James and the Wicked Rich

James is a devastating letter aimed at encouraging believers to live in accordance with the teachings of Jesus. Out of his various ethical exhortations, one group in particular emerges as his preeminent target: the rich. Modern authoritarian socialists are enamored of James’s vicious invectives against the rich, supposing him to be a proto-Marxist railing against the excesses of a market economy and private property. There is just one little problem with this argument: it is entirely wrong. As I demonstrate at length in my book Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation, drawing ironically on the excellent (if categorically confused) work of several New Testament scholars working within the Marxist tradition, a vanishingly small number of ancients in the Roman Empire acquired wealth through voluntary, consensual production in exchange. Most of the rich, including in Judea and even rural Galilee, were born into wealth and used the levers of political power to extract wealth from the great masses of society at their expense. There were few mutually beneficial transactions, only appropriation of state power to maintain and aggrandize the wealth of a tiny minority of politically favored elites. Every good libertarian knows exactly how to label this kind of economic system: it is, pure and simple, state socialism.

Although something of a minority view in New Testament scholarship, I believe there are enough internal indications to suggest that James was indeed written by the brother of Jesus, pillar of the church in Jerusalem, before the great persecution against the church by the wealthy political establishment following the extrajudicial lynching of Stephen recorded in Acts 7. This means that the “rich” James has in mind are the ruling elites of Judea and Galilee who oppress the poor through coercive, involuntary exploitation. James, therefore, is certainly not advocating for centralized wealth redistribution (which is, ironically, exactly how the ruling elites maintained their wealth), nor is he condemning voluntary market transactions. His eyes are set on precisely the kind of people modern authoritarian socialist Christians want to put in charge of the entire economy. I present below a significantly truncated selection of my section on James, demonstrating exegetically that anti-market interpretations of James are woefully inaccurate.

Miseries Will Befall the Rich

James 1:2-8 opens the letter with an encouragement to endure “various trials” through the wisdom and strength provided by God. Then in 1:9-11, James contrasts the glory of “the brother of humble circumstances” with the “rich man…[who will] glory in his humiliation…[who] in the midst of his pursuits will fade away.” The Greek word behind “rich man” is plousios, a term with which we became familiar in our study of the Synoptic tradition. In Judea, as in much of the Roman Mediterranean, very few people accumulated wealth through voluntary market transactions; designating a person as plousios could easily connote immoral or unjust behavior, and the context of trials and persecution in James suggests this is the intended meaning. The eschatological reversal of riches is a major feature in the Jesus tradition, particularly accentuated in Luke. From the song of Mary in Luke 1:46-55 to the Lukan beatitudes in Luke 6:20-26, the plousios might have their fill now but will find themselves humiliated in the great eschatological conflagration while the poor will be vindicated by the righteous God of Israel. In James 1:27, those who truly honor God “visit orphans and widows in their distress“; the longstanding Jewish tradition of care for the vulnerable, exhibited in passages such as Jeremiah 49:11, must characterize the life of a believer in contrast with the self-serving plousios.

James 2:1-7 is a command to show no partiality between the rich and the poor. When believers assemble, they are not to give preferential treatment to the well-dressed man while disregarding those who are poorly dressed, because “God chose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him,” echoing the beatitudes in Matthew 5:3-12 and Luke 6:20-26 in which the poor will inherit the kingdom of God, as well as Matthew 6:28-30 in which Jesus instructs his followers not to worry about clothing. Showing favoritism based on wealth and status has “dishonored the poor man,” and even worse, enabled the very oppression which James condemns (“Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court?“) according to 2:6. This is another passage in which the authoritarian socialist reading falls flat. The wealthy who are being rightly criticized by James are oppressive and weaponize the legal system against the poor. James is not issuing a condemnation of peaceful, voluntary market transactions in which the production and consumption of goods and services are decentralized. Nowhere can this passage be used in opposition to capitalism; quite the opposite, in fact. Those who have acquired wealth through oppression and the manipulation of courts are the problem. The reliance upon (oftentimes legal) coercion under threats of violence to regulate, control, or appropriate the productive fruits of other people is a feature of socialism, and no quantity of egalitarian rhetoric can mask the fact that James is in reality denouncing economic arrangements based on violence. If we are to adopt an economic principle from this passage for the modern world, it must include a repudiation of the economically coercive system of authoritarian socialism.

This theme reaches its climax in James 5:1-6: “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments have become moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver have rusted; and their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh like fire. It is in the last days that you have stored up your treasure! Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and put to death the righteous man; he does not resist you.” The rich will be miserable because all of their wealth will be destroyed. The language James employs is reminiscent of Matthew 6:19-20, where Jesus instructs his audience not to “store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy.” The rich will receive eschatological judgment because they have withheld the rightful earnings from those who labored in their fields. Since abject poverty was pervasive in first-century Judea, day laborers who were not given their contractually obligated wages were in danger of starvation. This explains why James can describe the behavior of those rich landowners as “condemn[ing] and put[ting] to death the righteous man.“

Far from being a critique of free markets, James is railing against the wealthy people who act in an unjust manner to increase their own wealth. As we learned in our study of the gospels, rich landowners were enabled by the political and legal institutions of their day. The socialists of the modern world, determined to grant a massive amount of economic power to a small handful of bureaucrats and politicians, are philosophically aligned with the rich oppressors James rightly condemns for their corruption and exploitation. Only through the most imprecise and inaccurate categorical definitions of “capitalism” and “socialism” could one possibly read this passage as an affirmation of the latter and a critique of the former. The Austrian definition of each term, predicated upon the objective difference between economic transactions based on consent and those based on coercion, allows us to draw the correct modern application: believers should condemn economic arrangements in which wealthy people are given arbitrary power over others. In other words, we must reject socialism root and branch.

In response to the oppressive rich and their impending eschatological judgment, James 5:7-11 encourages believers to remain faithful to God, enduring suffering until God acts to vindicate his people. Stulac explains the function of James 5:1-11: “[there are] two purposes (encouragement and warning) James would have for Christians who are reading how he would address their rich, non-Christian oppressors. His encouragement is for them to leave judgment to God while they persevere in righteousness. His warning is for them to beware of God’s judgment and flee from materialistic sin themselves.” This maps perfectly onto the general New Testament teaching on wealth and poverty. Wealth is morally neutral but must be acquired justly and used to build God’s kingdom by serving others. It entails a massive responsibility which leads many into idolatry and ruin. Believers must commit to radical charity, voluntarily sharing their resources with those who truly need them while fleeing from the destructive love of money. God will judge the rich oppressors, but there can be no violent revolution against them before the final day without compromising the unique, cruciform identity of the church. So-called “Christian” socialists, in promoting an economic system which perpetuates violence and inequality, are just as much in danger of forging economic idols as those who are rich, and James empowers us to rebuke both parties. The solution, as always, is decentralized economic networks of voluntary production and exchange between peaceful people. Leveraging the monopolistic power of a secular state to remake the economy based on the subjective, short-sighted, and barbaric theory of socialism is antithetical to Christian values and will always result in greater wealth inequality and structural poverty. May the modern church one day learn this lesson.