To know the actual economic history of enrichment and civilization, you have to know the numbers. Most people don’t. People got rich and civilized by liberty, not by coercion.

Let’s be clear ethically. Imperi­alism, as in South Asia, was very bad. Enslaving people, as in West Africa, was too. So was shooting striking workers, as in Ken­tucky. There are no excuses for the Opium Wars or King Leopold II in the Congo or the U.S. seizure of the Philip­pines or Ford’s goons beating up workers at the Battle of the Overpass. Stealing, coercion, murder are evil.
Wealth and its civilization, though, did not depend on the evil. The Left channels Vladimir Lenin in claiming that the West got rich by robbing the poor. And the Right channels Theodore Roosevelt in claiming that the world got civilized by conquering the poor. Both sides are wrong. People got rich and civilized by liberty, not by coercion.
To know the actual economic history of enrichment and civilization, you have to know the numbers. Most people don’t. The surpassingly wise Swedish professor of public health Hans Rosling reported that even well-informed people score worse than a chimp would throwing darts at the numbers. People think that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. They think that economic growth is perpetually threatened by new headwinds requiring urgent tacking by the ship of state. They think that things are worse than ever. They think that The End Is Near. And in reaction to such horror movies, they think that perhaps a bit of tyranny from left or right would be a Good Thing.
No. Nearly forever, from the caves until about two centuries ago, the average human, except for a few lords and priests, dragged along in today’s prices on less than $2 a day. Try living on $2 a day. Some people still do: South Sudan. Then, from 1800 (or 1900 or 1960) to the present, a Great Enrichment, dwarfing the mere doubling in the so-called Industrial Revolution of 1750 to 1850, made the average human 25 times richer. The number nowadays in the same prices is about $50 a day. Think China, Brazil, and Botswana. And Finland, Ireland, and Iceland, once miserable and colonized, stand well above $100 a day. At $50 or $100 a day, people get food instead of famine, long lives in­stead of parasites, Ph.D.s instead of illiteracy, high-rises instead of hovels.
Every nasty jerk in history has stolen, and usually gotten away with it. As Gibbon said in 1776, “history is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” So stealing by imperialism and enslavement caused the Great Enrichment, yes?
No. Do the numbers. If you seized your neighbor’s house and her stuff and enslaved her husband, you might get 20 percent richer. Maybe 50. Call it 100. Great for you. “Foreigners shall rebuild your walls,” said the Lord to Jerusalem through His prophet Isaiah, “and their kings shall be your servants…Your gates shall be open continuously…that through them may be brought the wealth of nations and their kings under escort.” Good for Jerusalem. In the zero-sum world before 1800, stealing and enslaving got the jerks 10, 50, even 100 percent richer. Hallelujah.
But the Great Enrichment has been two-and-a-half thousand percent. By fourth-grade arithmetic, the present $50 minus the miserable base in 1800 of $2 is $48, which divided by the base is about a factor of 25, or about that 2,500 percent. Blimey. Stealing can’t come remotely close to accounting for it. Stealing from the wretched of the earth doesn’t even sound like a good criminal plan. And anyway, stealing from Peter to pay Paul can’t enrich both, and certainly not by 2,500 percent.
Consider, for example, British imperialism. Half of the Royal Navy, which was paid for by Britons at home, was assigned to protect the sea routes to India. Glorious. Yet India itself yielded no stolen benefit to the average Briton. Not a shilling. India traded with Britain, sure. But trade is not stealing, and the trade would have happened regardless of whether the Raj was Britain or France or the domestic rajas.
Straightforward stealing from India happened only once. A window opened after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 through which some bold thieves en­tered. Robert Clive of India and Warren Hastings and some other nabobs made fortunes by stealing. Clive remarked that in view of his opportunities, “by God,…I stand astonished at my own moderation.” Then the stealing stopped and the paying for the glory began, as did a little peaceful trade of Sri Lankan tea and Indian jute for Lancashire dhotis and Yorkshire railway locomotives. And as rich as Clive and his fellow nabobs briefly became, their enrichment was trivial in national terms. Clive’s wealth at his death was half of one-tenth of 1 percent of Britain’s. Nice to have, you say, roughly $200 million nowadays. But it’s not average-enrichment-making, then or now. It’s a fly on the scale.
Something therefore is deeply screwy about blaming the West’s undoubted stealing and enslaving and other mal­feasance for the poverty that remains. While the malfeasance was taking place, humans for the first time went from misery to sufficiency, and they can now look forward in a few more generations to universal enrichment. As late as 1960, 4 billion out of the 5 billion souls on the planet earned the old $2 a day. Now it’s 1 billion out of nearly 8 billion, and truly rich places that were once shockingly poor, such as the Italian South or South Korea or South Tyrol, multiply.
Stealing does not a Great Enrichment make. Our friends on the left claim that rich people stealing from the English working class around 1800 resulted in…uh…everyone getting richer by a factor of 25. Huh? You break into your neighbor’s house and, like the assassin in the 2002 Tom Hanks gangster movie Road to Perdition, you brutally murder Hanks’s wife and one of his sons. Then you make off with his stuff. Out of this, says the Left, the real incomes of everyone—you, Hanks, his other son, the gangster boss, everyone—rise by 2,500 percent.
It’s Monty Python loony. In 1930 the spoof of English history 1066 and All That put it this way: “Many remarkable discoveries and inventions were made [about the year 1800]. Most re­markable among these was the discovery (made by all the rich men in England at once) that women and children could work for 25 hours a day…without many of them dying or becoming excessively deformed. This was known as the Industrial Revelation.”
After all, the historical problem with the hypothesis of stealing for enrichment is that stealing is historically commonplace, yet it never resulted in a Great Enrichment. Until it did. Whoops. What kind of a historical explanation is that?
And the economic problem is that the Enrichment after 1800 was so very Great that it can’t possibly be explained by routine projects, whether financed by evil stealing or by virtuous abstention from consumption. Canals, for example. Projects such as the Swedish state’s stealing of the conscripted labor of 58,000 soldiers to dig the Göta Canal from Söderköping to Gothenburg be­tween 1810 and 1832 face sharply diminishing returns. Normal capital accumulation does. That’s besides being economically idiotic in this case, and in the case of most of the canals that were financed as nice-sounding “internal improvements” in the United States during the 1830s. Compare stealing tax money to build a high-speed railway between L.A. and San Francisco. Just sayin’.
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One of the most important and striking characteristics of Hoste was his prayer life—and related to that, his true humility before God and in his ministry. Hoste never sought fame or power. Instead, he was determined that his name and reputation would be subsumed under the desire to see Jesus get all the honor for everything. Hoste “lived to be forgotten” because he chose to be “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3).

