U.S. stock markets continue to stagger over fear of the impacts of President Trump’s tariff announcements. “When you get this kind of economic scare, there can be some volatility that’s quite prolonged,” explained David Bahnsen, founder and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, on “Washington Watch.” “It’s both a stock market, and a real economy, and small business impact.”

One way of measuring the health of the economy — or, conversely, the risk of recession — is with consumer confidence. Confident consumers are more willing to spend, which helps keep businesses in the black. The Consumer Confidence Index had already fallen by 7.2 points in March, before the full tariff schedule was released on April 2, with the Consumer Expectations Index dropping 9.6 points to a 12-year low of 65.2.

Bahnsen recognized “the self-fulfilling prophecy” that low consumer confidence can contribute to a recession. “When there’s a lot of fear … people get afraid and say, ‘I’m not going to go to the mall.’ Candidly, if people are really afraid of their job right now, they shouldn’t be going to the mall.”

“On the other hand, it’s not to me about the consumer; it’s about the producer,” Bahnsen added. “This idea that our economy is built on people spending money is just not true. Our economy is built on us producing things. Now, of course, we produce things so people will enjoy them, but it becomes wealth-additive. … Consumption takes away wealth.”

“The Keynesian notion — the statist notion, the central planning idea from the 20th century — was an economics of subtraction, this idea that mankind is just built to go spend money and gratify themselves, and [that] that’s where you get economic growth,” he continued. “It’s just not true. So, I really believe that the fear issue is true, but it’s more on the production side than consumption.”

“This is something that’s very important to me theologically, but also economically,” Bahnsen declared. “It’s the most important Christian tenet in all of economics. Our belief in economics is one of addition and multiplication: ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.’ That’s what Christians believe in about the economy.”

Bahnsen was referencing Genesis 1:28, where God blessed the first human couple, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28).

In the next chapter, God places the first man Adam “in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15), strongly suggesting that God created the man to work. This work then becomes the subject of the curse addressed to Adam after his fall into sin (Genesis 3:17-19). Much later, the apostle Paul describes how work is one way to fulfill the Christian duty to love our neighbor, “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need” (Ephesians 4:28).

So, human beings were made to work, as a fundamental part of the creation order itself. Bahnsen is therefore correct to identify production, not consumption, as the most fundamental driver of the economy.

Interestingly, however, consumption also appears in the very next verse of the creation narrative. God adds to his blessing, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food” (Genesis 1:29).

This leads us to another important truth: everything we consume is a gift from God. In one sense, it is true that human consumption is made possible by human production. We work to produce goods that we can then use. But, in a more fundamental sense, both the labor and its fruit are gifts — “blessings,” to use Genesis’s language — from God.

And, while production is our duty, consumption should not be our anxiety because God can and will take care of his creatures. “You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth,” wrote the psalmist. God’s creatures “all look to you, to give them their food in due season” (Psalm 104:14, 27-28). In fact, even if “the young lions suffer want and hunger,” David reflected, “those who seek the Lord lack no good thing” (Psalm 34:10).

These theological reflections informed our Lord Jesus, who extended the same theme in the Sermon on the Mount, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:25-26).

These calm comforting words fundamentally conflict with the worldly economic philosophy that seeks to artificially inflate consumption as an anti-recession tactic. At worst, this worldview indulges in its own brand of economic anxiety. At best, this philosophy takes the Father’s loving, individual provision for each of his creatures and reduces it to a statistic.

Too much focus on economic consumption has caused other problems in America, such as “Men without Work,” as Nicholas Eberstadt describes in his book by that name. “We need more able-bodied men that want to work,” Bahnsen urged. “They talk all the time like our only problem is a decline of jobs. But we had a decline of workers, and those are two different things.” In fact, America has seen “not only a decline of workers, but a decline of skilled workers,” Perkins agreed. “When you look for bricklayers, you know, we’re not training people to do that anymore. That’s why there [are] so many people coming into this country to provide that manual labor.”

“When you look at that consumption side, that’s also what is driving our idea that the world is overpopulated,” Perkins continued. Focusing on consumption has contributed to the “idea that we don’t need children because they’re consumers rather than producers.”

A pro-work, pro-family policy would cherish domestic industries, reward honest labor, and value children. Of course, focusing on economic production does not require ignoring concerns on the consumption side of the ledger. For instance, rising costs of living (whether from tariffs, inflation, congestion, or any other cause) make it more difficult to support a family on a modest salary or wage, thus disincentivizing some types of good honest work. Christians should embrace all honest work as good and support sensible policies that make it possible for working-class families to survive economically.

Meanwhile, a cacophony of alarms is issuing from the production side of the American economy. “I got 100 calls on Thursday, Friday, and over the weekend — 83% of whom voted for President Trump — absolutely petrified about what these tariffs represent to their business,” Bahnsen warned. When would-be investors can’t calculate the return on their investment due to economic uncertainty, “they’re going to sit on it, they’re going to delay, they’re going to cancel. They might diminish — like they were going to do something that was a 10, and now they’re going to do a five.”

“The president did go about treating our friends and our foes the same. And I think that was personally a mistake, both economically and politically,” he added. “Where you get a self-fulfilling prophecy is when there’s a decline in production, a decline in capital goods, a decline in capital investments that make and build and do the things that lead to real economic output.” Real economic output is measured not by consumption but by production, which comes through work, which is what God made us to do.