Welcome to Episode 82 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will cover one of the greatest fears of our time, and the religious foundation of that fear. In previous episodes we saw that fear is the most powerful emotion people experience, and, judging from its prominence in the Bible, it is also the most important. We also saw that fear itself has a religious foundation and nature; and more than that, it is also a religion itself. (Ever been in a situation where you tell people paralyzed by fear that they shouldn’t be afraid, only to see them lash at you as if you were some sort of a heretic?)

In 1798, an English pastor and scholar, Thomas Robert Malthus, published a book: An Essay on the Principle of Population. On the surface, it was just another scholarly thesis that came out of the Enlightenment. Of the right wing of the Enlightenment, to be precise, the one prevalent in England and Scotland and Prussia and Hanover, not the left wing, prevalent in France and Italy. The Enlightenment’s standards for all scholarship were that it was supposed to be as technical and mathematical as science, and, most importantly, free of any ethical values and considerations. Yes, even the right wing Enlightenment, the one that was driven by church ministers (as was Malthus himself) and used religious language and rhetoric as its justification. From this Enlightenment perspective, Malthus’s book was the perfect scholarly thesis.

His topic was simple: the relationship between food production and population growth. It wasn’t anything new, to be sure, others before had tried that topic as well. It was a particularly common topic among the educated elite of revolutionary France – after all, that’s how the French Revolution started, with the people starving because of an alleged depletion of the resources for food production. A few revolutionary leaders argued that for France to remain full and content, about a quarter of the population should be exterminated to match the land available for food production. These ideas were, however, a little too extreme even for the French taste at the time; besides, most of their proponents – like Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton – were themselves guillotined. Similar ideas were floated in Prussia as well, although the Prussian monarchy, always in need of more soldiers, never took them seriously. So Malthus was not writing in a vacuum, the topic had already become “hot” among Enlightenment theorists on both right and left. He was, however, destined to become the father of a whole new trend with his theory. Why? Because he was much better educated than all previous writers, he was capable to write about in a perfectly technical, rather disinterested way (quite creepy, given the horrible bloodthirsty advice he was giving the political elite), and he was writing in a country that was politically stable and socially stratified, where scholars and church ministers like him had quite an audience and influence. He had the privilege of coming from a well-educated family, as well. His father, Daniel Malthus, was a non-Conformist (probably from an old Puritan family) and personal friend of men like David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thomas took orders in the Church of England, contrary to his father’s religious views, probably to avoid the non-conformist disabilities and be able to take positions as a college professor. There was also another point where he disagreed with his father: unlike his father, who was a staunch optimist about the future, Thomas was a pessimist. And his book was the ultimate expression of his pessimistic views.

In a very short sentence, the thesis of the Essay on the Principle of Population is that the prospects for humanity are bleak. Why? Because, as Malthus explained in mathematical terms, while the world’s population grows geometrically, the means for food production only grow arithmetically. That is the simplest and most popular way of presenting his thesis. In reality, however, his thesis was a little more complicated. He had to make it more complicated in order to add respectable Christina religious language to it, in order to conceal his true intentions. A fuller explanation of his thesis would be this: There is a certain number of population that matches the available resources for food production. However, when food production increases, mankind – and especially the lower classes of mankind – are not wise enough to maintain the same stable rate of human reproduction with the purpose of achieving higher standard of life. Instead, they are stupid enough to start reproducing more and more, exponentially. Eventually that exponential human reproduction catches up with and even overtakes food production, and people, even with the new and higher level of food production, are left much poorer and hungrier than before. That point where human reproduction catches up with food production has come to be called Malthusian catastrophe by sociologists, and the level at which the excess population stops growing due to shortage of food is called Malthusian trap. In short, all that Malthus’s analysis promised humanity was inevitable suffering in the future, marked by short periods of prosperity which, because of the very nature of humanity – especially of the poorer humanity – will inevitably lead to more and worse suffering.

When he came to his policy proposals, he had to conceal the true nature of his religion under a lot of pious verbiage. He used long-winded phrases and metaphoric language for regular phrases (for example, “virtuous affection” instead of “marriage,” etc.) to satisfy the spirit of the time and especially the academic spirit of the time; but to make his proposals acceptable, he had to pretend that his motives were honest and virtuous. When asked why God would create a world of limited resources for a growing population, his answer was that this was so that God teaches us prudence in procreation. But under the verbose expression of love and concern for the poor and needy, he practically declared that the political elite must do everything they could to prevent the masses from achieving any sort of prosperity, even if that meant artificially created shortages. He was in favor of government taxes on food so high as to keep sufficiency of food beyond the reach of the average family; in his view, the masses of people needed to be kept at the brink of starvation even in years of abundant crops. In his pious language, it was better to be poor than foolish and use the abundance for more irresponsible procreation. He didn’t even shy of recommending violent death as a final measure; since natural famine and pestilence didn’t always do their job in regulating the population, he believed governments should finish the job by starting wars just for the sake of thinning out the population.

In the final account, behind the seemingly dispassionate academic language, there was evil. His proposals, no matter how dressed they were in religious lingo, smacked of the ideology of the ancient pagan empires, especially the Biblical Assyria. The last time Europe had encountered such ideas and policies was in the last three decades of the 14^th century when Tamerlane, a distant relative of Genghis Khan, tried to restore the Mongol Empire. Tamerlane was so systematic in exterminating whole populations that he beat even Genghis Khan himself. However, ever since the 14^th century, no one in the known world ever used such policies nor advocated for them, not even the Ottoman Turks. (They had their share of atrocities but, in general, the Sultans viewed conquered populations as sheep to be bred and milked and sheared, not as vermin to be destroyed.) Malthus brought back to life ideas that everyone before him thought should have passed away with the passing of paganism.

I will touch later on the influence of Malthus’s ideas in the last two centuries, and especially in our day. But before we do that, we need to first look into the religious origin of these ideas, and especially into the religious climate these ideas both require, and help create or recreate. Where did he get his ideas from? Is it possible that a Christian scholar come up with such ideology of cruelty? Is there really a Christian justification for Malthusianism, and Malthus claimed? Or could there be something else behind it, religiously? We all know that ideas have consequences. But I have argued before, in some of my articles, that ideas are themselves consequences of something deeper and greater than ideology – namely, faith. Ideology is always based on some religion, and even when we present our ideas in a seemingly rational and unbiased and academic form, they are still religious in their origin. There is still some deep moral commitment, some deep religious impulse that drives our ideology. I can bring in tons of quotes from Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen here to illustrate what I am talking about, but I prefer this short phrase by Dennis Peacocke which beautifully explains presuppositional epistemology in general and my argument here: “The mind only justifies what the heart has already chosen.”

So, what was it that Malthus’s heart had chosen that his mind masterfully justified in that book?

I have a name for the religion behind his thesis: Paganism of a Closed Universe. Or, a Closed-Universe Paganism, if you wish. Those who have studied physics know that I am borrowing a term from physics: Closed System. A closed system is a system that doesn’t allow the transfer of mass or energy in or out of the system. In the same way, a closed universe is a universe that does not allow any transfer of energy in or out of the universe. All that there is, is inside the uni...