That is what Jeffery Degner, research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, calls a “rational vice.” I spoke with him on the latest episode of Acton Line about his essay “Rational Vice: Will Gen Z Gamble Its Way to Retirement?” and about why a generation has turned to sportsbooks and prediction markets.

Degner begins not with moral failure but with arithmetic. In the 1970s a median home cost roughly two and a half times median household income; today the multiple is closer to five. The old bargain of degree, job, house, and retirement has been priced out of reach. Meanwhile the instruments of ordinary prudence have been hollowed out. When a savings account or a certificate of deposit pays less than the rate of inflation, the saver is not accumulating wealth but slowly surrendering it. In that environment a contract on Kalshi or a Sunday parlay is not simply irrational. It is a crude attempt to chase yield in a world where the safe path no longer leads anywhere.

Alexei reasons the same way. He mocks the German family patiently piling up capital across generations and prefers to stake everything on a single evening. The vice is rational in the narrow sense that it answers to real incentives.

Degner traces those incentives back further than most commentators do, to August 1971 and the closing of the gold window. What followed was half a century of currency expansion and suppressed interest rates, a regime that rewards borrowers, penalizes savers, and teaches everyone to prefer the present to the future. He calls this an inflation culture, and its fruits are not just economic. Persistent inflation is moral hazard writ large: it makes thrift look foolish and risk look wise.

The data on expectations bear this out. Since the pandemic, consumer sentiment surveys have found Americans aged 18 to 34 more pessimistic about their long-term prospects than their elders, a reversal of the historical pattern in which the young were the optimists. A generation that does not expect tomorrow to be better than today has little reason to sacrifice today on its behalf.

Online sportsbooks now take in billions in handle, and prediction markets have carried wagering beyond sports to interest rates, elections, and celebrity gossip. The activity concentrates among young men, drawn by targeted marketing, the seamless fusion of betting with sports broadcasting, and a higher baseline appetite for risk. Degner cites estimates that as much as a fifth of the money these young men would otherwise have put into 401(k)s and brokerage accounts now flows into betting apps. That is not leisure spending. It is the displacement of a retirement.

Yesterday Nebraska voters weighed in. Initiative Measure 440, a constitutional amendment that would have authorized online sports wagering through the state’s racetrack casinos, failed by roughly 55 to 45 percent in unofficial returns, despite a campaign of more than $22 million by its casino- and sportsbook-backed sponsors. Betting in Nebraska remains legal only in person.

Degner would not, I suspect, be sorry to see it, but he is skeptical that prohibition addresses the problem. Bans and heavy taxation do nothing about the demoralization that makes the wager attractive in the first place. A young man in Omaha who believes he cannot save his way to a home will find an Iowa exit ramp or an offshore app. The deeper work is restoring the conditions under which thrift makes sense: sound money, real financial literacy rather than slogans, a leisure culture less thoroughly commercialized, and a renewal of long-term hope.

Dostoevsky did eventually stop. In 1871, after one last loss at Wiesbaden, he wrote to Anna that something in him had broken, and he never returned to the tables. No decree stopped him. He stopped when his life came to hold more than the next spin: a wife, children, work he believed in, a future he could picture. That is the harder prescription, and the one Degner and I kept circling back to. You cannot regulate a man away from the wheel. You can only give him a reason to walk away from it.

I was reminded of the passage while talking with Erik Matson on the latest episode of Acton Line about his new book with Jordan Ballor, A History of Christian Political Economy: From the Patristics to the Present, and its companion volume, Sources in Christian Political Economy: A Reader. Dante was no economist, but he had absorbed the scholastic debates over usury and the just price thoroughly enough to put them in verse. That is precisely the point of Matson and Ballor’s project. For most of Christian history, reflection on money, markets, and work was not a separate science but a branch of moral theology, and traces of it turn up everywhere, even in hell.

Matson is deliberate about the term in the title. Economics in the modern sense presents itself as a value-free discipline, a technical study of means. Political economy, as it was understood from the eighteenth century, was a branch of moral philosophy with ethical, political, and jurisprudential dimensions. To recover the older term is to recover the older self-understanding: that questions of exchange are inseparable from questions of justice. The confessional manuals of the medieval Church, with their anxious casuistry over fair prices and interest, were doing political economy long before anyone had coined the phrase.

The authors divide nearly two millennia into seven periods: the patristic age through roughly 500; the early medieval era up to the high scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas; the late medieval centuries down to the Reformation; the early modern period to the early eighteenth century; the classical period of Smith and his successors through the mid-nineteenth century; the industrial era from 1848 to the First World War; and the twentieth century. The reader supplies seven texts from each, forty-nine in all.

Matson refused to tell a tidy story of progress. He and Ballor identify two broad visions running through the whole history. One is the vision of the limited good, in which economic life is a zero-sum contest and one man’s gain is another’s loss. The other is the vision of mutual benefit, in which exchange leaves both parties better off. It would be convenient to say the first gave way to the second. It did not. Both coexist in every period, and they coexist today. A second axis, whether a thinker’s attention falls chiefly on spiritual goods or on material well-being, cuts across the first.

The most interesting argument of the episode concerns divine providence. The classical political economists’ confidence that free exchange tended toward mutual benefit was not, Matson argues, a secular innovation smuggled into a Christian culture. It was grounded in the doctrine of providence: the conviction that God had so ordered creation that human beings pursuing their legitimate ends could serve one another’s. The invisible hand had a theological pedigree.

The book is full of figures who deserve to be better known. The late scholastics of Salamanca, Azpilcueta working out an early formulation of the quantity theory of money and Lessius analyzing the money markets of his day, were doing sophisticated economic analysis in the service of answering confessors’ questions. John Bates Clark, a founder of American neoclassical economics, understood the laws of price theory as an expression of divine law governing human interaction. And Philip Wicksteed, the Unitarian minister who gave the marginal revolution some of its most elegant exposition, was also a serious scholar of Dante.

