Rev. Ben Johnson

Rev. Ben Johnson is an Eastern Orthodox priest and served as executive editor of the Acton Institute from 2016 to 2021. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including National Review, the American Spectator, The Guardian, National Catholic Register, Providence, Jewish World Review, Human Events, and the American Orthodox Institute. His personal websites are therightswriter.com and RevBenJohnson.com. You can find him on X: @therightswriter.

Posts by Rev. Ben Johnson

November 07, 2017

100 years of false religion

Today – November 7, 2017 – marks the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, touching off worldwide events mourning or celebrating the event. At its centenary, Communism deserves to be remembered as the most successful false religion to take root in the West in two millennia, unparalleled in the swiftness of its destruction and unequaled in its potential to generate misery from abundance. Continue Reading...
November 06, 2017

Spain: Remembering the forgotten Red Terror

As the world remembers the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Spain commemorates the thousands of Christians martyred by the Communists during the Spanish Red Terror. Historian Stanley G. Payne called this period the “most extensive and violent persecution of Catholicism in Western history, in some way even more intense than that of the French Revolution.” Continue Reading...
October 24, 2017

Government regulations in a fallen world

  The number of federal regulations in the United States broke an all-time record last year. A total of 97,110 pages were added to the Federal Register in 2016. The Competitive Enterprise Institute calculates the compliance costs and economic impacts of federal regulations at $1.89 trillion. Continue Reading...
October 23, 2017

Do natural disasters justify big government?

When disasters strike – as they have repeatedly across the transatlantic sphere this season – government exercises its most essential function: saving lives. Do these heroic actions validate the ongoing intervention of the federal government into local affairs? Continue Reading...
October 20, 2017

Christian influence over the common law, remembered at last

Christianity planted the seed that germinated into Western thought for two millennia. Yet the contributions of the faith, and its practitioners, remain unsung, underappreciated, and unheralded in an ever-secularizing west – a fact remedied in part by the book Great Christian Jurists in English History, edited by Hill and Helmholz. Continue Reading...