A Scottish Presbyterian clergyman as well as a lecturer on divinity, mathematics, and political economy at St. Andrew’s and Edinburgh, Thomas Chalmers maintained that economic laws were beautiful as well as utilitarian. Celebrating the “thriving interchange of commodities” in The Application of Christianity to the Commercial and Ordinary Affairs of Life (1820), Chalmers marveled at the “beauteous order” of the market, wrought by the “presiding Divinity” who “compasses all his goings.” God’s grace could enrapture and fructify the apparently sordid dealings of business, “impregnating our minutest transactions with the spirit of the gospel.” Chalmers envisioned the plenitude of grace available to all who asked, a “great stream of supply, which comes direct from Heaven to earth.” This grace-filled abundance ensured success in the market, the sign and seal of “a beauteous character.”8

But as Thomas Malthus and other Christian economists proved, such beauty truly was in the eye of the beholder. Scarcity, evil, and suffering played positive roles in the evangelical theodicy of capitalism. To many of the evangelical economists, our expulsion from the Garden of Eden was not a punishment, but an opportunity. In the evangelical gospel of scarcity, privation was excellent news: the lashes of adversity and competition would compel us into moral and material improvement. Malthus and Nassau Senior led the way among evangelical economists in redefining evil as a necessary good. In his infamous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) Malthus—an instructor at Haileybury College, the training school for administrators of the East India Company, as well as an Anglican pastor—asserted that want, conflict, and other agonies were parts of a godly metaphysical and moral architecture. Human life, he asserted, is “a state of trial and school of virtue preparatory to a superior state of happiness.” Departing from the mainstream of Christian theology since Augustine, Malthus argued that moral evils and natural calamities were “absolutely necessary to the production of moral excellence … instruments employed by the Deity” to spur industriousness and ingenuity. Malthus’s insistence on the goodness of disaster rested on a toilsome, penurious sacramentality, an ontology of dearth and meanness designed by an omnipotent but skinflint deity. Life is “the mighty process of God,” he insisted, “a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit.” “The finger of God is, indeed, visible in every blade of grass that we see,” and among the “animating touches of the Divinity” is the salutary character of evil. “Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.” (If it failed to spur industry, then, Malthus wrote in the 1826 edition, “we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality”—i.e., the death of the poor.) Senior—first professor of political economy at Oxford, and a protégé of Whately’s—told students in 1830 that God and nature “decreed that the road to good shall be through evil—that no improvement shall take place in which the general advantage shall not be accompanied by partial suffering.” So rather than look to reform or revolution to end their miserable condition, evangelicals such as Cobden advised workers that they should abide by “the principle of competition which God has set up in this wicked world as the silent arbiter of our fate.”9 The God of Love consigned the poor and dispossessed to a lifelong Calvary road.

From Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher. From the footnotes it looks like the Malthus quotes are all from An Essay on the Principle of Population he references above. Honestly, I mostly know Malthus through references in singular works this and through the Marxian critique of his theory of ground rent and related political economy/ecology (the ecoMarxists especially deal a lot with this); maybe I'm completely ignorant of some humanitarian side of Malthus, but he kinda strikes me as a cold blooded, hypercapitalistic evangelist. I'll agree 100% he's more of a doomer than an ecofascist, but does this doomerism really result in an expression of compassion rather than contempt for the poor? I totally admit to not having actually read him beyond his being quoted by other writers, so once again I am absolutely open to my being ignorant, but I've just never heard a leftist, or at least a proper Communist, say a positive thing about Malthus.