The conversation turned at the end to the present. Matson argues that market liberalism cannot sustain itself on its own resources. It requires moral, philosophical, and theological presuppositions it did not invent, and which in the West it drew largely from Christianity. The twentieth century saw real efforts to keep theology and economics in conversation. Matson points to the exchanges between Reinhold Niebuhr and Kenneth Boulding, and I would add the work of the Acton Institute itself.

Which brings me back to Wicksteed and Dante. A man who spent his mornings on marginal utility and his evenings on the Paradiso did not think he was living two lives. He thought, as the whole tradition Matson and Ballor have assembled thought, that the order by which bread is earned and the order by which souls are saved issue from the same divine intellect. Virgil’s lecture at the cliff’s edge was not a digression from theology. It was theology.

The full conversation is available here:

Hesiod was a farmer. He knew what he was complaining about. What he could not know was whether his second wish, to be born afterward, was worth making. On this week’s episode of Acton Line I spoke with Chelsea Follett, research fellow at the Cato Institute and managing editor of HumanProgress.org, about her new book The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past. Her answer, across more than five hundred pages, is that being born in later days is worth it, spectacularly so.

Follett and I began with the golden-age reflex itself. It persists in the pastoral novel, the costume drama, and in more than one school of contemporary political philosophy on both left and right, where the preindustrial village stands for simplicity, closeness to nature, and a community life we are said to have traded away for wealth. Follett’s argument is not that these longings are foolish. It is that they are ignorant, in the strict sense: they rest on not knowing. Modern people misjudge the harshness of the past by orders of magnitude, and this error is not harmless. It is the root of a cynicism about industry, markets, and technology that takes modern health, safety, and plenty for granted, as though they were the natural condition of man rather than a recent and improbable achievement.

What was the natural condition? Follett’s book proceeds through every facet of daily life, and our conversation sampled a few. Work was grueling manual labor for nearly everyone, and the slower pace of life celebrated by romantics was mostly the pace of exhaustion and chronic pain. Life expectancy was low, not only because so many infants died but because adults were worn down young. Sanitation barely existed; waste went into streets and rivers, clean water was a luxury, and without the germ theory of disease or anything resembling medical science, sickness swept through communities unopposed.

Above all, preindustrial people lived at the mercy of weather. One late frost, one dry summer, one blighted harvest, and a region tipped from subsistence into famine. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes warned, “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.” He wrote knowing exactly what a bad harvest meant.

The second half of our conversation turned from the misery to the escape. Here Follett resists the story in which industrialization is a fall from grace, the moment a harmonious world was broken for profit. Industrialization, together with the extension of free markets and the unleashing of human ingenuity, was rather the great liberation, the first sustained exit humanity ever found from the iron age Hesiod described.

The idea beneath this, one that runs through all of Follett’s work at HumanProgress.org, is a rejection of the Malthusian picture of the human person as a mouth to be fed, a drain on a fixed stock of resources. Human beings are not just bodies but minds. They solve problems, invent tools, and leave their descendants richer in knowledge than they found them. This is close to what the Church means when it speaks of man as made in the image of a creative God, and it is why Catholic social teaching, from Leo XIII to Leo XIV, has never been able to join the romantics in mourning the machine, however sharply it has criticized particular abuses.

Hesiod got his wish, though not in his own person. Those of us born afterward, in the long afterward that began with steam and has not stopped, are the beneficiaries of exactly the toil, ingenuity, and accumulated knowledge the golden-age myth teaches us to despise. Follett’s book is an exercise in gratitude disguised as a catalogue of horrors. Read it, and the next time someone sighs for the simple life of the village, you’ll know what they are sighing for.

Listen to the full conversation here:

That sentence came to mind more than once while I was talking with Samuel Gregg on this week’s Acton Line. Sam is president of the American Institute for Economic Research and an affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute, and his new book, The Civilization of Commerce: Invisible Hands and the Pursuit of Happiness (Encounter Books), is an attempt to recover exactly that chain for a generation of market defenders who have too often miss the linkages.

Sam begins by setting aside two words most of us would reach for first. Neither “capitalism” nor “liberalism” are central terms in the book. Both, he argues, carry so much accumulated baggage that they now obscure more than they reveal. In their place he substitutes a phrase and an insight.

The phrase is “commercial society,” which is what Smith, Hume, and Francis Hutcheson actually called the thing they were describing. The insight is Hayek’s: that civilization rests on cooperation among people who do not know one another, drawing on knowledge dispersed across millions of minds that no planner could ever assemble. A market is not just an allocation mechanism. It is the institutional form that this cooperation takes, and the Scots understood it as a transformation of the whole of human life, moral and intellectual as well as material.

Hayek, Sam notes, wrote for scholars. The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty are not beach reading. The civilizational argument Hayek made in those books never found the popular form that The Road to Serfdom and its Reader’s Digest abridgement gave his warning against central planning.

That is the gap Sam wants to fill, and it is a gap with consequences. Contemporary libertarians and classical liberals, he observes, have grown fluent in the language of efficiency, growth, and policy design while losing the older vocabulary of virtue, flourishing, and community. The result is a defense of markets that sounds technocratic, even when it is correct, but that leaves the moral high ground to the critics.

Those critics come, in Sam’s taxonomy, in two varieties. The rationalists, from John Rawls to the central planner, look at commercial society and see inequality to be corrected from above. The romantics, descending from Rousseau through today’s economic nationalists and postliberals, look at it and see community, solidarity, and identity dissolved by exchange.

What I found most illuminating in our conversation was Sam’s point about where these two camps end up. Their diagnoses are opposed, but their prescriptions converge: some form of corporatism, some variant of state direction, some arrangement in which the rule of law bends to the preferences of whoever holds the levers. Rationalist and romantic alike are prepared to trade a measure of liberty for the promise of order, and both discover too late that the order is not as orderly as advertised.

