As others have noted, applying modern political labels (never mind theories) to a man that (may have) lived 2000 years ago is a fools errand. The only relevant issue is: what does modern Christianity say about the appropriate social arrangement for humans? And on this, I’m afraid the conservatives are rolling a very large stone up a steep hill. It is clear that the essential tenet of Christian theology today is the Sermon on the Mount – which preaches abject, consistent altruism as the proper morality. Man is to live for his brothers, and not for this life, but for the one beyond.
Capitalism, in contrast, is the social system that is based on the morality of self-interest. It upholds the ideal that each individual is an end in himself, and that none should sacrifice their own lives and values for others. It bases this morality on worldly reason (as opposed to the mysticism of religion, and of Christianity in particular). Indeed, it is because man survives and thrives using his rational faculty that each person must be left alone to exercise his own judgment about how to live his life and what values to pursue.
Conservatives must decide – reason, self-interest and capitalism … or the Sermon on the Mount. Both cannot exist simultaneously in the same person, or in the same culture.
