A Practical Theology of Work

On Capitalism, Christianity, and Callings

The following is an edited excerpt from an unpublished book on business that I have shared with a few close associates.

I find theology interesting as a topic of discussion, but inevitably get bored with it due to much of its impracticality. Unlike science or business, there is no means of objective falsification to determine, for example, which mode of baptism is supported by Scripture. And as a practical businessman, without any way to prove who's wrong, I just tend to see a lot of hot air, an interesting hobby for people to seek a type of status in an insular world but ultimately not terribly useful.

I suppose one could be the type of boor who would insist that, for certain, the proper mode of baptism is essential for salvation. Yet as Christianity has declined in the West, most of us have realized the pettiness of many of these historical debates and appreciate what we have in common rather than those differences, the debate of which is a luxury in a society with a broad Christian consensus.

Not all theology is like this, however, and I have an intense interest in those aspects which have real and practical implications in the here and now. Strangely, those areas I find most interesting tend to be those little discussed in the church. In particular, I have found meaning in exploring the Reformation-era doctrine of calling in ordinary Christian life.

Writer and business strategist Simon Sinek has been a recent major influence on my thinking. The essence of Sinek’s message jibes with my understanding of the false dichotomy of the secular and sacred. Senek argues that we also cannot separate our life at work from who we are as people. We cannot become automatons at work blindly accepting orders. As humans, we yearn for meaning in all that we do. He believes every business must answer the question of why they exist. Further, for people to thrive their whole person has to be considered in the context of work. Work output is maximized when people feel safe, valued, and cared for at work, and when their work has real meaning.

The Doctrine of Calling

The doctrine of calling in our work gives the broadest possible “why” to our efforts. True meaning requires something that connects us to the eternal and transcendent. So many companies breed cynicism in thoughtful employees by pretending that their narrow mission is sufficient to give meaning, and attempting to gin up “passion” for selling various consumer goods.

So where can we derive meaning from our work? Like so many of these questions, the answer can be found in the book of Genesis.

While I have always felt that work itself is a legitimate center of meaning for Christians, this was brought home to me scripturally at a family conference hosted by a local Baptist church. At this conference, the keynote speaker noted that God’s first recorded words spoken to man and woman in the Bible were: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 

The first part of this command, concerning fruitfulness, could be a book unto itself and is outside the scope of this post, though regular readers well know my biases here¹ (and as I outline below, the two turn out to be causally related). The second part of the commandment, to “subdue” the Earth, is what interests me in this post, as it provides a dignity to our ordinary work that is sometimes missing in Christian discourse.

In the Anglican marriage vows from the Book of Common Prayer, the minister introduces marriage as “an honourable estate instituted in the time of man’s innocence.” This statement demonstrates the dignity of marriage in that it predates man’s fall into sin - it is an essential institution part of our original design before sin entered the world. Similarly, this first commandment provides equal dignity to work. Man was created, in perfection, to work on the material world, first in the garden, and then, after a time of testing, in the rest of the world. 

The Westminster Shorter Catechism, in its first question, asks “What is the chief end of man?,” and answers, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” While this is an eloquent answer, it tells us nothing about how man is to glorify God or enjoy him.

God knows best, of course, how to glorify Himself in how He designed His creation. Humankind, then, best glorifies God by fulfilling our original design purpose, which is best enabled, after the Fall, in a process of salvation purchased by Christ and applied by the Holy Spirit. We are sanctified so that we may fulfill our original purpose. And what was a significant part of that original purpose? “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it…”

God, I believe, delights in us much in the same way we delight in our pets. He desires our worship and affection of course, but also loves to see us do what we were designed to do. Just as we love seeing the unabashed enthusiasm of a dog fetching a ball, or the gracefulness of a cat stalking her prey, God loves seeing men and women fulfill the purposes that are unique to our species.

Against Hyper-Evangelism

Sometimes the church overemphasizes the evangelical aspect of Christianity while downplaying the ordinary Christian life. Too often this emphasis can make it seem like the only purpose of “secular” employment is to create walking checkbooks who can support church work. I think this misses half the blessing of our salvation. We are saved for some purpose other than salvation itself. Christianity is not a spiritual pyramid scheme where the primary purpose of those who become saved is to work to save others. 

