples “sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need,“[17] and that they “had all things in common.”[18]
“And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.”
This was the beginning of the mighty movement Jesus had launched for the overthrow of the empire of the Caesars[19] and the emancipation of the crushed and miserable masses from the bestial misrule of the Roman tyrants.
It was above all a working class movement and was conceived and brought forth for no other purpose that to destroy class rule and set up the common people as the sole and rightful inheritors of the earth.
“Happy are the lowly for they shall inherit the earth.”[20]
Three short years of agitation by the incomparable Jesus was sufficient to stamp the proletarian movement he had inaugurates as the most formidable and portentous revolution in the annals of time. The ill-fated author could not long survive his stupendous mischief. The aim and inevitable outcome of this madman’s teaching and agitation was too clearly manifest to longer admit of doubt.
The sodden lords of misrule trembled in their stolen finery, and then the word went forth that they must “get” the vagabond who had stirred up the people against them. The prototypes of Peabody, McPartland, Harry Orchard, et. al., were all ready for their base and treacherous performance and their thirty pieces of blood-stained silver. The priest of the Mammon worshipers gave it out that the Nazarene was spreading a false religion ad that his pernicious teachings would corrupt the people, destroy the church, uproot the old faith, disrupt the family, break up the home, and overthrow society.[21]
The lineal descendants of Caiphas and Judas and the Pharisees and money-changers of old are still parroting the same miserable ends, the only difference being that the brood of pious perverts now practice their degeneracy in the name of the Christ they betrayed and sold into crucifixion twenty centuries ago.[22]
Jesus, after the most farcical trial and the most shocking travesty upon justice, was spiked to the cross at the gates of Jerusalem and his followers subjected to persecution, torture, exile and death. The movement he had inaugurated, fired by his unconquerable revolutionary spirit, persisted, however, through fire and slaughter, for three centuries and until the master class, realizing the futility of their efforts to stamp it out, basely betrayed it by pretending conversion to its teachings and reverence for its murdered founder, and from that time forth Christianity became the religion, so-called, of the pagan ruling class and the dead Christ was metamorphosed from the master revolutionist who was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his class, into the pious abstraction, the harmless theological divinity who died that John Pierpont Morgan could be “washed in the blood of the lamb” and countless generations of betrayed and deluded slaves kept blinded by superstition and content in their poverty and degradation.[23]
Jesus was the grandest and loftiest of human souls – sun-crowned and God-inspired; a full-statured man, red-blooded and lion-hearted, yet sweet and gentle as the noble mother who had given him birth.
He had the majesty and poise of a god, the prophetic vision of a seer, the great, loving heart of a woman, and the unaffected innocence and simplicity of a child.
This was and is the martyred Christ of the working class, the inspired evangel of the downtrodden masses, the world’s supreme revolutionary leader, whose love for the poor and the children of the poor hallowed all the days of his consecrated life, lighted up and made forever holy the dark tragedy of his death, and gave to the ages his divine inspiration and his deathless name.[24]
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So we see that the argument “Christ was a great teacher and moralist, but not the Son of God,” is not entirely new. Actually it’s quite ancient. But it is an imperative argument for socialism to work. For if Christ is Divine, not only is He a humanly example, but he is a super-human authority, divine beyond questioning, and our sins of coveting another man’s property are subject to His judgment.
This Maundy Thursday, let us remember that Christ offered himself as a propitiation for our sins – He was not a lawyer who rationalized them. We are all guilty of coveting another’s property, and we are all equally guilty of not assisting the poor when we should. But let us not pretend our society and government – legislated, enforced, judged, and elected by imperfect people who no longer use God and Christ as authority – must compel another to part with their property: not to give it to the poor, but to give it to the state who may distribute it as they wish as supreme arbiters of equality.
[1] This argument still persists today, despite the consistency of Matthew and Luke. Insisting the phrase “Jesus of Nazareth” means he was born there is no more valid than insisting that John McCain be considered a Panamanian native.
[2] Joseph as a carpenter must have been quite good, especially to have enough money to abandon his town with his betrothed to accommodate the census in Bethlehem. But a successful carpenter — even if he engages in usury, litigation, legislation, fraud, or other “parasitic” activities — is still a proletarian, and to the socialist (Marxist), it is the occupation that determines the worth of a man, not his technical and ethical capacity for that occupation.
[3] Here is, in a sense, the summary of secular humanism: We exist, and we determine we exist, therefore we are a miraculous divinity — never questioning the origin of that determination.
[4] Here Debs demonstrates a further ignorance of the Bible and the Gospel. The Immaculate Conception is a doctrine concerning Mary, and her fullness of grace from her own conception — not that of Christ’s being birthed by a Virgin.
[5] Yet without a divinity — especially one who has fulfilled the law, as Christ did — morality, intellectuality, and spirituality are all relative and subjective concepts.
