131 Million. This is not a population statistic, nor is it the answer to some clever math problem. It’s the number of people you reached through Acton over the past year.
Your support made possible a wide range of conferences, publications, media products, television interviews, and social media outreach that impacted leaders around the globe. For this, we are truly grateful.
As you know, Acton has been promoting liberty and virtue for 25 years now. Alumni of our programs and users of our products include heads of state, members of the U.S. House, Fortune 500 business executives, influential clergy, and professors and students from preeminent universities and seminaries. Many of these individuals have gone on to promote Acton insights in their own realms of influence and authority.
But you did. Over the years, you’ve supported us generously with your prayers, encouragement, and resources. That generosity has made us one of the most unique and respected organizations in the free-market movement.
As you read this Founders’ Report – and all of them, for that matter – we hope you will see yourself not as a passive supporter, but as an active collaborator. Over the last 25 years, your support has brought us to this place. And of that, you ought to be proud.
With gratitude,
Kris Mauren
Annual Dinner Information
131 Million. This is not a population statistic, nor is it the answer to some clever math problem. It’s the number of people you reached through Acton over the past year.
Your support made possible a wide range of conferences, publications, media products, television interviews, and social media outreach that impacted leaders around the globe. For this, we are truly grateful.
As you know, Acton has been promoting liberty and virtue for 25 years now. Alumni of our programs and users of our products include heads of state, members of the U.S. House, Fortune 500 business executives, influential clergy, and professors and students from preeminent universities and seminaries. Many of these individuals have gone on to promote Acton insights in their own realms of influence and authority.
But you did. Over the years, you’ve supported us generously with your prayers, encouragement, and resources. That generosity has made us one of the most unique and respected organizations in the free-market movement.
As you read this Founders’ Report – and all of them, for that matter – we hope you will see yourself not as a passive supporter, but as an active collaborator. Over the last 25 years, your support has brought us to this place. And of that, you ought to be proud.
With gratitude,
Kris Mauren
Poverty Cure Information
Help us move people beyond their good intentions. Help us share a vision of the material poor as full of creative capacity, dignity, and potential. Only then will we see true, human flourishing in the poorest corners of the earth.
PovertyCure, being an initiative of the Acton Institute, seeks to connect good intentions with sounds economics. So often the efforts of well-meaning people and organizations to address poverty do more harm than good. Our goal is to equip these same people and organizations with resources that promote satisfying and fruitful work, within the context of a free and virtuous society, as the best, and most sustainable, pathway out of poverty.
Your donations will help us reach additional schools, churches, nonprofits, and other organizations with this message. Through screenings of the PovertyCure Video Series, simple training sessions with organizations, and conferences with influential nonprofit leaders, we hope more and more people will move away from aid and embrace enterprise in their fight against material poverty.
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Occasionally, the themes the Acton Institute dedicates itself to proclaiming, in season and out of season, burst into the mainstream.
On Monday’s “Rush Limbaugh” program, a female caller was perplexed that too many pulpits preach leftist ideals, which undermine the faith. Rush Limbaugh responded by pinpointing the intellectual moment that corroded the faith:
When the Left convinced the clergy that socialism is charity, it was over. So much of the clergy is leftist, because to them it’s all charity. 'It’s taking from the haves and distributing to the have-nots. Who could oppose that? That’s what we’re here to do. That’s what the Lord said…’ Ever since the redistribution of wealth ceased being seen as confiscating people’s money, and instead was seen as charity, it was over.
Limbaugh shares an underappreciated history with his audience, which is the largest in talk radio: Traditional clergy once commented on the pressing practical concerns of the day, standing against philosophical currents and movements that violated Christian principles. This explicitly included socialism.
Socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg lamented the diligence of Russian Orthodox clergy in opposing her movement from the ambon. “The believers who go to church on Sundays and festivals are compelled, more and more often, to listen to … a real indictment of Socialism,” she said in 1905.
“The clergy fights the socialists,” she said, “condemning the ‘covetousness’” of the movement.
Indeed, the best exponents of Christian thought revealed a truth so forgotten that it seems self-contradictory today: Socialists are motivated by greed. Pope Leo XIII wrote in in December 1878:
Lured, in fine, by the greed of present goods, which is “the root of all evils which some coveting have erred from the faith,” they assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of horrible wickedness … they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one's mode of life. (Quod Apostolici Muneris, “On Socialism.”)
However, the simplistic appeal of socialism also found its supporters in the pulpit. Earlier the same year, the great Baptist preacher of London, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, warned that ministers had become apostles of Marxist doctrine.
“German rationalism, which has ripened into socialism, may yet pollute the mass of mankind,” he said. “Deadly principles are abroad, and certain ministers are spreading them.”
“I would not have you exchange the gold of individual Christianity for the base metal of Christian socialism,” Spurgeon exhorted his congregation 11 years later.
Any efforts to build a utopian kingdom on earth, overseen by fallen men, would prove futile. “To attempt national regeneration without personal regeneration is to dream of erecting a house without separate bricks,” he said.
Christian leaders charged all priests to instruct the faithful that Christianity and collectivist economics are inherently inimical. “See to it, Venerable Brethren, that the Faithful do not allow themselves to be deceived! Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever,” wrote Pope Pius XI in March 1937 (Divini Redemptoris, “On Atheistic Communism”).
Yet Luxemburg had already previewed the way Christianity could be enervated from within. She proceeded to misquote sermons by Eastern Orthodox Christian saints, like St. John Chrysostom and Pope St. Gregory the Great, applying their support for private charity administered by the Church to government programs controlled by secularists.
With one fell swoop, socialism was baptized.
This empowered statists and cleared the field of intermediate groups like church organizations. By convincing clergy that the tiresome work of caring for the poor could be outsourced to the allegedly more efficient hand of government, the church gave up one of its divine commissions.
For too many, the siren song of a redeemed Messianic state proved irresistible. They began extolling the righteousness of wealth redistribution via the state. And soon, they found that the provision of government services and the fervor of Christian belief are inversely proportional.
In the spiritual life, abandoning any part of the commandments affects obedience to the rest, among clergy and laity alike.
“Christian leaders failed to appreciate the consequences of endorsing a collectivist secular world without redemptive purpose,” observed historian Frank Prochaska in Christianity & Social Service in Modern Britain. “Rarely has a British institution so willingly participated in its undoing.”
Rev. Ben Johnson (@therightswriter) is an Eastern Orthodox priest and served as Executive Editor of the Acton Institute (2016-2021), editing Religion & Liberty, the Powerblog, and its transatlantic website. He has extensively researched the Alt-Right. Previously, he worked for LifeSiteNews and FrontPageMag.com, where he wrote three books including Party of Defeat (with David Horowitz, 2008). His work has appeared at DailyWire.com, National Review, The American Spectator, The Guardian, Daily Caller, National Catholic Register, Spectator USA, FEE Online, RealClear Policy, The Blaze, The Stream, American Greatness, Aleteia, Providence Magazine, Charisma, Jewish World Review, Human Events, Intellectual Takeout, CatholicVote.org, Issues & Insights, The Conservative, Rare.us, and The American Orthodox Institute. His personal websites are therightswriter.com and RevBenJohnson.com. His views are his own.