Can a Christian Be a Liberal? What the Bible Says About Freedom and Coercion

Can a Christian be a liberal? The question sounds provocative, because the word “liberal” has accumulated so many meanings that it now means almost nothing - or everything at once. To one person it means a defender of the free market. To another, a supporter of abortion. To a third, someone who wants to tear down tradition, the family, and faith. So before we answer, we need to know exactly what we are talking about.

And we are talking about one specific thing: economic liberalism. The conviction that a person has a right to the fruits of their labor, to property, to voluntary exchange, to deciding what happens to what they own - and that the state should respect this freedom rather than replace it with coercion. On the other side stands socialism: the conviction that the community - in practice, the state - should decide how goods are distributed, and if necessary take from some to give to others.

And here arises a question that, for a Christian, is not political but theological: which side is God on? Is the Bible a book of socialism, or of freedom? Because if we take Scripture seriously, we cannot pick a system according to taste - we have to ask what actually follows from it.

My thesis is clear, and I will not hide it: a Christian not only can support economic freedom - they have serious, deep biblical reasons to do so. And the foundation of it all lies where the whole human story begins: in the free will God gave us.

First, let’s distinguish two things

Before we go further, I have to draw a line - because without it this entire text will be misunderstood.

There are two completely different “liberalisms” that English, like Polish, often bundles under one word.

The first is economic liberalism: freedom of labor, property, trade, enterprise. Freedom from having the state manage your life like a feudal estate.

The second is moral (or worldview) liberalism: the conviction that there is no objective moral truth, that everyone defines good and evil for themselves, that freedom means the absence of any limits - including God’s. It is the philosophy of “do whatever you want.”

And now pay attention, because this is the heart of it: a Christian can be an economic liberal, but cannot be a moral liberal. This is not a contradiction. They are two different matters.

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

- Galatians 5:13 (ESV)

Paul does both things at once in a single sentence. First he says: you were called to freedom. That is no small thing - Christianity is a religion of freedom, not of bondage. And immediately he adds the limit: but this freedom is not a pretext for sin.

That is precisely the model. Freedom - yes. Freedom as an excuse to do evil - no. The Christian wants to be free from the coercion of the state in economic matters, but does not at all want to be free from God in moral matters. On the contrary: they want a space of freedom precisely in order to freely choose the good.

So when, in this article, I defend “liberalism,” I mean economic freedom - not moral relativism. The first is biblical. The second I have already written about separately, explaining why it is a false virtue.

God created you free

The whole matter begins in the first chapters of Genesis - and this is the foundation on which everything else stands.

God created man free. He placed him in the garden, gave him a commandment - and left him the possibility of breaking it. This is crucial. God, who is almighty, could have created man as a puppet incapable of sin. He could have programmed us to do good automatically. And yet He did not. He gave us free will - and with it, the real possibility of saying “no” to God.

Why? Because without freedom, love does not exist. Coerced love is not love. Coerced good is not good. Programmed virtue is not virtue - it is mere mechanics. God wanted beings who would love Him by choice, not by necessity. And that meant risking that they would reject Him. (I wrote about this at greater length in the piece on free will as the greatest gift and the greatest risk).

And now the most important point: even after the fall, God did not take this freedom away from us. He could have. After the collapse in Eden He could have said: “The experiment with freedom failed; I am taking it back.” He did not. Instead, He prepared a plan of salvation - but a plan that also rests on the free choice of man.

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.

- Deuteronomy 30:19 (ESV)

“Choose.” God does not say, “I force life upon you.” He says, “I set the choice before you - choose well.” This is the whole logic of the Bible. God places man before an alternative and lets him decide, though He roots for one answer with all His heart.

And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve.

- Joshua 24:15 (ESV)

Jesus does the same. Nowhere in the Gospels do we see Him forcing anyone. He invites, calls, persuades, sometimes warns - but never reaches for a sword to herd people into the Kingdom. When the rich young man walks away, Jesus does not run after him to compel him. He lets him go.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

- Revelation 3:20 (ESV)

God knocks. He does not break the door down. He waits for man to open it from the inside - freely.

And here we reach the core. If God Himself - who has every right to do so, being the Creator - does not force man into the good, on what basis would one man force another? If God’s model is invitation, not coercion, then why should a political order a Christian considers good rest on coercion?

