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
August 25, 2017
The fall of the Berlin Wall remains the greatest symbolic victory of freedom over tyranny in the modern age. Yet the triumph of liberty finds itself threatened by corruption and a propaganda war wrapped up in religious sentiment, according to a prominent Eastern European commentator.
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August 24, 2017
The violent reaction to President Trump’s Phoenix rally and the ongoing fallout over Charlottesville show the issue of the Alt-Right, and its Antifa antagonists, is going nowhere. Americans struggle to understand what kind of “conservatism” the Alt-Right represents, as well as the nature of the protesters.
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August 23, 2017
The Spanish government is currently run by the center-Right People’s Party, led by Mariano Rajoy. However, should Spain’s socialist parties return to power, they have announced their intention to remove Catholic education from the curriculum and replace it with a secular curriculum that teaches fidelity to the government.
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August 22, 2017
As children in the U.S. return to school, their European contemporaries have or soon will join them. However, they do so in a context that recognizes fewer of the traditional rights that society has accorded parents over the education of their children, especially whether they are taught to uphold or disdain their family’s moral and religious views.
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August 21, 2017
Over the last two decades, global poverty has plummeted and the world’s poorest people have steadily climbed out of the shadow of death. Yet many Christians cannot distinguish between dire poverty and income inequality, falsely believe both are worsening, and oppose the very policies that have lifted the world’s poor out of malnutrition.
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August 18, 2017
As the UK sets out its negotiating policies for Brexit this week and next, it is no secret that European nations remain deeply divided over the role of the European Union.
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August 16, 2017
On Saturday,
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote a column that appeared to promote the same kind of identity politics that exploded in violence one day earlier in Charlottesville. He began:
I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice.
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August 11, 2017
In the United States, it is considered scandalous when a partisan public official tries to deny a charity its tax-exempt status. But a combination of EU and UK law forces British charities to pay £1.5 billion in taxes to the government every year – something a leading charitable coalition says that Brexit could change.
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August 10, 2017
After suffering a string of thefts at his organic farm, Melvin Burns is making an unorthodox offer. He’s responding to robbery with kindness, offering the offender a job if he’ll just return the tools he needs to take care of his animals.
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August 09, 2017
Josh Herring teaches history at a secular, classical academy – but as with all teachers, sometimes he learns valuable lessons from his students. As high school students at the Thales Academy progress from studying ancient cultures to modernity, they invariably tell him they are struck by one principle that sets the Judeo-Christian West apart from previous civilizations.
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