These words in Genesis are repeated again to Noah in Genesis 9:1, after the flood. The example of the Sabbath itself emphasized the primacy of work: six days you shall labor. Paul, in giving instruction to ordinary church members, said to “aspire to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you.” (1 Timothy 4:11)

Man was created, for all eternity, to have a dual nature. We are spirit and flesh, immaterial and material. Taking dominion over the material world, both literally and metaphorically working with our hands, is a fundamental part of our design purpose. 

This holy project of transforming the material world into useful goods is the essence of the life of work. It is a false dichotomy to say that we either must work to live or live to work. Working is and always will be, now and into eternity, part of the purpose for which God designed us.

The third or more of our waking hours we spend at work are not so that we can live, worship, and give; they are central to all three, and work encompasses all three. When we work, we worship if done to God’s glory. We create and support life for others by creating value in the economy. We give much more effectively to others when our contributions are not blind charity but rather informed by the pricing signals of the market, and the value we provide exceeds many-fold the cost required of the customer.

When people cooperate in their work efforts in an economy with predictable, just laws, the result is miraculous. Let’s now look at the historical construction of free market capitalism and its effects on human history.

The Miracle of Capitalism

I present the most important economic chart in the history of the world:

This chart is from Gregory Clark’s masterpiece of economic history, A Farewell to Alms². Clark, a British-American professor of economics at UC-Davis, argues that mankind before approximately 1800 was stuck in the “Malthusian trap.” This refers to the theory of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, an Anglican minister who studied economics. Malthus pessimistically argued that while the population of humans increased geometrically, the supply of food could only increase linearly to feed them, leading to a predictable cycle of prosperity followed by poverty.

Clark verified the truth of Malthus’ theory by looking at data of average income across different world societies. The story of history before 1800 is not one of continuous economic progress in continuity with the modern era. Materially, the average European family in 1800 was no better off than the average citizen of the Roman Empire two millennia earlier. It was a depressing world where good times led to more births, which led to famine and disease, which then cleared the way for more good times. The bubonic plague, for example, vastly improved the material conditions of Europe’s poor if they were fortunate enough to survive.

Ironically, Malthus wrote his treatise on population around 1830, just about the time when he would be proved spectacularly wrong in his predictions about the future, however well his theory explained the past. The great mystery Clark seeks to explain is why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in England and then Northwest Europe (particularly the Netherlands), versus in other advanced historical societies. Why the English in 1700-1800 rather than the ancient Romans, Greeks, Chinese, Aztecs, or Egyptians?

Clark’s answer is complex and multifactorial. First, England’s isolation from Continental Europe gave it an unusually long period of stable government and predictable property rights after the Norman conquest. This stable environment enabled a domestication process to occur in the population where less violent, more cooperative, harder working people were more likely to reproduce and pass those traits on to their children, while, possibly just as important, severe justice ensured the most violent 1% or so of males were executed annually and removed from the gene pool.

Recall the episode in the Bible where Abigail assuages David’s anger over Nabal disrespecting him. It’s simply assumed that, in the culture of the time, such an act of non-violent disrespect would require, as a matter of honor, David and his men to destroy and loot Nabal’s estate. Similarly, Clark cites statistics showing that among the nobility in medieval England, say around 1300, the leading cause of death, at 25%, was personal violence, in a society riddled by diseases untreatable by medical technologies of the time. This high rate of personal violence collapsed as England gradually self-domesticated. This created a population significantly different from ancient humans, almost akin to the behavioral differences between wolves and dogs.

He quantifies this by showing the decline in interest rates in England, an objective measure of a society’s “time preference.” If one expects a stable future and is able to delay gratification, then relatively low interest rates are rational, especially given the mathematical properties of compound interest. If, however, one lives in a society constantly torn apart by war and comprised of individuals who by nature have impatient, impulsive personalities, one will demand a higher discount rate. It matters little that a 10% interest rate will turn a small nest egg into a fortune over a century if that property might be stolen at any time by a new tyrant, or people care so little for the future that it doesn’t motivate them to delay consumption today.