Freedom is not a defect of creation to be fixed by the strong hand of the state. Freedom is a gift of the Creator. And a system that systematically restricts this gift “for our own good” wages war not so much against human selfishness as against the very design of creation.

Private property is not a sin

“Fine,” someone will say, “free will, yes - but the Bible condemns property. The first Christians held everything in common.” We will return to Acts. First let us look at what Scripture assumes about property at its very foundation - in the Ten Commandments.

You shall not steal.

- Exodus 20:15 (ESV)

Pause for a moment on this commandment, because it is far deeper than it seems. You cannot steal something that has no owner. The commandment “do not steal” presupposes the existence of private property. If everything belonged to everyone, theft would be a meaningless concept. God, in forbidding theft, simultaneously confirms: there is such a thing as “yours” and “mine,” and that distinction is sacred.

And the tenth commandment goes even further:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.

- Exodus 20:17 (ESV)

“Your neighbor’s house.” “Anything that is your neighbor’s.” God lists a neighbor’s property and says: you may not even covet it. This is no longer just about taking - it is about the very desire for what belongs to another. And envy of what the neighbor has, the conviction that “it should be taken from him and fairly redistributed,” is the emotional engine driving every social revolution in history.

The Bible does not know this engine as a virtue. It knows it as sin - the breaking of the tenth commandment.

And here it is worth adding an uncomfortable thought. If coveting another’s property is a sin, then what are we to say about a state that is built on exactly that coveting? The welfare state looks constantly at what is yours - your labor, your house, your savings, your inheritance - and calculates how much of it it can take and to whom to give it. It covets the fruits of another’s work as something inherently “common,” though it is not common at all. So it does, on the scale of an entire society, what the tenth commandment forbids the individual. What in a neighbor we would call envy, when done by the apparatus is called “social justice” - but the heart of the matter remains the same. And sin does not cease to be sin because it is committed by a collective armed with power.

Let us go further. There is a scene in the Old Testament that ought to be on the banner of anyone who thinks about the relationship between power and a citizen’s property.

Give me your vineyard, that I may have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near my house, and I will give you a better vineyard for it; or, if it seems good to you, I will give you its value in money. But Naboth said to Ahab, “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers.”

- 1 Kings 21:2-3 (ESV)

King Ahab wants Naboth’s vineyard. Notably, he makes a fair offer: a better vineyard or money. This is not robbery. It is a proposal of voluntary exchange. And Naboth says no. This is mine, my inheritance; I will not sell. And here is the most important thing: Naboth has the right to refuse. Even the king - the highest power in the land - cannot take this vineyard from him against his will.

What happens next? Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, arranges false witnesses, Naboth is accused, stoned, and the crown seizes the vineyard. And then God sends the prophet Elijah with one of the harshest verdicts in the entire Old Testament. God stands on the side of the murdered property owner, and against the power that reached for what belonged to another.

This is no accident. It is a pattern. A power that breaks a citizen’s property rights “for a higher good” commits, in God’s eyes, a crime.

The great Christian tradition - from Aquinas to Catholic social teaching - has never treated private property as a sin or a necessary evil. It treated it as something natural, written into human nature and the order of creation. Man takes better care of what is his own. He works harder on his own land. He manages with greater responsibility what he is personally responsible for. This is not cynicism - it is the realistic anthropology the Bible has known from its first page.

Work, talents, and responsibility

If property is good, then so is the work that leads to it. And here the Bible is surprisingly unambiguous - far more so than the advocates of a “gospel of compassion,” who confuse pity with handouts, like to admit.

If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.

- 2 Thessalonians 3:10 (ESV)

These are the words of the apostle Paul. Not a capitalist ideologue - an apostle. And they are brutally concrete. Paul does not write “whoever cannot work” - for the Church was always to care for the sick, the elderly, and the helpless. He writes “whoever is not willing to work.” He is speaking of people able to work who refuse to, expecting others to support them. And Paul’s verdict is hard: they are not owed a living at someone else’s expense.

This is the exact opposite of the logic in which work and idleness yield the same result, because the state will equalize it anyway. The Bible knows no such logic.

A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.