Dixon Edward Hoste (1861–1946) was a British missionary who served in China for over 40 years. Although he succeeded James Hudson Taylor as the general director of the China Inland Mission (CIM), much less has been written and recorded of his life and ministry than of Taylor’s.
This is not, however, because Hoste lacked achievements and contributions to the mission in China. He was instrumental to CIM’s development not only in terms of organization and mission mobilization but also in the indigenous principles that encouraged Chinese churches to self-grow and rely less on Western missionaries, as well as in dealing with the difficult Boxer Rebellion aftermath with grace and “the power of gentleness,” as former CT editor in chief David Neff put it.
One of the most important and striking characteristics of Hoste was his prayer life—and related to that, his true humility before God and in his ministry. Hoste never sought fame or power. Instead, he was determined that his name and reputation would be subsumed under the desire to see Jesus get all the honor for everything. Hoste “lived to be forgotten” because he chose to be “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3).
Talking to God
Dixon E. Hoste was born on July 23, 1861, four years before CIM’s founding. Both his father and his grandfather were military men. When Dixon was 17, he entered the Royal Military Academy. At 18, he received his commission as a lieutenant to serve in the Royal Artillery.
Three years later, in 1882, Dixon’s elder brother, William, invited him to attend a special meeting in Brighton where the speaker was the American evangelist D. L. Moody. Phyllis Thompson, author of D. E. Hoste: A Prince with God (the primary biographical source in this article), described the scene. When Moody prayed, Thompson wrote, Dixon felt that he “talked as though God was there, as though he knew him, as a man talks to a friend. He talked as though God could be depended upon to do his work in men’s hearts, right then and there.” Hoste was converted at the meeting. Moody’s prayer left a deep impression on him that shaped his own prayer life over the next 40 years.
It did not take long before Hoste came across Hudson Taylor’s little bookChina: Its Spiritual Need and Claims. Hoste was captured by Taylor’s call for missionaries to serve “four hundred millions of souls, ‘having no hope, and without God’” in China. Hoste wrote to the London office of the CIM in 1883 and offered himself to be a candidate.

However, the reference letter from the vicar of Sandown, Isle of Wight, W. T. Storrs, was not totally encouraging. On Hoste’s application form (in the OMF International archive) Storrs praised Hoste’s Christian character, calling him “a straightforward fellow, with much love and faith.” But he also characterized Hoste as naturally shy, a little impulsive, not able to teach well, not very enterprising, and not “naturally fitted” for missionary work—with a disclaimer of “but I may be mistaken.”

