A political influencer dressed up as Mao Zedong this month, gave a speech espousing communism to a new generation, and almost nobody in the comments thought it was strange.
Two-thirds of Americans under thirty now view socialism and communism favorably. Eugene says the argument isn’t new and neither is the answer — it got settled on a farming compound in Shandong in 1949, when Communist officials walked through the gate of a church called the Jesus Family and made their pitch. It wasn’t a threat. It was a handshake. You believe in caring for the poor, so do we. You believe the rich have too much and it should be redistributed, so do we. Everything you teach out of the words of Jesus, we’ve already adopted.
Then he says the part out loud: “Communism sounded exactly like Jesus. In fact, the Communists sound like really good Christians.” He says it flatly, about a church he admires, and then spends the rest of the episode on the one difference Pastor Jing Dianying found — the difference that cost him most of the rest of his life in a prison cell, and the same difference hiding in plain sight at the cross, where two men named Jesus stood in front of a crowd and only one of them was the real one.
Hear him make the case himself:
The historical reference gives the warning a more specific frame than a purely contemporary political argument. Returning to the Jesus Family episode in Shandong invites readers to examine how ideological pressure can reshape religious language and community life. The article’s concern appears to be less about a slogan alone than about discernment: whether a public image or movement remains consistent with the beliefs it claims to represent. That distinction is worth exploring carefully, especially when current commentary risks reducing a complex history to a quick comparison.