- Proverbs 10:4 (ESV)

And then there is a parable Jesus told Himself - perhaps the most “market-minded” text in the entire Bible.

He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.” But his master answered him, “You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest.”

- Matthew 25:24-27 (ESV)

Read this carefully, because it is astonishing. The master praises two servants who multiplied the capital entrusted to them - who “put it to work” and earned a profit. And the third, who out of fear buried his talent in the ground and risked nothing, he calls “wicked and slothful.” What is more - he says outright that the man should at least have put the money with the bankers to earn interest.

Jesus uses the language of investment, profit, interest, and the multiplication of capital - and in a positive sense. He condemns neither wealth nor enterprise. He condemns passivity, fear of risk, the burying of potential. God gave each person some capital - abilities, time, means - and expects us to multiply it, not waste it in the name of a quiet life.

This is an ethic of responsibility and enterprise, not an ethic of “everyone equal regardless of effort.”

Mercy must be voluntary

We now come to the heart of the whole matter - to the argument that, for me, settles the dispute between Christianity and socialism.

For the advocate of Christian socialism will say: “Fine - property, work, talents, agreed. But the Bible commands care for the poor, the widow, the orphan hundreds of times. Jesus identifies Himself with the hungry and the naked. So if we are to help the poor, the state should organize it - tax the rich and distribute to the needy. It is simply mercy on the scale of an entire society.”

It sounds pious. And it is false. And the crack lies in a single word: voluntariness.

Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

- 2 Corinthians 9:7 (ESV)

Read it again, slowly. “Not under compulsion.” “God loves a cheerful giver.” This is the whole theology of Christian generosity in two phrases. God does not simply want the poor to receive money. God wants the rich person to give it out of love - freely, with joy, out of a transformed heart. A gift extracted under compulsion does not have, in God’s eyes, the same worth as a gift offered freely. Because God cares not only about the outcome, but about the heart of the giver.

And now see what coerced redistribution does. When the state takes from the rich under threat of punishment and hands it to the poor, two things happen. First, the rich person gives nothing - it is taken from him. There is no virtue here, no act of love, no conversion of heart. There is only a transfer enforced by power. Second, the poor person does not receive a gift - he receives a payment due from an impersonal apparatus. The relationship vanishes. Gratitude vanishes. The encounter of person with person, which is the essence of Christian mercy, vanishes.

Socialism promises to handle mercy wholesale, through the budget. But in doing so it kills mercy as a virtue. It keeps the outcome (the transfer of money) and throws out the heart (voluntary love). It is rather like forcing someone into marriage under threat of prison and calling it love. The act looks similar from the outside - but it is hollowed out of what makes it what it is.

But I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own accord.

- Philemon 14 (ESV)

This is an astonishing sentence. Paul could simply have ordered Philemon to treat the runaway slave Onesimus well - he had apostolic authority over him. And yet he deliberately does not. He writes: I do not want you to do good “by compulsion,” I want you to do it “of your own accord.” The apostle himself renounces coercion in order to leave room for voluntary virtue. Because he knows that good done under compulsion ceases to be the good of the one who does it.

This is exactly the same logic we saw in God in Eden. God could have forced us into the good - He did not. Paul could have forced Philemon - he did not. Because in Christianity what matters is not only what happens, but from what kind of heart it comes.

In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

- Acts 20:35 (ESV)

“It is more blessed to give.” That blessing of giving belongs to the giver. When you take from a person the possibility of giving freely - by taxing him by force - you also take from him that blessing. You make him not generous, but plundered. And then you are surprised that people in a welfare state give less and less to charity. And why would they give? They have “already paid their taxes,” their conscience is at ease, and their heart untransformed.

Christianity does not want a society in which the poor are provided for and the rich are indifferent. It wants a society in which the rich love the poor enough to give to them freely - and in which, through that gift, they are themselves saved. No state budget can deliver that.

The biblical warning against the great state

There is a passage in the Old Testament that reads like a prophecy about every overgrowth of power in history. The people of Israel come to the prophet Samuel and demand: give us a king, like the other nations have. God tells Samuel to grant their request - but first to warn them what strong, centralized power is.

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen. (…) He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. (…) and you shall be his slaves.

