In the 20th century alone, class envy led to the slaughter of millions of people. Today, American school children are catechized in class envy in their textbooks and few parents seem to care. Christians are influenced by the ethos of the French Revolution. I was. In university, I was taught by some of my professors that some version of socialism was the most just social arrangement. Over time, however, I learned that what I had been taught was not true and that my professors did not really believe what they were telling me. After all, they made a voluntary agreement with the university to trade their skill and labor for a fair-market wage.

San Diego County has places of obvious beauty. Mt Palomar is grand and so are the beaches and, of course, the Pacific Ocean. My little corner of San Diego County (North County), has areas of quiet beauty. The back roads are quiet and some of them lead to lovely surprises. On the one of the back roads between Escondido and Ramona there is a grassland and even a few head of cattle and some horses. It is a favorite place to visit. The cattle do not mind and the horses come and go as they please. There are limits to where one can wander, however. They are marked with signs. One might be put off. I have been. More than once a trip down a quiet lane brought to an end by a sign, by the assertion of private property.  Where I come from, county rounds and state highways go for farther than I can. Fences and signs are more common place here. Even in the back country of California, fences and signs appear more often than one might like. Still, I own property and I believe in the natural right to private property, so whence the irritation? Why do I not rejoice when I see someone asserting his liberty to use their goods as he pleases? Because I am affected by the fall. Because, by nature, I am prone to violate the 8th and 10th commandment and so, dear reader, are you.

The eighth commandment, as numbered by the Reformed, says: “You shall not steal” (Ex  19:11; 20:15; Lev; Deut 5:19; Matt 19:18; Rom 13;9). The tenth commandment says: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male servant, his female servant, his ox, is donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Ex 20:17; Deut 5:21; 7:25; Rom 7:7; 13:9). Lately I have been meditating on some of the assumptions behind the biblical language about property and it occurs to me that without the assumption of private property these two commandments make no sense. One of the assumptions underlying the eight commandment is that there are things that are not mine. Those things belong to others. If I take them without permission or without buying them (by trading money, goods, or services for them), then I am a thief. In other words, unless there is such a thing as private property, theft is impossible. Theft exists, ergo private property exists. If everything belongs to everyone, then theft is impossible. How can one steal what is his already? The same reasoning applies to the 10th commandment. One cannot envy what is his. He envies what belongs to others. He is dissatisfied with the Lord has provided to him and wants what the Lord has provided to someone else. Here we are not talking about purchasing a good or service (though we might be guilty of envying in that instance too) but we are thinking about ungodly desires for the goods of others. Private property is assumed in both commandments.

There are Christian traditions, however, that oppose private property and there seem to be a fair number of late-modern evangelicals who are suspicious of private property. Whence this suspicion? The French Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) hated the idea of private property. He argued that, in a state of nature, there were no fences.  In the state of nature, everything belonged to everyone. Ergo, as we seek to return to the state of nature, fences (private property) should be abolished. This, of course, was nothing but self-justification for his Narcissistic self-indulgence. Rousseau was the first hippy and, like the hippies of the 1960s, he made a mess of his life and abandoned his children to the care of the people of Geneva. Granting his dubious and speculative assertion (that the state of nature was a worker’s paradise) what Rousseau neglected to mention, in his (cultural) appropriation of the Reformed doctrine of the covenant of works, was that we do not now live “in the state of nature” after the fall. The fall brought with it corruption and death. There will be no restoration of the “state of nature” in this life until the New Heavens and the New Earth.

Still, Rousseau’s ethic of envy (ressentiment) has had a powerful effect in the modern world. It fueled not only the French Revolution but the Communist revolutions in Russia, China, and elsewhere. In the 20th century alone, class envy led to the slaughter of millions of people. Today, American school children are catechized in class envy in their textbooks and few parents seem to care. Christians are influenced by the ethos of the French Revolution. I was. In university I was taught by some of my professors that some version of socialism was the most just social arrangement. Over time, however, I learned that what I had been taught was not true and that my professors did not really believe what they were telling me. After all, they made a voluntary agreement with the university to trade their skill and labor for a fair-market wage. They formed no commune. They went home to decent houses in middle- or even upper-class neighborhoods in private cars. They talked about a workers paradise but they did not live in one. They lived in a nice college-town largely created by entrepreneurial capitalists, who paid the taxes to pave the roads and build the bridges over which the socialists in town drove. Socialism is institutionalized envy.

Even before university I had heard grown ups grumble about how “those businessmen” got their wealth unjustly, by “stealing” it from others. Those grumblers never explained how this process worked. I do not remember a store owner once pointing a firearm at me and demanding my money. I do not remember anyone forcing me to walk into their business. Did the grocery store owner charge exorbitant prices? If so, why did we not go to another grocer? There were several in the neighborhood? In fact, these claims about “those greedy businessmen” could not stand scrutiny. Those complaints were nothing but envy disguised as righteous indignation. We know it is envy and not truth when we see business people, who evidently believe in charging a fair market price for their goods and services, complaining about “evil” businesses. Really? It is just for you to charge a fair-market price (what the market will bear) for your goods and services but the other business person is “evil” for doing the same? How is that not just envy?

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