Sam locates the high-water mark of commercial civilization in the decades between roughly 1840 and 1914. What made that period work, on his reading, was not a set of economic policies alone but a whole package: constitutionalism, moral reform movements, and liberties written into institutions that outlasted any particular government.

By contrast the market revival of the 1980s and 1990s, for all its achievements under Reagan, Thatcher, and Friedman, drew its strength from the collapse of the Keynesian consensus rather than from a renewed civilizational narrative. It won the argument about means without reopening the argument about ends. That, Sam suggests, is why its gains have proved so easy to erode.

We closed on a question Sam says he is still working through: whether commercial civilization can take root in places like India and China that do not share the Scottish Enlightenment’s lineage, and what cultural and moral foundations such a transplant would require. His answer is tentative but premise firm. A free economy does not sustain itself. It depends on habits, institutions, and beliefs that must be cultivated with as much care as the economy itself.

Which is only to say what Hume said. Industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked by an indissoluble chain. The error of our moment is to imagine that one link can be polished while the others are left to corrode. Sam Gregg’s book is a timely reminder that the chain holds together, or not at all.

Listen to the full conversation on Acton Line:

I thought of Barbosa while speaking with Paulo Ghedini, founder and president of the Instituto Libertário Cristão in Brazil, for this week’s episode of Acton Line. Ghedini is making a claim about persons rather than nations, but it is the same shape of claim: equal dignity before the law, pressed by someone whose position the great powers of his own intellectual world are inclined to dismiss.

Ghedini came to libertarian ideas as a Brazilian living in the United States during the 2012 presidential campaign, drawn in by Ron Paul’s speeches and the publications coming out of the Mises Institute. He soon discovered that he had become a puzzle to everyone. His Catholic friends wanted to know how he could be a libertarian. His atheist libertarian friends wanted to know how he could be a Christian.

That tension is sharper in Brazil than here. As Ghedini describes it, the Brazilian right is divided between Christians of a conservative and often frankly authoritarian stripe and a libertarian movement heavily shaped by Objectivism and hostile to religion. A Christian who believes in free markets and limited government has, until recently, had no place to lay his head. The Instituto Libertário Cristão exists to build that place.

Ghedini’s case for the compatibility of Christianity and libertarianism rests on four observations. The non-aggression principle, he argues, is not a Rothbardian invention but a restatement of the Golden Rule and the natural law, grounded in the equal dignity of every person. Free will, which God gave to human beings even at the cost of their disobedience, sits uneasily with a state that governs by coercion. Private property is affirmed throughout both Testaments, from the Decalogue to the parables. And the Christian doctrine of the Fall converges with Hayek’s account of dispersed knowledge: both teach that no one knows enough, or is good enough, to be trusted with unlimited power over others.

None of these arguments is unique to Ghedini, but hearing them assembled by someone working in a Latin American context, where the alternatives on offer are often liberation theology on one side and integralism on the other, gives them a distinct urgency.

The hardest part of our conversation, for a Catholic, concerned the social encyclicals. Ghedini reads Rerum Novarum and its successors as practical responses to the industrial revolution and the Marxist threat rather than as definitions of faith. He also argues that the early social encyclicals were shaped more by German Jesuits of a statist bent than by the classical liberals of the day.

I am more inclined than Ghedini to read Leo XIII as a defender of the free economy within a juridical framework, as John Paul II later read him in Centesimus Annus. But Ghedini’s broader point stands within the tradition. Where an encyclical makes claims about economics or politics, prudential claims about means, a faithful Catholic may respectfully disagree, particularly where a proposed intervention fails to achieve its end or undermines the dignity it was meant to protect. That is a very different posture from the old Mater sí, Magistra no quip, and a more defensible one.

Ghedini handles two scriptural flashpoints with care. Romans 13, so often read as a charter for obedience, he situates in a persecuted church counseled to prudence, and he notes that the Greek can be rendered as authority permitted by God rather than positively willed by him. The Good Samaritan and the common life of the church in Acts, meanwhile, describe voluntary acts of persons and communities, not programs of the state. Charity compelled, he argues, is not charity at all; it forms no virtue in the giver.

Ghedini’s aim is modest in method but large in ambition. He wants Christians to stop feeling guilty for believing in free markets, and he wants authoritarian Christians to see that coercing their neighbors through the state is a betrayal of Christian ethics, not an expression of it. His movement leads with virtue and means rather than utility: civil society, free will, and voluntary charity are the only means consonant with the gospel.

Rui Barbosa went to The Hague to insist that the small and the great stood equal before the law. Paulo Ghedini is making the same case, one person at a time, in a country where that claim is still contested. Listen to our conversation on Acton Line here:

That gap between the Francis of history and the Francis of imagination is the subject of my new essay, “St. Francis of Assisi: The Friar Abides,” published yesterday in Religion & Liberty.

G.K. Chesterton identified what he called “the problem of St. Francis” in his 1923 biography of the saint: modern readers are drawn to the gentle friend of beggars and birds and then recoil from the hair shirt, the fasting, and the stigmata. His solution was to insist that saints are first of all lovers, and lovers have always looked a little mad to those outside the romance.

But I argue in the essay that Chesterton’s problem is a problem of St. Francis, not the problem. Eleven years before his book appeared, a small French Catholic magazine, La Clochette, printed an anonymous prayer for use at Mass. A Quaker periodical reprinted it in 1927 under Francis’s name, and from there the misattribution ran. Cardinal Spellman distributed it by the millions to American servicemen during the Second World War, it became a fixture of church bulletins and twelve-step meetings, and the Hindu teacher Eknath Easwaran recommended it to his Berkeley students as the gateway to meditation. For a many today, Francis is mediated almost entirely through words he never wrote. Chesterton’s problem was a modern one. This one is postmodern, and it needs its own answer.

