Imagine a man walking into the financial district of Toronto or the streets of Kingston, feeding crowds without charge, healing the sick without billing them, and telling the wealthy that their riches are a barrier to God's kingdom. Now imagine the headlines. Not "Miracle Worker Transforms Community." More likely: "Socialist Agitator Disrupts Economy" — or worse, "Communist Infiltrator Threatens Social Order." That man, of course, is Jesus of Nazareth. And the tragedy is that the loudest voices defending those headlines would likely be sitting in church the very next Sunday.
The Radical Economics of the Sermon on the Mount
Strip away two thousand years of stained glass, institutional hierarchy, and theological debate, and what you find at the core of Jesus's ministry is profoundly disruptive to the economic and political order of any era — including our own.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." "Sell what you have and give to the poor." "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." These are not gentle pastoral suggestions. They are structural critiques of wealth concentration, power hoarding, and imperial domination.
The early Christian communities described in the Book of Acts practised a form of radical resource sharing: "All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need." In today's political vocabulary, that is not charity — it is collective ownership. And collective ownership, we are told repeatedly, is the first step toward communism.
Jesus challenged both the political empire of Rome and the religious establishment of the Pharisees and Sadducees. He centred women, lepers, foreigners, sex workers, and the destitute — the very people that systems of power routinely exclude. He overturned the tables of money changers in the temple, confronting those who had turned a sacred space into a profit engine. Today, that same man would likely be dragged out of the stock exchange in handcuffs and his actions labelled "class warfare."
How Empire Learned to Wear the Cross
Here is the central paradox: the same political and economic system that would persecute a modern Jesus has spent centuries using his name to justify itself.
European colonial powers framed conquest and extraction as a Christian duty. Missionaries followed soldiers. The enslavement of Africans, the theft of Indigenous lands, and the brutal plantation economies of the Caribbean were all wrapped in the language of civilization and divine providence. Christianity was not incidental to empire — it was empire's most powerful ideological tool.
Over time, this theological architecture evolved. By the 20th century, particularly in the United States, a new doctrine had taken root: the prosperity gospel. Wealth became evidence of divine favour. Poverty became a spiritual defect — a failure of faith, not a consequence of wages, debt, structural adjustment, or colonial extraction. The prosperity gospel did not emerge from the margins; it was amplified by televangelists with private jets, megachurch pastors with multiple homes, and political allies who understood that a congregation trained to see poverty as personal failure would never organize against the system producing it.
"The prosperity gospel turned structural injustice into a personal spiritual problem — and in doing so, it handed elites the most effective shield imaginable: the poor defending their own exploitation in the name of God."
The Power of a Label: From "Heretic" to "Communist"
Every era has a word that does the work of silencing without requiring argument. In Jesus's time, it was "blasphemer" or "troublemaker." In ours, it is "communist," "socialist," or "leftist." The mechanism is identical: attach a stigmatized label, trigger a visceral reaction, and watch the conversation collapse before it even begins.
Polling in the United States consistently shows that even people who support specific progressive policies — universal healthcare, public education, social security, minimum wage increases — recoil at the word "socialism." The label carries decades of Cold War conditioning, media narratives, and religious framing that associate it not with policy but with atheism, dictatorship, and moral failure. Elites do not need to debate the merits of feeding the hungry or healing the sick. They simply need to say the word "socialist," and the conversation ends.
This dynamic is not accidental. It is engineered. Right-wing media and religious leaders have perfected the art of turning Jesus's economics into a political taboo. A low-wage worker who tithes faithfully to a megachurch pastor with a private jet, yet rages against universal healthcare as "socialist handouts," is not acting against his own interests out of ignorance alone — he has been taught, deliberately and systematically, to identify those interests with the continued dominance of the wealthy.
If Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount in front of a legislature today, the attack ads would write themselves.
The Caribbean: Where Empire Baptized Capital — and Resistance Was Born
Nowhere is the collision between the Christianity of empire and the Christianity of liberation more vivid than in the Caribbean. The same ships that brought enslaved Africans to the islands brought priests and crosses. Colonial powers presented domination as divine mission. Plantation capitalism was sanctified from the pulpit.
And yet, colonized and enslaved people did not simply accept this. They reshaped Christianity from below, blending it with African spiritual traditions — Santería in Cuba, Vodún in Haiti, Obeah across the Anglophone Caribbean — turning it into a theology of survival, resistance, and dignity. Caribbean Christianity has always contained both currents: the theology that blesses empire and the theology that resists it. That tension has never been resolved. It lives in every Sunday service across the region today.