Clark’s hypothesis can be tested by comparing the English to their close genetic cousins, the American Scots-Irish³. Originally lowland Scots, during the same millennium when England enjoyed stability they endured constant war on the border between England and Scotland. The historian David Hackett Fischer, in his masterwork Albion’s Seed, draws a direct line from the “trailer park” or “redneck” culture of the Scots-Irish in America to their history in Scotland. He shows how the lowland Scots built very simple, architecturally unadorned homes, almost huts, because they were accustomed to the English coming through looting and burning them down every decade or so. They preferred ranching over farming, as livestock could be moved more easily out of harm’s way. 

In such an environment, it doesn’t pay to invest for the long-term future, and this creates a culture, and if it happens long enough, a genetic tendency of short-term thinking and all of the problems associated with such a mindset. To this day, the poorest areas in our country are not, as many assume, inner cities, but rather rural counties in deep Appalachia running along the western side of the Appalachians from Tennessee to West Virginia⁴. Clark finds similar effects in other European frontier populations who experienced historical instability, including the Acadian French (Cajuns), who struggled economically and educationally relative to their cousins who remained in Canada.

However the Industrial Revolution happened, it enabled man to escape the Malthusian trap and, for the first time, grow the supply of food faster than the population. America was among the most blessed of nations in having abundant vacant, fertile land (the historical Malthusian cause of prosperity) at the same time the technologies of the Industrial Revolution exploded general prosperity. When we Americans look back at our family trees, we are sometimes shocked by the early age of marriage and the number of children people had. We have this idea that it was “normal” historically to get married at 16 and have ten children. 

In reality, America was an aberration of abundance. Before 1800, a surprising number of English women never married or had children (on the order of one quarter to one third), and the average long-term historical age of marriage was 27 for men and 24 for women, these ages floating up or down inversely to average income. As 19th century German leader Otto von Bismarck put it, “God takes care of idiots, drunks, and the United States of America.”

Clark’s theory, that a stable political regime and secure property rights over 800 years in England enabled evolutionary selection for “middle class” genes leading to a society predisposed to the sort of innovation necessary to spark the Industrial Revolution, is not complete. It is of course starkly materialist, which is not surprising for a secular economic historian. What it does not adequately explain, however, is why this occurred in England and Northwest Europe more broadly, rather than any number of advanced and stable ancient societies from Rome to China.

Christianity & Capitalism

A German biochemist, Gerhard Meisenberg, promulgates an interesting hypothesis to explain why. According to Meisenberg, a universal feature of all prosperous, stable pagan societies was that those who became wealthy were dissipated into a life of hedonism.

In particular, Meisenberg says that ancient peoples had contraceptive technologies or practices sufficient to suppress their own fertility, and there is evidence from these ancient societies that the wealthier someone was, the fewer children they would bring into the world. Thus, while theoretically being wealthy in ancient Rome would enable a person to have more surviving children, which would tend to select for “middle class” values over time, in reality the upper classes prevented themselves from reproducing to avoid the work and effort of raising children. Many modern societies have the same problem.

The Roman Emperor Augustus, a more or less virtuous pagan, tried to fix this in Rome, to no avail, by passing morality laws that forbade adultery and divorce (enforced consistently even against his own family members), and heavily taxed bachelors. He gave a famous speech where he shamed elite Roman men for their refusal to sire children:

“For you are committing murder in not begetting in the first place those who ought to be your descendants; you are committing sacrilege in putting an end to the names and honours of your ancestors; and you are guilty of impiety in that you are abolishing your families, which were instituted by the gods, and destroying the greatest of offerings to them, — human life, — thus overthrowing their rites and their temples. Moreover, you are destroying the State by disobeying its laws, and you are betraying your country by rendering her barren and childless; nay more, you are laying her even with the dust by making her destitute of future inhabitants. For it is human beings that constitute a city, we are told, not houses or porticos or market-places empty of men.” ⁵

He saw accurately that if the elite of Rome did not reproduce themselves, the virtue that led to Roman power would eventually cease to exist and the empire itself would collapse. And this is the story of all pagan societies, a hopeless cycle of virtue begetting prosperity begetting vice begetting ruin. Only ruin could create an environment where virtue was again a necessity⁶.