To begin answering it, I lean on Augustine Thompson’s Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (2012), the surest guide we have to separating the historical Francis from the pious legend. The young Francis Bernardone that emerges is recognizably the saint in seed: a cloth merchant’s son with enough Latin to keep the ledgers and enough French to sing the popular songs, vain about his clothes, lavish with his friends, and stung with remorse the one time he brushed off a beggar at the shop door. Then war, capture, and a long imprisonment that left him with nightmares and no joy in the natural world that once delighted him.

Most striking in Thompson’s account is the prayer Francis finally poured out before the crucifix at San Damiano. He did not ask for his health back, or his friends, or peace with his bewildered and loving parents. He asked for light in the darkness of his heart, for faith, hope, and charity, and for the knowledge to carry out God’s command. It is a terrifying prayer, because such prayers tend to be answered. Everything that followed—the lepers, the orders he founded with Clare, the sermon before the Sultan, the wounds he hid for the last two years of his life—flows out of that prayer asked and answered.

The historian can tell us that the stigmata were real; a score of Assisi citizens signed a document attesting to them. The historian cannot tell us what caused them. And this is the point at which I part company, gently and respectfully, with the historian’s authority altogether. Thompson laments that “everyone has his or her own Francis.” That is true, but not only because legend has crowded out fact. It is true because Francis is alive in the presence of a God who is, as Christ reminded the Sadducees, God of the living and not of the dead. The saints have earthly lives, but their life is not merely earthly.

So the test of a genuine encounter with Francis is not whether it passes muster in the archives but whether it bears fruit: whether it enlightens the heart and enlarges charity, on Wall Street or Main Street or in the kitchen. A bird bath in a suburban garden can pass that test. So, for that matter, can a prayer Francis never wrote.

Still, it is worth knowing which words are his. Francis composed the Canticle when he could barely see the sun he was praising. The anonymous author of La Clochette composed a prayer that has carried his name into millions of lives. One is history and one is reception, and both are instruments. The friar abides in each.

You can read the full essay here.

Eighty-one years later the city filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, and creditors’ lawyers began asking how much the paintings were worth.

How did that happen? And why did it happen in Detroit and not in Pittsburgh, a city with every reason to expect the same fate?

Those are the questions I put to Dave Hebert, Director of Economics & Economic Freedom and Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, on this week’s episode of Acton Line. Hebert has written a paper on the divergent fortunes of the two cities, and the story he tells should unsettle anyone, left or right, who believes the answer to industrial decline is to build a wall around industry.

The parallels in 1950 were striking. Detroit built roughly half the world’s automobiles. Pittsburgh’s mills poured more steel than all of Great Britain. Each was a one-industry town at the height of that industry’s power, and each would falter as global manufacturing shifted in the decades that followed. Yet Detroit collapsed, hemorrhaging population and tax base, while Pittsburgh merely bent without breaking.

Hebert’s explanation begins with what each city had planted alongside its dominant crop. Pittsburgh, even in the age of steel, had cultivated other things: research universities like Carnegie Mellon, a robust healthcare sector, institutions with no connection to a blast furnace. When the mills closed, workers and capital had somewhere to go. Detroit had the automobile and the trades that fed it: machining, parts, tooling. When the auto sector faltered, the supporting industries fell with it, and a laid-off line worker looking for other work in the city found every other employer laying off too.

Monoculture is only part of the story. The larger part is what Detroit did to protect itself, and how each protection became a trap.

The 1950 “Treaty of Detroit,” the landmark agreement between the UAW and General Motors, guaranteed high wages, annual raises, and generous pensions. It was celebrated as labor peace, and for a generation it delivered. It also insulated Detroit’s workforce from any pressure to adapt. By the late 1970s, Japanese manufacturers were building cars with labor costs roughly half of Detroit’s. The treaty had not protected the workers so much as fixed the price at which they would become uncompetitive.

Government then stepped in to protect the protection. In 1980 Michigan rewrote its eminent domain law so the city could seize the Poletown neighborhood, spending some $200 million to clear it before selling the land to GM for around $8 million. Washington negotiated “voluntary” restraints on Japanese imports. Each intervention bought time, but none bought change. Shielded from competition, the automakers had less reason, not more, to fix the practices that were failing them. Protectionism, as Hebert puts it, offers short-term comfort at the price of long-term fragility.

The protectionist measures eventually failed to protect Detroit's way of life. The middle class left. The tax base eroded. Schools and services deteriorated, giving those who remained more reason to go. By 2013 the city Rivera painted could not pay its creditors.

What I found most compelling in our conversation was Hebert’s insistence that this is not merely a story about efficiency. It is a story about dignity. The Catholic social tradition has always taught that work is bound up with the dignity of the person. Hebert’s argument is that this dignity is not served by making workers permanent dependents of a declining industry propped up by subsidy and tariff. It is served by making it easier for them to move, to learn, and to find new work worthy of their gifts. Pittsburgh’s workers had that option. Detroit’s, for a long time, did not.

There is good news at the end. Since roughly 2010, investment in technology, mortgage lending, and financial services has begun to give Detroit the diversity it lacked. The city is recovering, slowly, by becoming less of a company town.

The Rivera murals, for their part, are still on the walls. A coalition of foundations, the state of Michigan, and the museum’s own donors raised more than $800 million to keep the collection out of the bankruptcy. It is fitting. Rivera painted men at work as an image of human dignity. The lesson of Detroit and Pittsburgh is that dignity cannot be walled in.

The precise words attributed to Elizabeth are almost certainly apocryphal; one is right to be suspicious of verbatim transcripts from Tudor audience chambers. But the instinct behind them is very much alive. It animates the latest episode of Acton Line, in which I sat down with my colleague Stephen Barrows, the Acton Institute’s chief operating officer, to examine Bill Gates’s sprawling new essay on artificial intelligence, “The turbulent AI era is here.”

