Socialism is not a policy disagreement about the size of the welfare state. It is a comprehensive anthropology that begins with a false account of God, man, and the created order. Marxism does not merely fail because it was “never tried correctly.” It fails because it must. It denies that man is made in the image of God and fallen. Having rejected both dignity and depravity, it treats the human person as raw material for historical process and the state as the agent of that remaking. Once that premise is granted, the rest is method. Religion is the first obstacle. Marx’s line that religion is “the opium of the people” is often quoted as sociology. In context it is a program: abolish the “illusory happiness” of the people so that a new order can supply their “real” happiness. The church cannot be tolerated as a rival authority because Marxism claims the right to define reality, guilt, and redemption. That is why every serious Marxist project has moved, with remarkable consistency, from critique of doctrine to the closing of churches and the re-education of children. The family is the second obstacle. The Manifesto does not hide this. “Abolition of the family.” The “hallowed co-relation of parent and child” is dismissed as bourgeois sentiment. Accused of seeking to end the authority of parents over their children, Marx and Engels reply: “To this crime we plead guilty.” The logic is coherent. If the child is to be formed for the revolution, the household cannot remain a sovereign sphere. Parental authority is not merely inconvenient. It is a competing liturgy. This is present in Marx before 1848. In The Pale Maiden he writes, “Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell.” In The Player: “With Satan I have struck my deal.” Elsewhere he vows revenge against “the One who rules above.” One need not invent a occult biography. The texts are sufficient. The later politics are the public outworking of a prior revolt. That is the point the present debate refuses to face. Democratic socialists insist the word now means Scandinavia, unions, and clinics. But the intellectual structure they inherited is not a theory of clinics. It is a theory of ownership, formation, and ultimacy: who owns the means of production, who forms the child, and who stands as final authority. Soften the rhetoric and the structure remains. Call it “democracy” and the destination does not change. An idea that must secularize the altar and nationalize the home will not stop at tax policy. The twentieth century is therefore not an unfortunate footnote. It is the experiment run at scale. When the state becomes father, priest, and economist, it does not produce solidarity. It produces scarcity, surveillance, and graves. More than 100 million dead is not a debating tactic. It is the empirical record of an ontology put into practice. Christians may and should argue for just wages, relief of the poor, and limits on predatory power. Those are questions of prudence under a moral law we did not invent. What cannot be baptized is a system whose first moves are the abolition of worship and the transfer of the child from the parent to the regime. That is not compassion refined. It is a counterfeit kingdom. The church’s task is to tell the truth about the idea: its anthropology is false, its theology is rebellion, and its fruit has been consistent wherever it has been given power.