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The cosmic battle for economics: Toppling ideological idols with Christian wisdom

When I began my freshman year of college, I didn’t care much about economics. Having been raised in a conservative Christian home, I had adopted a generically pro-capitalism shtick, but it wasn’t much to stand on. As I arrived at my left-leaning Christian college, that lack of foundation soon became clear. I found myself swirling amid campus debates about “economic justice,” infused with lofty religious language. Progressive economic policies were championed with social-gospel gusto and the Acts-2 arguments for socialism...

Political idolatry: A Lutheran view

Is faith in politics “another Gospel”? A distinguished Lutheran scholar has weighed in on the matter, clearly delineating a Christian’s duty as a citizen from his duty to the Christ and his fellow body of believers. Gene Veith, the noted professor, provost, and editor, weighs in on the topic after taking notice of Acton’s article on President Trump’s recent “King of Israel” controversy. In his blogatPatheos, Veith shares insights gleaned from Lutheranism’s traditional “Two Kingdoms” theology. “The state’s purview is...

Fact check: 5 facts about the third Democratic debate of 2019

The Democratic Party held its third presidential debate on Thursday night. The 10 hopefuls made at least five proposals that were based on erroneous premises or that would harm the country. 1. Wealth inequality is destroying the world. Senator Bernie Sanders said he felt it was “unfair” pare his version of democratic socialism with the version practiced in Venezuela. But he distinguished himself from most of the field by promising bat wealth inequality: To me, democratic socialism means we deal...

UN climate chief: Stop worrying and have babies

Climate change may well be a problem, but the chief of the United Nations’ agency on climate says it won’t destroy the world – and shouldn’t stop young people from having children. Alarmist rhetoric from “doomsters and extremists” that babies will destroy the planet “resembles religious extremism” and “will only add to [young women’s] burden” by “provoking anxiety,” he said. Petteri Taalas is no “climate-change denier.” He is secretary-general of theWorld Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UN’s special agency on weather...

U.S. surges into top 5 economically free nations

For the second year in a row, the United States has increased its ranking in parison of the world’s freest economies. The good news came as the Fraser Institute released its annual “Economic Freedom of the World” report this morning. “The U.S. has ascended back into the top five most economically-free countries in the world,” said Fred McMahon, research chair at the Fraser Institute, which is based in Canada. The United States fell to 16th place in 2015 but rebounded...

Charles Dickens, poverty, and emotional arguments

Why is it that the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century is so often our go-to mental paradigm for poverty? CapX’s John Ashmore, for instance, recently wrote of those who “feel an argument about poverty is plete without claiming we’ve somehow gone back to the 19th century.” Were there no poor people before that? (There were, obviously.) There are a number of possible answers – an increase in the concentration of poverty with growing urbanization and industrialization, which made poverty...

Status and function: Drucker on the keys to a functioning society

This is the fifth in a series of essays on Peter Drucker’s early works. Peter Drucker published The Future of Industrial Man in the midst of World War II (1942). He was conscious of the need to defeat authoritarian governments beyond the battlefield. Free societies would have to prove themselves superior or the problems of fascism munism would continue to recur. In the book, he offered a formulation that he would go on to repeat in many other books and...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

Adam Smith and the Poor

Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....

Jun 30, 2026

Jesus and Class Warfare

Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...

Jun 30, 2026

C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender

From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...

Jun 30, 2026

Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church

Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...

Jun 30, 2026

Up from the Liberal Founding

During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...

Jun 30, 2026

Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi

In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...

Jun 30, 2026

Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley

Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...

Jun 30, 2026

Mistaken About Poverty

Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...

Jun 30, 2026

Creating an Economy of Inclusion

The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...

Jun 30, 2026

How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind

Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...

Jun 30, 2026