Christianity, according to Meisenberg, inaugurated an entirely new sexual ethic that called for personal accountability for conduct regardless of a person’s status in society. While the elites in pagan Rome were functionally deist — no intelligent person took the pagan religion seriously, though seeing it as a necessary tool for political unity — Christianity required a much higher bar of personal conviction and behavior.

In particular, Christianity was hostile to contraception, to an almost superstitious degree, and infanticide. As a result, as Christian Europe rose from the ashes of the Empire, Christian elites were producing many children and limited, relative to Rome, in participating in bacchanals of dissipation. Meisenberg believes that Christianity’s pro-natal ethic, along with the long-term stability cited by Clark, enabled northwest Europe to achieve the genetic “escape velocity” necessary to bring about the Industrial Revolution⁷. 

However interesting this theory may be, it feels incomplete. Why 1800 and not 1300 if Christianity generally was the primary cause? What if, as I think likely, these secular historians miss the spiritual aspects of this era? Notably, I believe the story of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism is incomplete without consideration of the Protestant Reformation.

The Protestant Work Ethic

The German sociologist Max Weber famously attributed the advent of industrial capitalism to a cultural phenomenon he called the Protestant Work Ethic. Possibly the most critical development in the Reformation was a holistic view of Scripture that saw more continuity between the Old and New Testaments. Catholic devotion tended towards the virtues of the early church described in the New Testament, and as a result elevated asceticism, poverty, and victimhood as the ultimate indicators of true faith. The Reformers, on the other hand, believed that the church consisted of one covenant of all elect people from Adam to the present day. As such, those Old Testament indicators of virtue, which often included martial and material success, were seen as the natural complement of God’s saints. 

Christians, of course, might be called to suffer in extraordinary times like the early church or the Reformation, and the Reformers did not promote a prosperity gospel where spiritual piety led to material blessings formulaically. However, the Reformers did hold that the normative experience of God’s people would be blessings when they were faithful, and curses when they were not. Just as Abraham’s faithfulness was rewarded with lands and wealth, and David’s by victory in battle, similar blessings would accrue to those who formed the New Israel of the Church. 

This self-confidence gave impetus to commercial, spiritual, and military conquest on a scale the world had never seen before. Wealth in particular was no longer seen as a spiritual liability, which a narrow reading of the New Testament in isolation might suggest, but rather an indication of God’s favor.

Capitalist innovation was not limited to hardline Calvinists. By a different theological route, the Quakers came to believe that serving others in the marketplace was one of the highest Christian callings. Though pacifists in war⁸, they came to dominate many areas of trade. Quakers also went beyond the minimum requirements of Biblical law in their dealings with customers.

If a member of the Quaker business community acted unethically or went bankrupt, to protect their reputation as a group they would make the victim or creditor whole. This innovative practice foreshadowed the purchase protections provided by return policies and credit cards. Because consumers have confidence they can get quick restitution in a worst case scenario, the transaction costs of economic activity are reduced, resulting in more economic activity.

Quakers also invented the concept of flat pricing. Before the Quaker innovation in shopkeeping, goods in stores didn’t have prices. The customer and merchant would haggle over whatever basket of goods the customer wanted to purchase. The Quakers felt it was morally wrong to charge different customers different prices. While I disagree with the sentiment as obviously incorrect, their hyper-pietistic drive to be holier than Jesus caused them to stumble onto something useful. While it’s not morally wrong⁹, it is inefficient to haggle over every transaction. The concept of flat pricing quickly took over advanced economies because of these benefits, and today the hallmark of any retrograde economy are marketplaces where people would rather haggle to optimize short-term margins over long-term profits at scale.

As the twin reinforcing forces of the Industrial Revolution and free market capitalism accelerated, a new possible world began to dawn. No longer was prosperity best achieved by conquering and taxing others, but rather by voluntary trade serving customers. Tiny countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, or Switzerland could provide an outstanding standard of living for their people by embracing free market principles without the need for an empire. It inaugurated a world where the ambitious could see a path to advancement that eschewed organized violence. It was, in sum, a partial fulfillment of the promise that God’s law would be written on the hearts of His people. 

