When it comes to promoting their ideologically-driven interpretation of the Bible, conservative Christians have never been adverse to resorting to "political hardball" - the "voluntary versus coercion" argument is reserved for those Biblical selections, like "The Believers Share Their Possessions," that they would prefer to ignore!
Circling back to this, though I'm not sure who you're referring to when you refer to "conservative Christians" (since you're supposed to be talking to me and not some amorphous collective who has not elected me as spokesman, though I understand this may be difficult for you), do you disagree that the earliest Christians in Acts were doing so voluntarily? Do you think they were forced by the Roman government into their arrangement?
Of course not, and that's quite absurd. Christianity at that time was a quite marginal, fringe group within wider Judaism. The arrangement was voluntary. The Roman Empire did not force anyone into a Christian-style Kibbutz (nor did their Sadduccean client rulers). Surely you agree with some basic history?
So the first point is that the earliest Christian description in Acts was voluntary. This is quite indisputable and I don't realistically expect you to be able to respond to this obviousness, and this point stands independently and conclusively to other considerations I'm going to mention. The next few points will be more disputable (though you likely will not have the tools to do so):
(2) No sooner had the earliest Christians formed a, supposed, Christian-style Kibbutz than it failed to function. There was a dispute about the distribution of food and unfair treatment in this supposed idealistic setting (Acts 4). The Hellenistic Jewish women weren't being treated a equally as the Hebraic Jewish women. So far as I can tell, it's difficult to argue this setting is some ideal arrangement of society when it fails so soon. I mean, if the ideal society fails within a decade or so, is it really "ideal"? Also so far as I can tell, this unequal treatment would be a feature of the structure of a Kibbutz-like arrangement that was growing too large.
(3) The point of all of this in Acts is not to give a prescription of how society should be arranged (and Luke does not give prescriptive commands), but to describe how God arranged the gospel to proceed from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the world. The emphasis here is the spreading of the gospel, not an ideal arrangement of Christian society, and much less some political description that is necessarily applicable to anyone else. This larger context will, undoubtedly, be ignored by you.
(4) Its hard to argue that because the earliest Christians were doing something, therefore it's applicable to everyone, everywhere, always. There could, at least theoretically, be conditions in the early church that would be applicable only to the early church and which are not necessarily intended to be modeled everywhere and always. So, it's fallacious to argue that (a) the early church did X and (b) therefore, we should too. The earliest church also participated in the Temple and met in synagogues...should we?
At any rate, the appeal to Acts by modern, American, Protestant, Christian socialists and/or progressives is pretty misguided and anachronistic.