- 1 Samuel 8:11-17 (ESV)

Read this as a Christian of the 21st century, and your hair will stand on end. What does overgrown power do, according to God? It takes. It seizes. It levies. It gives to its own. And in the end it makes you slaves. “He will take the best of your fields and give them to his servants” - this is a description of redistribution to the political clients of the state. “He will take the tenth” - this is a description of rising taxes. “You shall be his slaves” - this is a description of a person who has become the subject of the very apparatus he summoned to take care of him.

And note the punchline. God treats the very demand - “give us a king to rule us like the other nations” - as a rejection of Himself:

Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.

- 1 Samuel 8:7 (ESV)

This is one of the deepest passages in the Bible about politics. When a person wants earthly power to take total care of him - to solve all his problems, to secure him from cradle to grave - he is in truth seeking a substitute for God. He puts the state in the place that belongs to the Creator. And that, bluntly, is idolatry. The state becomes an idol that promises salvation here and now - in exchange for your freedom.

Socialism, in its deepest layer, is not merely an economic theory. It is a kind of faith - faith that the collective, properly organized and equipped with power, will create paradise on earth. It is a secular eschatology. And about secular religions, which take over the structure of faith without having God, I have already written separately.

”But what about…?” - three arguments that must be disarmed

Honesty requires that I take on the strongest biblical arguments of the other side. Because they are real and frequently cited. Let us examine the three most serious.

”The first Christians held everything in common”

This is the crown argument. In the Acts of the Apostles we read about the Jerusalem community:

Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. (…) There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

- Acts 4:32-35 (ESV)

“They had everything in common” - it sounds like a manifesto. But let us read on, because Luke gives us the key to interpretation in the next chapter. Ananias and Sapphira sell a field but keep back part of the money, pretending to give the whole. They fall dead - not for keeping the money, but for lying. And here Peter speaks a sentence that shatters the socialist reading of Acts to pieces:

While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?

- Acts 5:4 (ESV)

Read carefully. Peter says to Ananias: the field was yours. The money was yours. You could do with it as you wished. No one forced you to give the whole - or any part. In other words: the right of property in the first community was in force. Sharing was entirely voluntary. Ananias’s sin was not keeping the money - his sin was lying, faking a generosity that was not there.

This settles the matter. The Jerusalem community was not socialism, because socialism is the coerced socialization of property. Here there was no coercion at all - no state, no apparatus, no penalty for not giving. There was something far more beautiful: people so transformed by the love of Christ that they voluntarily shared everything. This is not a model of government. It is the fruit of converted hearts. You cannot legislate it - you can only awaken it with the Gospel.

”God established the jubilee and redistribution in the Law of Moses”

The second argument reaches into the Old Testament. God in the Law commanded a jubilee year - every fifty years the land returned to its original families, debts were forgiven, slaves freed. He also commanded leaving the edge of the field for the poor and not charging interest to a fellow Israelite. Is this not God’s redistribution?

Let us look closely - because the details change everything.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner.

- Leviticus 19:9-10 (ESV)

First - this whole law presupposes enduring private property. It is “your field” and “your vineyard.” God does not abolish property - He confirms it, and commands the owner to be generous toward the poor. Second - the mechanism itself is brilliantly freedom-minded. God does not say, “hand the harvest to an official who will distribute it.” He says, “leave the edge of the field, and the poor person will come and gather it himself.” This is exactly what Ruth does, gleaning in Boaz’s field. The poor person is not a petitioner of an apparatus - he is a person who gathers, by his own labor, what the owner has freely left. The dignity of both parties is preserved.

And the jubilee? Its logic is precisely the opposite of the socialist one:

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.

- Leviticus 25:23 (ESV)

The jubilee was not the taking of property from the rich and giving it to the poor. It was the restoration to families of their original inheritance - that is, the protection of private, family property from permanent loss. It is a mechanism that protects the “little man” from losing the ground beneath his feet once and for all. And crucially - it was a command directed to the conscience of a people of faith, grounded in the fact that the ultimate owner of everything is God, not a program of coerced redistribution enforced by a tax office. It is God’s law for the people of the covenant, not an economic system to be copied by a secular state.

