Why the Bias?

Many see socialism as inherently anti-Christian.  While I see it in it's purest form as neither for or against Christianity, many believe one cannot be both a socialist and a Christian.  So why is there such a bias against socialism by Christians?  Similarly, why is there a bias against Christianity by socialists?  The following answer provided on those oh-so-wonderful Yahoo! Answers boards provides some interesting insight:

1. Christianity in Medieval and Renaissance Europe was highly integrated with the existing social structure, which in most of Europe was feudal.

Under feudalism, as one Christian bishop wrote in around 1100 AD, a dominant school of thought was that God had ordinained the existence of different social classes, each with a different duty: namely, to "fight, work, and pray."

The feudal nobles had the [supposed] duty "to fight."
The [supposed] duty of the clergy was "to pray."

And the duty of the peasantry -- as this Catholic prelate saw it -- was "to work," and to support the two other social classes, the military aristocracy and the clergy.

In short, this medieval bishop saw Christianity mandating a highly stratified and unequal social order in which the peasants had a duty to be exploited - supposedly for God's glory.

Unsurprisingly there were many movements of medieval Christians who challenged this notion while advocating something resembling the "primitive communism" of the early church.

The challengers included some Catholics who stayed under the leadership of Rome -- notably St. Francis and some of his followers -- as well some Christian groups who were deemed heretical by the Church and violently suppressed.

As historian Norman Cohn writes in "The Pursuit of the Millennium," the "heretical" religious communist movements of the Middle Ages included the Waldensians in the late 1100s, the Flagellants of the 1300s and early 1400s, some of the Lollard priests associated with the English Peasants Revolt of 1381 , and the Hussites in the early 1400s.

Later on, as the Renaissance took hold, Christian communist movements with an explicitly anti-Catholic edge included the revolutionary Anabaptists of the early 1500s in Germany and the "Diggers" and "Fifth Monarchy Men" who emerged during the Puritan Revolution in England in the mid-1600s. There were other Christian communist groups, too.

The "pro-capitalist" ethic of mainstream Christianity, I think, emerged at least in part in reaction against the revolutionary communism of the heretical movements.

The lower-class heretics, some with revolutionary ideas, challenged the legitimacy and even the existence of the Church, and naturally the Church fought back -- eventually to the extent of labeling egalitarianism itself "anti-Christian."

2. Many historians think a second source of "anti-socialist" Christian thought is Calvinism.

Or at least that was the view of the famous sociologist Max Weber, author of "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

Weber's argument isn't easy to summarize, but basically he holds that Calvinist doctrines about delayed gratification and hard work as a "religious calling" inspired many Calvinists -- not to give away their money to the poor, but to work ceaselessly at making more money without spending it.

In addition, like the Good Steward in some of the gospel parables, these Calvinist Protestants made a habit of reinvesting their money for the future.

The early Calvinists didn't mostly start out wanting to get rich, Weber thought. But their habits of working hard, scrimping on personal consumption, and investing money for the future gradually turned them into successful capitalists.

As successful capitalists, but with "Christian" ideas, they then naturally attributed their economic success to God's will, and came to feel that anyone who proposed to take away their wealth was "anti-Christian."

3. This Calvinist idea about the religious merit of money-making was given an added boost in England following the restoration of the monarchy following the Puritan Revolution.

why?

Because Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians and other "religious dissenters" - Christians who rejected the Church of England -- were basically banned by English law from 1689 through around 1830 from entering politics, engaging in many professions and even studying at Oxford and Cambridge, England's two great Anglican universities.

In response, some highly religious English dissenters sought careers in business, as the only career path open to them, and some were extremely successful at it.

Then the Dissenters, having helped launch the Industrial Revolution, came to feel in the 1800s that capitalist enterprise was a religious calling, and that all attempts to have the government interefere with it were anti-capitalist, not to mention "anti-freedom."

I think an intellectual hangover from that era still inspires many conservative American Christians today

4. A fourth explanation for the anti-socialist bias of many Christians today derives from the highly secular nature of the economic radicalism that has become popular since the French Revolution, I think.

Marx was explicitly atheist, so was the British utopian communist Robert Owen; so were most of the 19th century anarchists.

Some radicals -- eg Lenin -- even came to identify the Christian church with political reaction, and some Spanish anarchists by the 1930s were physically attacking churches.

Not surprisingly, many Christians returned the favor by attacked "godless communism" in turn.

But as you point out, Jesus and the early Christians probably would have favored socialists & communists more than capitalists. Many medieval Christians outside of the Vatican would have done the same.