The summary of the Ten Commandments is to love God and love others. Conversely, the expository Biblical delineation of what it means to love God and others is the Ten Commandments. To love others means we do not steal from them, we do not murder them, we respect their marriages, we do not envy them, we do not lie about them, and we show proper respect to those in authority. Much of what we take for granted in modern capitalism was the outworking in the civil law and societal practices of the love required for others in the Ten Commandments.

We simply assume, for example, that it is normal to go to the store and buy pure, unadulterated products for pennies. When we buy milk, we have reasonable assurances it has not been diluted with water. When we buy ibuprofen, we can be confident it is not fake or dangerous. The laws and regulations that enable this confidence in commerce are part of the gospel’s work as all things are brought into subjection to Christ.

Before the Protestant Reformation declared the general equity of God’s Law a blueprint for civil society, the Roman, pagan principle of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) prevailed in the marketplace. Buyers had no protection under the law from unscrupulous sellers, and had to rely on their wits to protect their interests. 

Such a principle, besides being morally wrong, vastly increases transaction costs in the economy. If people cannot be certain of what they are buying compared to an objective standard, they must either rely on a few trusted providers on blind faith, or else continually be duped by those selling inferior goods. Commerce with strangers becomes almost impossible. The Christian principle of “do not steal” puts moral responsibility on sellers to ensure their goods are what they say they are, and leads to a more general prosperity.

The essence of the Industrial Revolution, then, was not merely technological but spiritual. It took the Protestant Reformation for man to finally take God’s law seriously, as it also resulted in the Counter-Reformation in Catholic countries. While retaining the essential doctrines of the Catholic faith (papal and church authority), the Counter-Reformation successfully purged Roman Catholic institutions of much of the hypocrisy and corruption that inspired Luther to make his break. The church also began to speak with more moral authority over the application of its teachings to everyday life, such as commerce. The Counter-Reformation, though reactionary, served much the same purpose in bringing the hearts of the people closer to God and his commandments.

These dual reformations enabled the economy to escape the negative-sum game of exploitation, cheating, and stealing for advantage. Instead, actors in the economy increasingly focused on sustainable, win-win advantages, such as better techniques and technologies for increased productivity. Greater prosperity was seen as evidence of God’s blessing of enterprise, and all were lifted up in a positive-sum game of producing more goods for more people.

The great Reformation theologians made clear that God’s commands are to our benefit, not harm. A more sinful society is a poorer society. Paul describes a poverty mindset in Ephesians:

“This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” Ephesians 4:17-19

Greediness is, in a sense, the essence of poverty. The essence of capitalism is to not consume all of one’s income, but rather to defer gratification and invest the savings into productive assets.

Post-Scarcity

Thankfully, the conditions necessary to bring about the Industrial Revolution were not a limit to the adoption of its technology. While England and Northwest Europe broke through the Malthusian trap first, the enabling technologies and practices were easily adopted by other groups, who were motivated to do so after seeing the prosperity that resulted. This miracle of capitalism, a mere 220 years since man began his rise from cyclical poverty, is now on the brink of eliminating severe poverty worldwide.

Now, if I may be granted a bit of speculative enthusiasm here, I will go further and say that free market capitalism is one of the culminations of the Great Commission. It is not the heart of the redemptive gospel, but its spread is one aspect of Christ’s increasing dominion over the Earth.

When Christ said that the greatest shall be the servant of all, could He have been referring to the coming age when economic cooperation, not oppression and stealing, would provide the greatest rewards? For indeed, it is largely true that those who serve others best are rewarded the most in a capitalist system. Could the people of the Roman Empire even imagine a world where buyers could get refunds not for outright fraud or deception, but for mere dissatisfaction with a product? Or a world where obesity is now more of a global public health threat than inadequate nutrition?

The Bible does speak in certain places of a future golden age that is much better than the world of the ancients but still lacking the perfection of eternity. See for example, Isaiah 65:20:

“Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed.”

The interesting thing about this passage is that it posits the marginalization but not complete eradication of death. This was unimaginable to the ancients, but capitalism, defined broadly, has brought about unbelievable, exponential improvements in life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty, and arguably, it has reduced sin. 