Gates argues that this technology is categorically unlike the disruptions that came before. Where past machines replaced muscle, AI targets cognition itself; where past tools demanded training, this one speaks our own language; what it offers, in Gates’s phrase, is “portable intelligence.” From that premise flows a striking proposal: that we designate certain “human-reserved occupations,” domains of work fenced off for people alone.

Stephen was unpersuaded that AI is so wholly new. The bulldozer displaced the ditch-digger, yes, but the spreadsheet displaced the bookkeeper and AutoCAD the draftsman: cognitive, skilled, white-collar work, gone or transformed. He pointed to the Anthropic Economic Index, which finds current AI use running somewhat more toward augmentation than outright automation: tools that make us more productive rather than simply redundant. Both of us can testify to the former from our own desks.

But the heart of our disagreement with Gates lies in that word reserved. Elizabeth reserved knitting for human hands by royal fiat, and the frame simply left. Lee carried his machines to France, where Henri IV welcomed what England had spurned. Barrows’s objection is the classical liberal’s: what is genuinely valued need not be commanded. If people prefer a human hand at the bedside of the dying, or the honest imperfections of handcrafted goods, the market will register that preference far more faithfully than any government reserve. The principle at work is subsidiarity, that decisions belong at the level closest to the human person, not decreed from above. It should govern our anxieties about children and screens, too: not the surveillance model perfected in China, but simple tools that put parents, rather than the state, in charge of their own households.

For all this, neither of us treated the essay as merely wrongheaded. The gravest danger of these technologies, Stephen suggested, is not to our paychecks but to our persons: to friendship, to family formation, to the fragile business of falling in love and raising children, already strained by falling fertility across the developed world. A tool that answers every need may quietly erode our need for one another.

The essay’s most surprising note was one we welcomed. Gates, hardly a man given to piety, calls for religious thinkers to be brought into the conversation, invoking Pope Leo XIV’s concern that technology remain at the service of the human person. To that I would add what Gates underplays: the capacity of firms themselves for moral self-government. Anthropic’s own refusal of certain military applications suggests that conscience need not always wait upon regulation.

Which returns me to William Lee. Elizabeth’s fear was not baseless; some knitters surely suffered. But the frame she barred did not vanish. It went abroad, came home, and two centuries later helped kindle an age of abundance she could not have imagined, one that lifted the descendants of those very knitters out of the poverty she had sought to spare them. She saw the seen and could not see the unseen.

We cannot un-invent the machine. The question this Acton Line conversation left me with is not whether to hold it back, but whether we will meet it with the moral resources—freely chosen virtue, the family, the church—that no royal reserve and no federal statute can supply. A curate built the first frame. Four centuries on, a technologist asks the clergy back into the room. That is a hopeful sign.

No publisher commissioned it. No industry planned it. The genre that now fills multiplexes and bestseller lists was born at a house party, among friends reading their work aloud to one another.

I thought of that villa earlier this month in a less romantic setting: the DoubleTree by Hilton near the Grand Rapids airport, where I attended BasedCon 2026, a science fiction and fantasy convention. My reflections on the weekend are now up at Religion & Liberty Daily: “Portrait of the Artist as Based.”

The essay opens with the word itself. A “con” is a swindle; a “con” is also a convention; and “based”, a coinage of the rapper Lil B, later adopted by the online right, promises authenticity, being yourself without fear of what others think. BasedCon advertises “a community that feels serious without being stiff.” Whether that promise would prove a work of con artistry in the honest or the dishonest sense was the question I carried through the hotel doors.

The right-coded signaling was there, as the name suggests. But the foreground of the con was based in the broadest and best sense: authors reading works in progress with real vulnerability, panels on the Chosen One trope and the Dark Lord problem conducted with amiable disagreement, and a formal debate between a medievalist and a scientist on whether good storytelling requires fidelity to genre conventions. I left with two books purchased on the strength of brief readings alone.

The most bracing session tackled the elephant in the publishing room: there are too many books chasing too few readers. What struck me was how little despair attended this fact. When Amazon searches yield a pile of slush, an arbitrage opportunity arises. Small, dense networks where readers actually know authors look less like a dying industry and more like an artistic scene. Success, on this view, is defined neither by fame nor fortune but by finding a dedicated audience, even one of three hundred readers.

And the writers doing this work are systems engineers and church music directors. This is not a scandal but a tradition, one the essay traces through some illustrious company. The choice facing a writer has never really been between writing full-time and not writing at all, but between what I call consumptive and creative leisure, between making something and scrolling.

I went to BasedCon expecting to observe a subculture. I came away having received, in a mysterious way, a summons to boldness in my own work, one I try to articulate in the essay’s closing turn, which I won’t spoil here.

The party at the Villa Diodati had no idea they were founding anything. They were amateurs in the oldest sense, lovers of the work, reading aloud to a room of friends on a dark summer evening. Two centuries later, the skies over publishing look dark again: the flooded market, the vanishing midlist, the pile of slush. But science fiction has been here before. It was born in exactly this weather, at exactly this scale: a few writers, a few readers, and a story worth telling. There are only too many books if books exist solely to be sold and not crafted. The villa by the lake, the DoubleTree by the airport: the light gets made indoors.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Liberty Daily.

Then, at Caesarea Philippi, something new entered history. Christ handed the keys of the kingdom not to the emperor, not to the Sanhedrin, but to a Galilean fisherman. Spiritual authority went not to Caesar, but to Peter.

That break, and what it means for religious freedom in America, is the subject of my conversation on Acton Line with William J. Haun, Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and author of the forthcoming book Not to Caesar, but to Peter: Remembering Why the Catholic Church Is a Perfect Society (Angelico Press).

Haun’s argument revives a concept most Catholics have forgotten and most Americans have never heard: the Church as a societas perfecta, a “perfect society.” He draws especially on Pope Leo XIII’s 1890 encyclical Sapientiae Christianae.

