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
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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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America’s current racial strife has roots deeper than recent controversies involving the police. One factor greatly exacerbating these tensions is the contrast in worldviews over the relative importance of “race” in one’s life and how those in dialogue view the American founding, according to Ismael Hernandez, executive director of the Freedom and Virtue Institute and a longtime lecturer at Acton University.
Hernandez first traces slavery to every nation and culture, then places the origins of modern racism in the 17th century, when exploration brought cultures into contact with one another. Racial categories originated when observers emphasized “certain true biological differences” which are “seemingly irrelevant” but “tend to be very visual.”
This racialized view was weaponized by such forces as “mercantilism, trade, Darwinism: All this gave a new twist of justification to an ancient institution: the institution of slavery,” he says. “Darwinists are the first ones to give to racism some semblance of scientific validity.”
In contrast, what emerges uniquely from this time period is not slavery but the kernel of the abolitionist movement, rooted in biblical sources and Western civilization.
Hernandez then contrasts the “natural law/integrationist/personalist” approach — which sees the individual as having a primary identity apart from any group membership — with the “dialectical separationist” or “collectivist” approach.
“The first stream that has informed race relations in America from the beginning of our nation is what we can call the natural law/integrationist approach, or the personalist approach,” he says. In this view, “the individual person stands sui generis in the midst of the group, so the group doesn’t have priority over the individual.”
“America benefited from the fact that the idea of individual freedom is an individual value,” Hernandez says, a worldview which “took root only in the Christian West." He contrasts that with the collective view that dominated the pre-modern world:
The slave could conceive freedom, but not as an institutional value. If I was a slave, I wanted to be free — but I wanted to be free so I could return to my community and come back and enslave the other. There was no opposition to slavery as an institution.
Adherents to the natural law/personalist stream believe that the “biblical context and the American constitutional framework, over time, could overcome social, economic, and political racial stratification, precisely because the individual matters and not the group. Embedded in those principles was the seed to the answer of the problem,” he says. “The Constitution was not perfect, but it was neither tragically flawed. Its principles, its basic principles were not those of white supremacy but the principles of liberty.”
Hernandez says this biblical, optimistic view fueled the civil rights movement of the 1960s, led by Martin Luther King Jr.
Hernandez contrasts the natural law tradition, which upholds the integrity of the individual, with the “dialectical separationist approach, or the collectivist approach.” Hernandez also calls it “the dialectic of antagonism,” aptly personified by Malcolm X. In this view, “race is a basic reality, a sort of practical absolute, the heart of individual identity, what we can call racialist essentialism. The very substance of what it means to be human cannot be understood apart from the concept of race at the heart of identity,” he says.
This view sees “the crimes of ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, and racism” as creating an “oppressive and irreformable system” in the United States and the West generally. Ironically, this leads black liberationist collectivists to read U.S. history the same way that “rabid racists read history.”
This has “a precursor in the Marxist understanding of human nature … The very nature of man is collectivized in Marx,” he says. “In Marx, class was what moved history, but in this dialectical system … it is race that is a catalyst.”
As in Marxism, this understanding of race and race relations in America emphasizes “collective identity, collective innocence, and collective guilt. The racial group takes priority. … The only way to end this tension is the acquisition of power” by the group – something Orlando Patterson calls it “sovereign freedom.” To proponents of this collectivist dialectic, “the individual can become an impediment to our progress.”
By extension, one can extrapolate that this view deemphasizes investment in improving one’s own, God-given potential in favor of a zero-sum struggle for collective power. The world, and countless families, are literally poorer for it.
You can listen to each podcast in the two-part series below:
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.