While the modern world is confused on a great many moral issues, Harvard professor Steven Pinker has provided voluminous data in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature to prove that violence, the most harmful form of sin, is in the midst of a multi-century decline. Amazingly, this holds true statistically even when accounting for the horrors of war and mass murder by totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. The advent of video coverage of faraway events has taken much of the power of violence away, as whatever benefits the perpetrator hopes to achieve will be undermined by the horror of a mass audience. It is no accident that the Vietnam War, as the first televised war, was the first war the American public did not uniformly support. 

I am also optimistic about the remaining moral confusion in our society. I believe it is no coincidence that information technologies have outpaced even the amazing material gains of the Industrial Revolution. The theological statement in John 1, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” implies that evil is essentially a negative force. It is an absence of truth and light, and as the barriers to communication fall, we should expect the eventual triumph of truth. The power of memes, or self-replicating ideas, become especially predictive when communication is frictionless. Even those who spread malevolent ideas mostly harm themselves.

There is ample evidence that the Left has poisoned itself most effectively with anti-family beliefs. Those with liberal beliefs have far fewer children, and political leanings are highly heritable, which means the future is more likely to be conservative. Many have convinced themselves that to reproduce would be a destructive act against the planet or, if they are white and convinced of Critical Race Theory, an act of white supremacism. One’s belief or rejection of the truth is somewhat self-fulfilling.

A pro-capitalist worldview derived from Scripture says that the material progress of mankind is a fulfillment of the gospel. When I drive by the incredibly dense heavy industry along the Gulf Coast corridor from Houston to New Orleans, I see people serving the common good and utilizing one of God’s great gifts, petroleum, to support billions of human lives. I look at history and see God preparing man for a time when he would begin to conquer the power of sin in the world through commerce over war, and then providing fossil fuels, hidden treasures in the Earth, as an accelerant. Without petroleum, and the 1918 Nobel-prize-winning discoveries of German chemist Fritz Haber to create petroleum-based nitrogen fertilizer, billions of people would not exist because they could not be fed.

In fact, it appears that God has placed just enough fossil fuels in the Earth to serve as a bridge to an even more prosperous, likely nuclear future. He could have created a world with little accessible petroleum and mankind would have eked out an existence just a bit above the beasts of the Earth for our entire history. God, in fact, blessed us with a world so bounteous in its resources that He clearly intended us to experience incredible wealth as a society, and delights in our blessing.

Contrast this view with the extreme environmentalist view, which says humans are nothing special, just another species, albeit an invasive one destroying the Earth’s pristine environment. The billions of people who exist now because of technology are parasites on the planet with an unacceptable “carbon footprint” - a phrase loaded with anti-life connotations since to breathe, eat, heat, and live, humans must produce carbon dioxide. Instead of our living on a planet custom-made by a loving God for our prosperity, this worldview says we are lucky fools, accidents of the multiverse, destined to a meaningless eventual extinction in the cold emptiness of space.

The essence of capitalism requires an implicit faith that serving others and improving their condition through trade is a moral good. We can be thankful that through common grace, the secular world still runs on the fumes of a Christian moral framework instead of embracing the full nihilism implied in their worldview.

Coda: Compassion for the Past

Acknowledging the rapid rise of wealth over the past 200 years can also give us a better understanding of the past. It is easy for us to stand in judgment, in our prosperity, of those who came before. We have no idea of the trauma and privation they endured, experiences of scarcity that harden people into seeking survival as an imperative before all else. 

Take the case of Paul Revere. Revere had 16 children in total, 8 with his first wife Sarah, who died, and 8 with his second wife, Rachel. Of Revere’s 8 children from his first marriage, only one daughter survived him. In his time, even in relatively healthy and prosperous New England, children were not named before they turned two years old because so many died, as they did not want to “waste” a beloved family name on a child who passed. As late as 1852, one million people died in a famine in Ireland. 

That you exist today means you have ancestors who managed, under brutal conditions compared to our own, to rear children who survived and had children themselves in an unbroken line back to Creation. They suffered¹⁰, much more than we do, the brutal sentence of the Fall of Man in the Malthusian era. We possess the most meaningful privilege imaginable, that of chronology. None of us would trade our place in the modern world for the life of John D. Rockefeller, when no amount of gold could purchase a dose of penicillin to save a dying child. Yet we stand on their shoulders, enjoying unimaginable prosperity in the world they built and gave to us.