Neo-Pentecostal and prosperity gospel movements have since spread rapidly across the Caribbean and Latin America, carrying the same message that took root in the United States: strong faith brings personal wealth; poverty reflects weak faith. A domestic worker in Port of Spain or Santo Domingo may be materially poor but spiritually invested in a theology that explains her poverty as personal failure rather than as the predictable outcome of wages held down by global capital, debt restructured by IMF conditionality, or colonial histories that stripped her island of its resources.
Cuba as Scarecrow: When Healing the Poor Becomes a Crime
If you want to understand how a label shuts down moral reasoning, look at how the word "Cuba" functions in Caribbean political discourse. For decades, it has served the same purpose as "communist" in the broader ideological toolkit: a single word that ends conversations, triggers visceral disgust, and protects the status quo from scrutiny.
The irony is profound. Whatever one thinks of the Cuban state's political system — and there are genuine, serious critiques to be made — Cuba has also spent decades doing something that looks, by any reasonable reading of the Gospels, remarkably like what Jesus actually told his followers to do.
Cuba established the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), one of the largest medical schools in the world, explicitly designed to educate students from low-income backgrounds — many from the Caribbean, Africa, and the Global South — on full scholarships, with a commitment to return and serve in underserved communities. Since the 1960s, Cuba has trained more than 80,000 international doctors, sent tens of thousands of medical personnel to disaster zones, remote villages, and impoverished regions that wealthier nations routinely ignore. When Haiti was devastated by the 2010 earthquake, Cuban medical brigades were among the first on the ground. When West Africa faced the Ebola crisis, Cuban doctors volunteered in numbers that shamed the wealthy world.
"Heal the sick. Freely you have received, freely give." — Matthew 10:8. If a country practises this literally, at scale, across decades and borders, what do we call it? Apparently, we call it forced labour.
The United States and allied actors have mounted a sustained campaign to dismantle Cuban medical missions, branding them "forced labour" and pressuring Caribbean and Latin American governments to cancel or restrict these programs. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the OAS have launched investigations. U.S. officials have imposed visa bans and threatened consequences for governments that host Cuban doctors. Some Caribbean governments have pushed back, defending the missions as vital to their strained health systems and insisting that labour standards are respected — and that cutting off Cuban doctors would directly harm their most vulnerable populations.
One can acknowledge legitimate debates about working conditions and wage structures within these missions without ignoring the obvious: these concerns are deployed selectively. There is no comparable U.S. or OAS pressure campaign against private hospital chains that exploit underpaid nurses, against multinational corporations that underpay Caribbean workers, or against the structural adjustment programs that gutted public health systems across the region in the first place. The target is not labour abuse. The target is Cuba — and by extension, the idea that a state might organize resources around human need rather than profit.
A Caribbean or African peasant trained as a doctor at ELAM, serving in a community clinic that would otherwise have no physician — that is not a talking point. That is a life changed. Call it what you want. Jesus called it ministry.
Who Is Really Out of Step with Jesus?
Let us be precise about what is happening here. Across North America and the Caribbean, a large portion of the people most harmed by concentrated wealth, structural inequality, and the privatization of essential services are also the people most likely to defend those systems — because they have been taught, through a combination of prosperity theology, Cold War propaganda, and deliberate political messaging, that any challenge to those systems is an attack on God, family, and freedom.
The rich and powerful do not need to engage the substance of Jesus's teachings about economic justice. They simply need to label anyone who raises those teachings as a communist, a socialist, a leftist — and watch their own followers do the rest. The label performs the work of silencing. The visceral reaction does the work of discrediting. And Jesus's radical, inconvenient economics disappear behind a fog of conditioned outrage.
This is not a critique of faith. It is a critique of how faith has been weaponized to protect power. The Christianity of the plantation owner and the Christianity of the enslaved person read the same text and arrived at opposite conclusions — because power always shapes interpretation.
The real question is not whether Jesus's teachings sound like socialism. The real question is why, in a world of obscene inequality, the loudest defenders of that inequality so often do it in his name.
If Jesus walked into the Caribbean today — feeding without charge, healing without billing, training the poor to serve the poor, and telling the wealthy that their riches are a barrier to the kingdom — the attack ads would already be running. The OAS would open an investigation. The cable news chyron would read: "Communist agitator disrupts regional stability."
And somewhere, in a gleaming megachurch with a private jet parked outside, a congregation would nod along and say: "Good. Someone had to stop him."
Previously on The Collective Brief:
Three Tyrants and a War: Don't Let Trump and Netanyahu's Attack on Iran Fool You
The Deportation Lie: How Trump Turned Immigrants into a Detention Economy
The Ultimate Irony: How Project 2025 Inverts Lenin's Playbook
— The Collective Brief | March 2026 | Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
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