“Perfect” here is an Aristotelian term of art. It means complete: a society that possesses, in itself and by itself, all the means necessary to achieve its distinctive end of leading souls to eternal life with God. It does not mean that the Church’s clergy or laity are sinless. The Church is perfect in her constitution, not personnel. Anyone who has sat through a parish council meeting can tell the difference.

Why does this matter? Because the alternative frameworks on offer are inadequate to what the Church actually is, and dangerous to religious liberty besides.

Modern law and modern habits of mind tend to treat the Church as one voluntary association among many: a club, a nonprofit, a Rotary chapter with incense. Haun argues that this framing quietly makes religious practice a matter of state permission. If the Church is just another association, her freedoms are just another set of exemptions, granted today and revocable tomorrow.

The older teaching offers a firmer foundation. If the Church is a complete society with her own origin, her own end, and her own governance, then her independence is not a carve-out from state power but a structural boundary on it. The existence of an institution that answers to a higher authority than Caesar is itself a check on Caesar’s pretensions. This is why, as Haun notes, even non-Catholics have a stake in the argument: religious freedom grounded in the nature of the Church is far more durable than religious freedom grounded in the state’s forbearance. This argument is strikingly similar to the one advanced by Lord Acton in his 1877 lecture “The History of Freedom in Antiquity”, and it is an excellent one.

Haun is equally careful to distinguish his thesis from its counterfeit. Contemporary neo-integralists propose to direct society toward Catholic ends by capturing state power. Haun’s points out that whenever throne and altar have merged, it is the altar that gets subordinated. The regalist experiments of early modern Europe did not produce a sanctified state; they produced a domesticated Church, an instrument of governance rather than a proclaimer of the Gospel.

His counter-model is integration from without, and his exemplar is Archbishop John Hughes of New York, “Dagger John”, who met nineteenth-century nativist hostility not by seizing the levers of civil power but by building: schools, colleges, charitable institutions, legal protections. A Church confident in her own completeness enriches public life organically, from her own resources, on her own authority.

Haun closes with counsel in the same spirit: live the liturgical calendar, build the institutions, let the Church demonstrate her authority the way she always has through concrete practice.

Centuries after Caesar held it, the emperor Gratian declined the office of pontifex maximus, laying aside the old pagan priesthood. The title did not vanish. In time it settled where the keys had already gone, on the successor of the fisherman, the bishop of Rome. Caesar’s most ancient religious office now belongs to Peter’s heir.

Titles, like authority itself, eventually find their proper home. Haun’s book is a timely reminder of where that home is, and why remembering it may be the surest foundation religious liberty has.

At the birth of a technology that would annihilate distance, remake commerce, and transform war and peace, there stood a Christian asking not, “what have we built?”, but “what hath God wrought?” Wonder, gratitude, and responsibility, all in four words.

I thought of Morse while recording the latest episode of Acton Line with my friend Kevin Vallier, professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo, director of research at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership, and affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute. Kevin has joined me before to discuss Catholic integralism and the fusionist tradition. This time we took up a subject that will shape all the others: artificial intelligence, and the Christian case for using it well.

Kevin begins by explaining what the technology actually is. Large language models are, he explains, something like your smartphone’s autocomplete raised to an extraordinary power. Billions of interconnected parameters trained on the vast corpus of human language, predicting the next word that mimic human intelligence behaviorally and functionally, but they are not conscious and do not reason as we do.

Demystifying the technology inoculates us against both the utopians who worship it and the doomsayers who flee it. A tool understood is a tool that can be governed.

The economy ahead, Kevin argues, will be defined by what he calls “agentic capitalism”: AI systems evolving into autonomous assets that act, transact, and even replicate without direct human supervision.

The promise is real and could unlock innovation, efficiency, and scientific discovery at speeds we can scarcely imagine. But so is the peril. As AI agents mediate more of our exchanges, they risk widening the distance between persons and corroding the social trust on which free societies depend. Kevin wrote the book on this, Trust in a Polarized Age, and he warns too of dramatic “intelligence inequalities,” in which the few firms or nations commanding vast AI societies wield near-total economic and military dominance.

Many Christians feel an instinctive aversion to all this. Kevin’s counsel is that abstention is the truly dangerous option. History bears him out. When the Church has retreated from new paradigms of power, as portions of it did during the industrial revolution and the ideological convulsions of the twentieth century, those instruments have been seized by others and turned against her.

If Christians leave AI to the transhumanists, they forfeit their seat at the table where the technology will be governed. The faithful presence that put Scripture on the wire in 1844 must be present at this creation too.

Kevin closes with practical counsel: test frontier models rather than judging AI by its free tiers; outsource the menial to preserve time and attention for nobler pursuits; skip “prompt engineering” and simply ask the model to write its own best prompt. He even confesses to venting minor workplace frustrations to a machine rather than gossiping to a colleague, sparing real reputations and real relationships.

But there are limits, AI can summarize theological texts or prompt us to prayer, but it must never simulate the spiritual life itself. No machine can pray in our place, and none can replace a spiritual director or a friend. The measure of the technology is whether it protects and improves human relationships, never whether it replaces them.

That was Morse’s posture in the Capitol chamber, and it should be ours: hands on the instrument, eyes lifted higher, asking of every new power the old question, what hath God wrought?

It is a beautiful vision of liberty as a generational project: each generation securing for the next the freedom to pursue higher things. But the vision contains a hidden assumption. It works only if each generation actually hands down what it has learned, if the children who study poetry still understand why their grandfathers studied war. When the transmission fails, the inheritance is squandered.

The failure of transmission is the subject of the latest episode of Acton Line. I had a wonderful conversation with Stephanie Slade, senior editor at Reason and fellow in Liberal Studies at the Acton Institute, to discuss her new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right.