1. Everyone can probably agree that this requires Christians to be open to the fruitfulness of children in marriage if God blesses a couple with fertility. Where things can get heated is debating exactly what this looks like. One child only to check the box and maybe reduce one’s carbon footprint? As many as possible to fill the quiver? I think wisdom calls for something in between these two extremes, but I’ve learned to keep quiet because nothing makes a modern Christian angrier than Biblical specificity infringing on personal autonomy, but since you’re reading a footnote I’ll get more specific. Normatively, that is, making room for exceptions like infertility, extreme poverty, or illness, mathematically this means three or more children to lead to a net increase from two individuals forming a marriage. Societally, families must average three or more to account for the historical 20-30% of people who never marry or have children, such that >2.1 is achieved per capita.

2. Clark names his books as puns of Hemingway titles. His other published book is The Son Also Rises and his forthcoming work is entitled For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls. Clark’s work is authoritative because of his use of comprehensive English demographic data (birth records, probate, property records) going back to the Domesday Book of 1086. Among his surprising findings is that social mobility, i.e. the ability of people to improve their lot in life over that of their parents, was about the same in medieval Europe as it is today. This challenges our prejudice in showing that medieval Europe was a more open society than we imagine, while hereditary influences play a larger role in modern life than we would like to think.

3. The Scots-Irish are, ethnically speaking, lowland Scots, not Irish. The British Crown, after uniting with Scotland, thought they could use these tough, low church Protestants as a buffer class of warriors to subdue Ireland. They lured the lowland Scots to Ireland with promises of land and privilege, but then quickly reneged on the deal by charging outrageous rents on land and privileging Anglicanism over the Presbyterianism of the Scots. They migrated yet again when smart American proprietors lured these now “Scots-Irish” to the American frontier to farm the mediocre land in the mountains while protecting the wealthier coastal English colonists from Native Americans. Appalachia became the only stable homeland this group had ever known in their history. They proved very capable, though ruthless, Indian fighters and have provided the tip of the spear of United States military combat forces since our founding. An accessible, sympathetic history of the Scots-Irish is Born Fighting by former Senator and Secretary of the Navy James Webb.

4. Interestingly, these counties have violent crime rates well below the national average despite their poverty, which tends to advise against typical Marxist apologetics for crime. In my first job, I supervised mostly mountain people at a factory in extreme north Georgia. They are the sweetest, most agreeable people you could meet. My guess is that the violent and ambitious moved further west, following the frontier.

5. From Roman History, Book LVI by Cassius Deo.

6. As discussed separately, pagan societies were also built on exploitation rather than production, and sometimes they ran out of resources or new peoples to conquer. Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies analyzes the economics of these empires.

7. Some have expressed concern that modern welfare states, in subsidizing the non-productive by taxing the productive, are reversing this process. There seems to be some evidence for this in recent polygenic analyses. For example, people with genes predisposed towards mental illness are having more children than people with genes associated with higher education and cognitive ability.

8. The Quakers were pacifists, but wily. Since they could not personally take up arms against Native American attacks on their cities, they eagerly funded militias for others to do so. They were also key in recruiting the Scots-Irish as a buffer population in the Pennsylvania countryside, while heavily discouraging their settlement in cities where their rude manners might disrupt polite society. This is why Pennsylvania can be described today as “Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and Alabama in the middle.”

9. See, for example, Christ’s direct contradiction of this in The Parable of the Laborers. We are obligated to keep our word, not treat everyone the same.

10. This poverty and scarcity is very recent, especially for those of us from poorer parts of the country. Perhaps this is why “privilege” type frameworks ring hollow for me. My grandmother had to chop wood to wash clothes. My grandfather had a stroke in his 20s and, with no social safety net, continued to farm, dragging his bum foot behind him in a sack while pushing a plow. Neither of my parents had indoor plumbing until they were teenagers. And none of them had air conditioning in the thick, humid Gulf Coast heat.