Strip Jesus of the miracles and the cloud-hopping and what remains is inconveniently simple – feed the hungry, heal the sick, kick the money-changers out, and stop pretending that wealth is a passport to virtue. That’s socialism in a nutshell.
Across the pond, the Bible-thumpers bellow about “family values” while cheering tax cuts that gut healthcare and education. They’ve reduced the Sermon on the Mount to a sort of prosperity-gospel raffle – “blessed are the billionaires, for they shall inherit the Senate.” They thump the Bible so hard the words have fallen out.
Here in Britain, we don’t really do Bible-thumping. We do flag-thumping. Our home-grown patriots prefer to wrap themselves in polyester bunting, shouting “Christian country” with the same zeal Americans shout “freedom.” But ask them to name a single teaching of Jesus beyond a garbled memory of the Lord’s Prayer and you’ll get blank stares. They want Christianity as a brand – not as a set of awkward instructions about loving your neighbour and welcoming the stranger.
Both tribes, American and British, pull the same trick. They want the metaphysics without the ethics. They’ll cling to the ritual, the symbols, the noise – anything but the substance. Because the substance is radical. The carpenter from Nazareth was far closer to a shop steward than a hedge-fund manager. Strip away the magic and you’re left with redistribution, compassion, and solidarity – everything they’ve spent decades trying to crush.
And that’s the funny thing. They think socialism is foreign, dangerous, un-British, un-American. Yet it’s right there in the red-letter text they pretend to honour. If they ever stopped thumping their Bibles and their flags long enough to read the small print, they’d see they’ve been shouting down Jesus all along.
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