”Sell all that you have” and the condemnation of the rich

The third argument: Jesus tells the rich young man to sell everything. James thunders against the rich. Lazarus goes to heaven and the rich man to the abyss. Is this not a clear condemnation of wealth and inequality?

I unpacked this in detail in a separate piece on money, success, and the Kingdom, so here only the essence. Read carefully what Jesus actually said to the rich young man. This man very clearly wanted to become perfect - he ran up, fell on his knees, and asked what more he could do beyond keeping the commandments. And only to that ambition does Jesus reply: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess” (Matthew 19:21). This is not a universal economic program, nor a command for every believer. It is an answer to the specific desire of a specific man: “if you want to go all the way, then go all the way.”

And now the most important point for our subject: the young man did not give it up - and Jesus did not chase him. He did not run after him, did not grab him by the arm, did not force him. He let him walk away sorrowful. God set a choice before him - exactly as He sets it before each of us - and respected his free will even when he chose wrongly. This is not a prescription for a system. It is one more proof that even to the holiest things God invites, He does not coerce.

The best proof is Zacchaeus. Also rich, also meets Jesus - and Jesus does not tell him to sell everything. Zacchaeus himself, voluntarily, out of joy, gives half his possessions and restores fourfold what he had taken. And he hears: “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9). Again the same word: voluntarily. Jesus does not impose a sum, does not set a rate, does not summon an official. He waits until the transformed heart itself wants to give.

And the condemnation of the rich in the Letter of James? Read what it is for, specifically:

Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.

- James 5:4 (ESV)

James does not condemn the rich for being rich. He condemns them for a specific injustice: they withheld the wages due to the laborers. They robbed their workers of what was honestly owed to them. This is not an attack on property or the market - it is a defense of the worker against the fraud of the employer. The Bible is against theft and exploitation, not against an honestly earned fortune. The socialist reading constantly confuses the two.

Freedom is not a religion

If I stopped here, I would commit the very error I charge the socialists with - I would make an idol of an economic system. And I must be honest to the end: the free market is not the gospel, and freedom is not a religion.

Economic liberalism is good because it respects how God created man - free, responsible, capable of work and love. But the moment freedom stops being a means to doing good and becomes an end in itself - “freedom to have more, consume more, possess more” - it turns into the very thing Jesus warned against most sharply.

No one can serve two masters. (…) You cannot serve God and money.

- Matthew 6:24 (ESV)

A free market that makes getting rich the meaning of life leads straight to the service of Mammon. The Christian defends economic freedom not because he loves money, but because he loves the freedom to do good - and to that freedom, money can be both a servant and a destroyer.

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.

- 1 Timothy 6:10 (ESV)

This is why the Christian advocate of economic freedom is not a libertine for whom only profit and his own “self” matter. He is someone who says: I want to be free in order to give, serve, share, and love my neighbor by my own choice - and not under the whip of an official. Freedom, for him, is the space of virtue, not an excuse for selfishness.

This is exactly the same line I drew at the beginning. Freedom - yes. Freedom as an idol - no.

A free market, but not free from God

Let us return to the question we started with: can a Christian be a liberal?

If we mean economic liberalism - then not only can he, but he has solid biblical grounds for it. God created us free and did not take that freedom away even after the fall. He confirmed private property in the Ten Commandments. He praised work, enterprise, and the multiplication of talents. He demanded that mercy be voluntary, because only the voluntary has worth. He warned against a power that takes, taxes, and turns people into slaves. And even those passages used by the advocates of “biblical socialism,” on careful reading, turn out to be testimonies of voluntariness and property, not of coercion.

But the Bible also draws a line no libertine will draw. Freedom is not an end in itself. It is a gift and a responsibility. God gave you freedom not so that you might hoard and serve Mammon, but so that, by your own choice, you might love Him and your neighbor. A free market - yes. Free from God - never.

Socialism wants to save man by taking away his freedom. Moral liberalism wants to “liberate” him by taking away his God. And the Gospel says something neither of them will say: you are free - therefore you are all the more responsible. God does not break down the door of your heart. He knocks. And He waits until you open it yourself.

That is the whole difference between coercion and love. And the whole difference between a system that treats you as a cog, and a God who treats you as a free person made in His image.

So choose freedom. But choose it in order to do good freely.