Though the clergyman’s assessment wasn’t very hopeful, Thompson writes, members of the London Council took note of the spiritual stature of this quiet young man. He was clearly humble and sincere and even in his youth demonstrated balanced judgment and foresight.
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This downgrade involves compromise on theological levels such as complementarianism (roles of men and women in the church), ecclesiology (the office and function of elder), and most important of all is the gospel (the social justice movement has replaced theology with victimology—resulting in the rise of a new religion). For that reason, our church which is 180 years old and predates the SBC by three years, has determined by a 100% congregational vote led by the elders who voted in a 100% eldership vote to lead the church away from the SBC due to such compromise. The SBC has failed. The leaders have compromised. 

One of the great joys of my life has been serving as the pastor of three different churches that have been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. I currently serve the church where my wife and I grew up as children on the west side of Atlanta—Pray’s Mill Baptist Church. Although our church is 180 years old and predates the SBC, our congregation has maintained a longtime affiliation within the SBC. However, in recent days we came to the conclusion that there was no profitable path forward for us within the SBC and we made the decision to officially separate.
Over the last few years, there has been a great deal of transition and change within the Southern Baptist Convention. That’s a nice way of describing the devious deconstruction plan that has been at work for many years behind the scenes. Along the way, we have witnessed scandals, controversies, and division. It is not my desire in this article to add fuel to the fire, however, as a lifelong SBC member and pastor I believe it’s necessary to provide a reason for our church’s decision to officially separate from the SBC effective on January 1st, 2022.
The Commendable
What I will say in this article should not be seen as a denial of the fact that there are many good and gifted professors who are serving in the SBC entities and doing a good job of training men for the pulpit and church planting. When I look back on my time at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I am grateful for many of the professors who invested in me and helped prepare me for the work of gospel ministry.
Alongside professors are many good pastors and local churches who have been healthy and profitable in supporting Christian education and church planting for many years within this network that we know as the SBC. Therefore, we can be thankful for these gifted individuals and churches who have sacrificed much to accomplish much for the glory of God.
But, all is not well within evangelicalism and that also includes the SBC. In recent years, we’ve witnessed quite a transformation take place within the once beloved SBC that has necessitated separation for what I believe is far more than preference matters.
The Downgrade
Over the past decade or more, things began to shift with the SBC leadership that moved the once theologically conservative denomination in a leftward direction. The biggest catalyst to this leftward movement undoubtedly was the acceptance of the social justice agenda which has resulted in the greatest downgrade in our modern era of church history. Any denial of this downgrade is simply a refusal to report the facts about where the SBC is today, where the SBC was yesterday, and where the SBC is moving tomorrow.
While this shift did not take place overnight, it began to pick up the pace drastically over the last 4-5 years. Back in 2018, I was part of a group who assembled in Dallas, Texas for a meeting regarding the problems of social justice. As we assembled, I was concerned but hopeful. Little did I know that our meeting and subsequent Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel would not only serve as a means of confirming what was already in motion beneath the radar, but it would expose many people and institutions within the SBC and their involvement in this devious movement.
Sadly, the top tier SBC leaders continue to double down on their positions. They have sought to deflect charges of theological capitulation and rigorously work to protect their positions through cultural virtue signals and theological word salads.
During this downgrade we have witnessed once trusted voices and institutions accept the ideologies of the social justice movement and platform notable voices within their hallways, classrooms, and conference circuits. They came together under the banner of the gospel only to embrace a social justice gospel that resulted in confusion, division, and in some cases—a complete derailing altogether. This must not be overlooked. If left unchecked, the social justice agenda will leave an indelible mark upon preachers who will be sent out into local churches to serve as pastor.
The SBC once fought a war on the inerrancy of Scripture during what has become known as the “Conservative Resurgence.” After claiming a victory over the “Battle for the Bible” the SBC has moved into a new era where this once theologically conservative denomination has adopted the controversial “Resolution 9” at the 2019 SBC in Birmingham. How could the SBC who openly champions inerrancy at the same time adopt a resolution stating that we need to employ Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality (CRT/I) as “analytical tools” for gospel ministry? This was done, in all reality, without much public debate and through sly political schemes.
Moving beyond the 2019 SBC, after a break in 2020 due to COVID-19, the SBC reconvened in Nashville in the summer of 2021 to discuss business and make decisions as a group of churches. During the meeting, there were multiple attempts from the floor to call upon the SBC to openly renounce the teachings of CRT/I. At each juncture, all of these attempts were rejected and generic language was adopted in place of specific language that openly rejected CRT/I.
One must ask the honest question as to why there was such an open refusal from the SBC leaders at this point? In the past, the SBC openly challenged Disney and eventually boycotted Disney in 1997. One must ask why the SBC was willing to boycott the gospel according to Disney but failed to boycott the gospel according to social justice?
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