Dr. Rob Pacienza: Exchanging the Truth for a Lie

New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, spent the last nine months defending city-owned grocery stores while the president of the United States called him out as a “Communist mayor” on the national stage. Mamdani didn’t flinch. He has said for months that he intends to govern as a democratic socialist, and since the beginning of his term, that is exactly what he has done.

Whatever you think of grocery stores run by City Hall, the bigger story is the one most commentators keep missing. Conservatives have spent the last decade arguing that socialism is bad economics. They are right. But they are answering an incomplete question. Socialism is not merely a theory about how to run an economy. It is a theory about how to save the world. And that makes it something closer to a religion than a policy platform.

More than economics

Every religion answers the same basic questions: What is wrong with the world? Who or what will save us? Where is history headed? Socialism, in its Marxist form especially, offers answers for all three.

Humanity’s deepest problem, according to Karl Marx, is material inequality. Not sin. Not a broken relationship with God. Inequality itself is the great evil, the root of every other evil, the one thing that must be abolished at any cost.

The solution — the promised salvation — comes by revolution. Class struggle is what moves history forward, Marx argued. And once the socialist revolution happens and produces a classless society, the deepest wounds of human existence are supposed to disappear with it. No church, no priesthood, no need for grace. Just political power, correctly applied.

The priesthood, in this system, is the party: the revolutionaries who understand the evil arc of capitalist history and are willing to bend it. And the promised end is a world finally free of hierarchy, private property and want.

Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft put it well: “Marx, like Moses, is the prophet who leads the new Chosen People, the proletariat, out of the slavery of capitalism into the Promised Land of communism.” Kreeft was not exaggerating for effect. He was describing the actual architecture of Marxist thought, borrowed wholesale from the biblical story it was built to replace.

This is why socialism keeps finding new converts among people who have never read a page of Das Kapital. It offers what every human heart wants: an explanation for suffering, someone to blame, and a path to a better world. It just leaves out the one thing that could actually deliver on the promise.

Scripture has a name for this pattern. Paul writes that fallen humanity “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). That is not a first-century problem. It is the oldest pattern in the world, and every generation dresses it in new clothes. Ours has dressed it in the language of equity and revolution.

A broken promise

None of this means the economic critique of socialism is wrong. It is absolutely spot on. Socialism is an economic nightmare. The nations that have tried to build Marx’s classless society have produced some of the worst poverty and the most brutal governments in modern history because the ideology cannot survive contact with reality. You cannot run an economy without honest prices, and you cannot have honest prices without a free market. Venezuela learned this the hard way. So did the Soviet Union, at a cost of tens of millions of lives.

But the deeper failure is theological, not economic. Socialism promises to save people from suffering, from inequality, from the ache of a world that does not work the way it should. It cannot deliver because no political system can. Only God can answer that ache because only God made us and knows what we actually need.

The prophet Jeremiah described his people’s idolatry this way: God’s people had “committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Every political idol is a cistern with a crack in it. It might hold water for a season. It will not hold forever.

God’s people had “committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13).

A Kingdom that endures

Christians should be the last people fooled by this. We know why the world is broken, and it is not primarily an economic story. We know what it will take to fix it, and it is not a five-year plan. We serve a King who was crucified for the sins of rich and poor alike, and who rose again offering a kingdom that no revolution could ever build and no empire could ever destroy.

Vote your conscience. Study the economics. Ask hard questions about what any candidate, socialist or otherwise, is actually proposing. But do not mistake the ache in your neighbor’s heart for a problem government can fully solve. That ache has a name, and it is not inequality. It is sin. And it has already been answered, once and for all, at the cross.

Dr. Robert J. Pacienza is the Senior Pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (Fort Lauderdale, FL) and the CEO and President of Coral Ridge Ministries.

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