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.
Posts by Rev. Ben Johnson
July 30, 2020
Herman Cain, the 2012 Republican presidential hopeful and former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, passed away early Thursday morning at the age of 74. During his meteoric rise from poverty to the heights of the business world, Cain shared his faith in Christ, free markets, and the American dream.
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July 28, 2020
Were he alive today, what would C.S. Lewis say about the ongoing, violent riots and church desecration being led by “trained Marxists”? As it turns out, we know. The answer lies in a letter that Lewis wrote about UK social protests 80 years ago, which reads as though it were a news dispatch from Portland’s federal courthouse.
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July 24, 2020
The Chinese government demands a small price in exchange for your monthly check: apostasy.
Chinese Communist Party officials have ordered impoverished Christians to remove pictures of Jesus from their walls or lose the government aid that’s keeping them alive.
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July 23, 2020
American exceptionalism cannot be appreciated without contrast. Compare these two scenes: On Wednesday night throngs of rioters rampaged through Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, inflicting “massive amounts of property damage, looting,” and “arson” without sustaining a single arrest.
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July 22, 2020
The underlying tensions between national conservatism and a more pro-business Republican orthodoxy burst into the open during a 24-second, primetime exchange on Fox News Channel. During the hand-off between hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, Hannity seemingly rebuked his lead-in for criticizing Jeff Bezos’ fortune.
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July 17, 2020
This week, a federal committee accomplished the rarest of all achievements: It produced a government document worth reading. On Thursday, July 16, the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights released a clear, enlightened, and comprehensive report on the origins, authentic content, and illegitimate expansion of human rights.
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July 14, 2020
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to ban singing inside churches — and in some cases, to close churches outright — is ringing some unpleasant bells.
The government’s “infringement of our religious rights” reminds his flock of “the era of godless persecutions in the USSR,” says a leader of the Russian religious community.
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July 10, 2020
Religious liberty won two significant victories at the U.S. Supreme Court on July 8. Justices ruled in two separate, 7-2 decisions that the federal government may not interfere in religious institutions’ hiring and firing of ministers, and that the government has the right to grant the Little Sisters of the Poor a religious exemption from a federal Obamacare mandate requiring employers to furnish female employees with no-cost birth control, sterilization, and potentially abortifacient drugs.
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July 06, 2020
Judicial activism is a transatlantic problem. Thus, it requires a transatlantic analysis. The Acton Institute has helped link English-speaking citizens concerned with preserving the Constitution in a conversation with the world’s 270 million Francophones.
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July 05, 2020
Among the most influential critics of the free market on the Right is Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame. Acton Institute Senior Research Fellow Michael Matheson Miller has published a response in
Law & Liberty to Deneen’s recent plea for a national policy to favor small communities (“Thinking Big to Act Small” in the
American Compass).
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