Fusionism was the postwar synthesis, articulated in the early American conservative movement by Frank Meyer, that joined the classical liberal defense of individual freedom to the Christian tradition of moral virtue. Its central insight was that these two commitments are not rivals but mutually dependent: virtue that is coerced is no virtue at all, for the good must be freely chosen; and a free society cannot long endure among a people without moral character. This synthesis became the philosophical foundation of the American conservative movement and carried it to its greatest political triumphs.

Slade observes how those triumphs bred complacency. After Reagan, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fusionism’s heirs no longer failed to explain and defend their first principles. The movement grew adept at winning elections and negligent in forming minds. A generation inherited the institutions of conservatism without inheriting its convictions.

Into that vacuum has rushed a new generation of intellectual entrepreneurs and hucksters who argue that liberty itself is the obstacle to virtue, that the freedom fusionism prized is precisely what hollowed out the moral order it hoped to preserve. Their remedy is to seize the levers of state power and impose from above what persuasion failed to secure. Slade calls these folks the dissident right, “will to power conservatives.”

Slade warns that abandoning classical liberal institutions, the rule of law chief among them, in pursuit of top-down moral renewal does not produce virtue. It produces unworkable and authoritarian extremes, and it destroys the very moral character it claims to defend. Compliance compelled forms no souls. Lord Acton understood this: liberty is not a means to a higher political end but the highest political end itself, required “for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.”

Where, then, is the way forward? Slade’s answer is that young people drifting toward illiberal alternatives are not, at bottom, seeking technocratic policy or economic efficiency. They are starving for answers to the oldest questions: What is a good life? What is it for? A conservatism that offers them only marginal tax rates has nothing to say to their deepest hunger.

The remedy is a re-engagement with philosophy, theology, and the humanities. A return to the moral and intellectual formation that the movement neglected in its decades of electoral success. A return to the work of transmission.

Which brings us back to Adams in Paris. His generational sequence doesn’t run in one direction only, as though politics could be studied once and then forgotten. Every generation must take up the study anew, must learn again why liberty is worth securing and what it is for. The liberty to study philosophy is earned, in every age, by those willing to make the argument for liberty itself. Both liberty and virtue are non-negotiable and both must be handed down, or they will not be held at all.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube:

Sri Ramakrishna went beyond conventional morality and stressed purity, which is the real basis and aim of all moral codes and conduct. The difference between conventional morality and purity is to be noted here. Morality is the basis of religion; whereas purity is the basis of spirituality. Morality is how we appear to other people; purity is how we appear to God. Morality is conformity to codes of conduct and behaviour, whereas purity is freedom from the hold of past samskaras [psychological imprints] of desires and instinctual drives.

Swami Bhajanananda, The Light of the Modern World (Advaita Ashrama, 2012), 223-224.

Give it a listen:

If Newton could be undone by speculation, none of us should trust our instincts in the market. On the latest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with David Bahnsen, founder and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group and author of Profit from the Profit: The Past, Present & Future of Dividend Growth Investing, to talk about what the alternative to speculation actually looks like, and why the answer is as much moral as it is financial.

David draws a distinction at the beginning of our conversation that governs everything that follows: investing is putting capital into human action and long-term wealth creation. Speculation is something else entirely, a wager on price movements. It is an attempt to profit from the crowd’s next mood rather than from any enterprise’s real productivity.

The trouble is that speculation is increasingly marketed as investing. The gamification of markets: meme stocks, zero-commission trading apps, and the daily churn of financial media has made investing feel like being a shooter at a craps table. David’s finds that human nature, left to its own devices, makes for a poor investor. We are wired to chase what is rising and flee what is falling, which is precisely backwards. Discipline is not one virtue among many in investing, it is the whole game.

So why dividends? The obvious answer is cash flow: a rising stream of income that compounds over decades and does not depend on selling shares into whatever market happens to prevail. But the deeper answer, and the one that animates David’s whole approach, is about accountability.

A dividend is a kind of social contract between a company’s management and its owners. The obligation to return real cash to shareholders, quarter after quarter, disciplines executives in a way no mission statement ever could. Balance sheets must be managed soberly. Vanity projects and empire-building become harder to justify when money must actually be paid out. The dividend, in other words, tells the truth about a business, and it keeps the business honest in the telling.

It would be easy to let the matter rest there as a question of prudent strategy, but our conversation deepened to a discussion of growth itself is a theological concept.

Wealth creation is not a zero-sum scramble over a fixed pile of cash. It is the fruit of human dignity expressed through work and innovation, men and women made in the image of God, meeting real human needs through real enterprise. To invest in that process is to participate in it. The numbers on the screen symbols of something concrete: goods shipped, services rendered, problems solved, and families provided for. Stewardship is not merely the careful preservation of what we have been given but its faithful cultivation over time. The parable’s servant who buried his talent in the ground was not being cautious, he was being faithless.

Which brings us back to Newton. His failure in 1720 was not a failure of intellect but virtue. The madness of crowds is not calculated away; it is resisted, and resistance requires virtues: patience, discipline, humility about what we cannot know, and fidelity to what we can.

Dividend growth investing is not a trick for beating the market but a framework for staying sane inside it, ordered toward long-term stewardship rather than short-term price fluctuations. Newton could chart the heavens, but he couldn’t time the market. Investors need not be speculators, they can simply hold good companies, collect what they produce, and let time and do the work.

More than half a century later, the famines Ehrlich prophesied never came, but strangely the fear persists. Many still think the earth is bursting at the seems with humanity while the reality is that, if current trends continue, there won’t be too many people but too few. On the latest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with my colleague Stephen Barrows, economist and chief operating officer of the Acton Institute, to ask how we got the future so wrong and what a truer account of the human person might tell us about the demographic questions now pressing upon us.

