The Acton Institute

What The Acton Institute is

The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is a Christian think tank headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with affiliated offices in Rome, Buenos Aires, and London. It was founded in 1990 by Father Robert Sirico — a Catholic priest who had previously been a libertarian activist — together with entrepreneur Kris Mauren. Its stated mission is to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles, and that exact phrase shows up in almost everything the institute publishes.

In practice the output sorts into a few buckets: a constant stream of short essays on the Acton Powerblog, the quarterly Religion & Liberty magazine, the peer-reviewed Journal of Markets & Morality, the Acton Line podcast, video lectures on YouTube and the Acton website, paid online courses, and the flagship Acton University conference each June. The audience is pastors, seminarians, business leaders, journalists, scholars, and serious laypeople — not a mass devotional audience.

Why thoughtful Christians use Acton

The single biggest practical difference between Acton and almost every other Christian publishing outlet is that Acton treats economics as a real theological discipline. Most Christian media handles money the way it handles politics — as a touchy subject best addressed with a stewardship sermon every two years. Acton does the opposite. It assumes that markets, prices, property, labor, trade, monetary policy, and entrepreneurship are subjects the Christian tradition has thought about for two thousand years, and it brings that tradition into contact with modern economics in a serious, footnoted way.

The other differentiator is the ecumenical bench. The contributor list pulls from Catholic social teaching, Reformed (especially Dutch neo-Calvinist) economics, Eastern Orthodox social thought, Jewish ethical tradition, and secular classical liberalism. That is unusual. Most think tanks that look ecumenical on paper are functionally one tradition with guest essays. Acton actually puts a Catholic priest, a Calvin College economist, and an Orthodox theologian on stage together and asks them to disagree productively — which is the thoughtful Christian reader’s killer feature.

Religion and economics: the differentiator nobody else does at this depth

Acton’s core intellectual project is the intersection of religion and economics — and it is genuinely hard to find another organization doing this work at the same depth, frequency, and quality. Articles tackle questions like the moral status of profit, how Catholic social teaching reads modern labor markets, whether usury doctrine still applies to consumer credit, how Abraham Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty translates to twenty-first century pluralism, what the Hebrew Bible’s jubilee laws do and do not say about contemporary redistribution, and dozens more. The arguments are made from inside the Christian moral tradition, not as an apologetic afterthought.

The framing is honestly conservative-libertarian — pro-market, pro-property, skeptical of expansive state economic policy, sympathetic to mediating civil-society institutions like family, church, and voluntary association. Readers who agree will find a vast, well-organized library to draw on. Readers who disagree should still know this content exists; if you are going to argue with the religious case for markets, Acton is the place where that case is made most carefully, and engaging it directly is more useful than engaging caricatures.

Acton University: the annual conference that anchors the network

Acton University is the institute’s flagship event — six days each June in Grand Rapids that function as a kind of seminary-grade intensive on religion and free societies. The format is dense: pick one of roughly a hundred sessions per slot, attend three or four lecture blocks a day, take meals with faculty and other attendees, and end each evening with a plenary address. Faculty are drawn from Catholic universities, Reformed seminaries, Orthodox institutions, secular universities, and policy organizations — and the attendees skew toward pastors, seminarians, business owners, professionals, and graduate students.

For the right reader this is one of the most efficient learning experiences in American Christian academic life — you can compress a semester’s worth of reading on, say, Catholic social teaching or Kuyperian economics into a single week of expert lectures, with a notebook’s worth of book recommendations on the way out. The cost is real (tuition runs around $850–$1,200 depending on track and timing, and that is before travel and lodging to Michigan), but scholarship support for clergy and students is substantial — anyone seriously considering the trip should apply for aid rather than assume the sticker price.

Free articles plus the Acton Line podcast: the everyday on-ramp

Most readers will never make it to Grand Rapids in June, and that is fine — the free article library and the Acton Line podcast do the bulk of the institute’s public work. The Acton Powerblog publishes multiple short essays a day on current events through the religion-and-economics lens. Religion & Liberty is a longer quarterly magazine with feature essays, interviews, and book reviews. The Journal of Markets & Morality runs peer-reviewed academic work and went open-access in 2020, which means anyone can download the full PDF archive.

Acton Line, the institute’s flagship podcast, is a calm, interview-driven show — typically a host in conversation with a scholar, journalist, or practitioner for forty-five minutes to an hour. It is one of the more substantive religion-and-public-life podcasts in regular production, and it works as a background subscription even for listeners who disagree with the editorial line. Together the articles and the podcast are the institute’s real front door — the place where most people first encounter Acton and decide whether the project is for them.

Pricing

Where The Acton Institute falls behind

No real engagement with progressive Christian economic frameworks. The institute makes its case from inside conservative-libertarian assumptions and rarely engages liberation theology, Christian socialism, or social-democratic Catholic thought on their own terms. Readers who want a steel-manned version of the other side will need to read elsewhere and bring the comparison themselves.

No devotional, pastoral, or formation content. Acton does not publish reading plans, prayer guides, daily devotionals, sermon outlines, or anything aimed at personal spiritual formation. This is a feature, not a bug — but it means Acton sits alongside, not in place of, the resources you use for actual Bible reading and prayer.

A persistent Catholic gravity even in ecumenical work. The founding orientation, the prominence of natural-law vocabulary, and several flagship books carry Catholic social-teaching assumptions even when the bylines look broadly Christian. This is not concealed, but Reformed and Orthodox readers will occasionally notice the home tradition speaking with a slightly louder voice.

Limited international and non-Western coverage. Despite affiliated offices in Rome, London, and Buenos Aires, most of the writing addresses American political economy and the European policy debates Americans are already paying attention to. Coverage of African, Asian, or Latin American religion-and-economics questions is real but thinner than the American material.

Acton Institute vs. First Things vs. Sojourners

These three publications are the easiest way to map the American religious-public-square conversation. Acton, First Things, and Sojourners are all serious, well-edited, and unapologetic about their priors — but they are aimed at very different readers and operate from very different theological and political starting points.

Different strengths. Acton is the specialist on religion and economics, with a conservative-libertarian frame and a uniquely ecumenical contributor base. First Things is broader — a religion-and-public-life journal with a strong Catholic and traditional-Protestant editorial center that engages culture, law, philosophy, and theology more than it does economics specifically. Sojourners sits at the opposite end of the economic spectrum from Acton — a progressive evangelical magazine founded by Jim Wallis that frames poverty, racial justice, and peacemaking through a left-leaning policy lens drawn from the same Christian sources Acton reads conservatively.

For a Christian trying to think honestly about economics and public life, reading all three is more useful than reading any one. Acton makes the rigorous religious case for markets and limited government. Sojourners makes the rigorous religious case for redistribution and state-led justice work. First Things does the broader cultural and theological framing in which both arguments live. None of them is neutral, and that is precisely why the combination is more useful than any single source pretending to be.

Alternatives to The Acton Institute