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Fact check: the second presidential debate of 2020

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden faced off for their second and last debate of the 2020 campaign season on Thursday night at Belmont University in Nashville. The candidates offered viewers a far more staid and substantive exchange than their first debate – a low bar, to be sure. Despite the improved tone, did all of their factual assertions hold up? Here are the facts. Did no one lose coverage under Obamacare? And will BidenCare’s public option...

Half of Gen Z supports Marxism/socialism. Here’s why.

A new poll reveals the disquieting extent of young Americans’ support for Marxism. However, it also divulges the reasons behind the popularity of collectivism and the seeds of its destruction. The number of young Americans who have a favorable view of Marxism has increased five-fold in just one year. According to the new survey, nearly one-third of the members of Gen Z – Americans between the ages of 16 and 23 – deem “Marxism” worthy of support. The term’s favorability...

Justice Amy Coney Barrett: a new model for working women?

Judge Amy Coney Barrett became Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Monday night. Barrett has called herself “a different kind of lawyer,” and now she’s breaking new barriers. ACB may serve as an innovative model for professional women, as well as an opponent of misguided government programs and policies that encourage workplace discrimination against women. “Tonight, Justice Barrett es not only the fifth woman to serve on our nation’s highest court, but the very first mother of school-aged children to e...

After her ‘Vanity Fair’ shoot, AOC must hear this speech from Fr. Robert Sirico

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has touched off fresh controversy in a Vanity Fair cover story. Although she called the president of the United States a “motherf—er” and expresses her interest in seeking a “higher position” in politics, what caught the public imagination is its panying photo shoot in which the democratic socialist’s apparel in no way resembled the clothing of the proletariat. AOC wore clothing designed byAliette, Carolina Herrera, Wales Bonner, Christian Louboutin, and a $2,850 dress from Loewe, which the magazine...

DOJ: Government grants induced Christians to commit fraud

Even the federal government now admits that its federal financial aid policy is so immoral it can turn theology students into criminals. The Justice Department accuses a Christian theological institute of creating phantom students in order to cash in on federal college funding. According to prosecutors, the North Carolina-based Apex School of Theology set up a satellite in Georgia to serve students in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. There’s just one problem: There were no students. The DOJ says that Apex’s...

How Amy Coney Barrett could save America

Although Amy Coney Barrett has only been a Supreme Court justice for a matter of days, she has the potential to act as the harbinger of a renewed America. She is not only potentially a new role model for working women, but she may also serve as the apostle who introduces Americans to a refreshingly positive view of their own Constitution. In the process, she may reverse the nation’s headlong rush to embrace socialism. With her unassailable credentials, personal popularity,...

‘For Love of Neighbor’: the documentary that explores authentic Christian political witness

In the heat of each political season, we are bombarded by arguments about which candidate is the moral choice and which political platform is patible with Christian values and beliefs. Such arguments typically place a heavy emphasis on specific issues and policies – and rightly so. But throughout our debates about short-term goals and final es, we should also consider the more foundational aspects of such actions. As Christians, our political responsibility involves more than filling circles on ballots or...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Apr 18, 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...

Apr 18, 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...

Apr 18, 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...

Apr 18, 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,...

Apr 18, 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...

Apr 18, 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...

Apr 18, 2026

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....

Apr 18, 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...

Apr 18, 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...

Apr 18, 2026