[6] Besides Debs’s own interpretation of Christ being used to serve his own “knavish ends,” i.e., advance his particular ideology, he also advances another knavish interpretation by Bouck White, who thought it clever to rewrite the Apostles’ Creed to read: “I believe in God, the Master most mighty, stirrer-up of Heaven and earth. And in Jesus the Carpenter of Nazareth, who was born of proletarian Mary, toiled at the work bench, descended into labor’s hell, suffered under Roman tyranny at the hands of Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. The Power not ourselves which makes for freedom, he rose again from the dead to be lord of the democratic advance, sworn foe of stagnancy, maker of folk upheavals. I believe in work, the self-respecting toiler, the holiness of beauty, freeborn producers, the communion of comrades, the resurrection of workers, and the industrial commonwealth, the cooperative kingdom eternal.”
[7] Why would Abraham Lincoln be included with the likes of John Brown and Karl Marx? Brown was a felon (don’t forget Kansas!), and Marx was an elitist. Yes, Abraham Lincoln — despite his insistence on preserving racial inequalities — was seen as a hero because of his lowly birth and his perceived willingness to interrupt existing social orders without regard to consequence, a necessary condition for the victory of Socialism.
[8] Apparently, Mr. Debs had forgotten about Matthew, the despised publican-turned-disciple, not to mention Christ’s rich supporters such as Zacchaeus, Lazarus, Nicodemus, Jairus, the Roman Centurion in Matthew 8, etc. The passage “I know whom I have chosen,” is from the Last Supper scene on Maundy Thursday in John 13. If his followers were proletariat, Christ advises them immediately prior to this statement, “a servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent them,” and refutes Debs’s secular Jesusism a moment later by saying, “Now I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I AM he,” the he being added by the KJV (and later) translators by context, but the I AM, referring to his divinity as YHWH. See Exodus 3:14, John 8:24, John 18:6, 8.
[9] Apparently Christ did not consider the institution of the priesthood parasitic, even by Debs’s standards. Why would Christ praise the widow’s donation of two mites to the temple in Luke 21, “she of her penury hat cast in all the living that she had” to the temple, the priesthood, and to God.
[10] Matthew and Zacchaeus?
[11] Nicodemus?
[12] Jairus? Granted, Nicodemus and Jairus were not technically present the moment Christ spoke this commandment, but if the principle applies generally, it would apply to all his followers.
[13] This statement is entirely antithetical to the teachings of Christ, which urge his followers to eschew personal gain and suffer personal loss for a transcendent — not material — purpose. In short, Marx’s exhortation is as selfish as those given by the bourgeoisies.
[14] Compare the disciples’ reaction to the woman who anointed Christ’s feet with a precious oil in Matthew 26. “To what purpose is this waste?” they asked, “This ointment might have been sold for much and given to the poor.” To which Christ responded, “Ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.”
[15] Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25, Luke 19)?
[16] Christ also reaffirmed rights in private property, saying “a laborer deserves his wages.,” i.e., a laborer has traded his self-propriety in service for a material propriety in wealth — each equally his own. Thence came the philosophy of Locke.
[17] [Voluntarily], which is not what communism — nor even socialism — proscribes.
[18] This sort of communism was nothing new even in Christ’s day, but for its prolonged success, it absolutely needed an authority who was elevated above the masses to determine what is fair and equal. In Christ, there is a divine authority, to whom every human is made low, and is equally inferior to His glory, and indeed may use his authority to determine what is fair and equal. However, in secular communism, the authority is necessarily human — and a paradox is created in that all things may not be had in common as he who determines the distribution of commonality is by definition uncommon, unequal, and unfair. When this authority is human, ultimately there are no absolutes, as one human cannot simultaneously claim authority and equality at the same time.
[19] “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”?
[20] This is a perversion of the beatitudes in Matthew 5: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” The difference between “Happy” and “Blessed” is one of an agency. Being “blessed” requires one to do the blessing; being “happy” makes humanity independent from a divine agent
[21] This is an obvious attempt at showing equipollence between historical Christianity and contemporary socialism. These were all arguments against Socialism in the 1910s. But while Christianity did not disrupt the family, break up the home, nor overthrow Jewish society or the church (the pagan Romans did), what has the advent of socialism brought in those regards?
[22] Accusations of “Christ Killer” are a long-standing ultimate insult to a group of people. But while accusing the Jewish race of killing Christ is considered anti-Semitic and bigoted, accusing the bourgeois race of killing Christ is acceptable. Perhaps the vilification of “money changers” and “financiers” is itself rooted in and began with the anti-Semitic stereotype of greedy Jews who bought cheap and sold dear.
[23] The “three centuries” refers to the early church up until the conversion of Constantine. But during these three years there were countless church fathers who advocated for property rights, including St. Peter (“While [your land] remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?”), St. Paul, (“As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life.”), Aristides (“Wherefore Christians do not commit adultery nor fornication, nor bear false witness, nor embezzle what is held in pledge, nor covet what is not theirs”), St. Clement of Alexandria (“Riches, then, which benefit also our neighbours, are not to be thrown away. For they are possessions, inasmuch as they are possessed, and goods, inasmuch as they are useful and provided by God for the use of men; and they lie to our hand, and are put under our power, as material and instruments which are for good use to those who know the instrument,”) and so on.
[24] Notice Debs never mentions the resurrection, as this would require a nod to divinity, not humanity.