Across most of the world, fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level. A consistent demographic trend with serious momentum. Just as a growing population compounds across generations, a shrinking one does too: fewer children today mean fewer parents tomorrow, and the arithmetic gets harder to reverse the longer it runs. Barrows walks through the social and economic challenges that follow: shrinking workforces supporting growing numbers of retirees, strained welfare systems, and hollowed-out communities.

Yet the old fears linger. The Malthusian intuition that people are a drain on a fixed stock of resources still shapes how many think about children, family, and the future.

The error runs from Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century to Ehrlich in the twentieth. The error is counting human beings as stomachs and mouths alone while forgetting that they come with minds and muscles. Human beings, Barrows argues, are net problem solvers, bringing more into the world through creativity, innovation, and work than they consume.

This is not naïve optimism but a claim about human nature. Why, Barrows asks, do we face material scarcity at all? His answer is arresting: scarcity is an occasion for virtue. The limits of the material world call forth precisely those excellences, ingenuity, diligence, cooperation, service to one another through productive work, that constitute so much of a life well lived. We are made to meet constraints and, in meeting them, to be perfected.

The evidence bears this out. Barrows points to the economics of “time prices”: measuring the cost of goods not in dollars but in the hours of labor required to earn them. By that measure, nearly everything has grown radically more abundant over time. The hours of work that once bought a bushel of wheat now buy many. Scarcity retreats before human creativity, not automatically, but wherever people are free to innovate, exchange, and serve one another.

Economics can take us this far, but not all the way. Drawing on Pope Benedict XVI, Barrows insists that human existence cannot be reduced to transaction. A child considered as a line item on a household balance sheet will always look like a liability; the categories themselves are the problem. Children are not costs to be managed but gifts to be received, the supreme gift, to families and to societies. What Benedict called the logic of gift stands as a rebuke to every accounting of human life that begins and ends with the ledger.

It is a case Barrows and his wife, Dr. Kimberly Barrows, will soon make at book length in their forthcoming One More: The Case for Another Child.

Paul Ehrlich told Johnny Carson’s audience that the battle was over and humanity had lost. He was wrong twice: wrong about the outcome, and wrong about what human beings are. The battle to feed humanity was never really a battle at all, because every generation arrives bearing the means of its own provision: minds, hands, and hearts.

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (Luke 15:4-7)

Luke Burgis spent years trying is decipher this arithmetic. His wrestling with it produced his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, and it is the subject of my conversation with him on the latest episode of Acton Line.

Burgis is best known for Wanting, his very successful popularization of René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. The theory gives a counterintuitive account of our own desires which are not generated from within but caught from without. From the conscious and more often unconscious imitation of models. In The One and the Ninety-Nine that insight is extended from what we want to who we are. If desire is contagious, so is identity. The parable becomes the hermeneutical key to the digital age. Imitation is not so much a flaw in human nature as its grammar. Anxieties personal, intellectual, and cultural now spread at the speed of light through digital crowds which now fit in pockets.

Frictionless digital spaces—feeds, group chats, quote-tweets—make it easier to both flee into isolation or dissolve into the crowd. The acute challenge is found in remaining ourselves while remaining connected to others.

Against both temptations Burgis sets what he calls, borrowing from family systems theory, the “solid self.” A self capable of remaining grounded and calm in anxious environments. This is the only sort of person capable of deep and meaningful relationships, because only such a person has a self to give rather than a self perpetually shaped by external pressure.

How is such a self forged? By cultivating one-on-one relationships within our families, churches, and institutions rather than encountering one another only as members of groups. Burgis speaks movingly of his own family’s experience of caregiving, and we range from there into education and artificial intelligence. The remedy is recovering our capacity to encounter transcendence: the true, the good, the beautiful, and, Lord willing, the Lord himself.

Which brings us back to the shepherd. His arithmetic is only strange if a sheep is just a fraction of a flock. One out of ninety-nine. It is perfectly sound if each one is irreplaceable. The parable is not bad accounting but an illustration of God’s economy, one in which the person is never simply one of the many.

Listen to the whole conversation:

That last phrase should sound familiar to anyone who followed the debate over the “common good” raged across X this past week. It was offered up, nearly verbatim, as a definition of the common good itself. But a definition that cannot distinguish the common good from a lighthouse has mistaken a part for the whole and ignored more than two millennia of philosophical and theological reflection in the Christian West.

That conviction is at the heart of my essay published Sunday in The Dispatch‘s Dispatch Faith newsletter, “The New Right Is Wrong About the ‘Common Good.’”

The Catholic Church has engaged in a rich, sustained reflection on the common good for some 2,000 years. The Catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes, defines it as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” And it names three essential elements: respect for the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person, the social well-being and development of the group, and the stability and security of a just order.

Note what comes first. Any honest grappling with the common good must include a serious commitment to the rights of the human person as a part of and not an obstacle to its realization. This is why the “zero-sum dispute” between the common good and individual liberty, so confidently framed by voices on the new right, dissolves under examination. As Lord Acton observed, the Catholic notion of liberty “denies that general interests can supersede individual rights.” When postliberals celebrate Franco’s regime or argue for the military occupation of American cities, they do not defend the common good. They discredit it.

After the essay published, I had a thought-provoking exchange on X with Ken Craycraft, professor of moral theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati, who shared with me his own recent column in The Boston Pilot, “What is the ‘common good,’ anyway?”

Readers of both pieces will find a lot of convergence. Craycraft and I draw from the same wells: Gaudium et spes, the Catechism, and the four permanent principles of Catholic social doctrine: human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. He rightly insists that the common good cannot be reduced to a calculation or spreadsheet, and his list of policies incompatible with human flourishing includes restrictions on freedom of religion, assembly, and travel.

Where we differ is in diagnosis and emphasis. Craycraft sees the recent debate as driven by classical liberals and libertarians who equate the common good with totalitarian collectivism. My concern runs in the other direction: not that the common good is invoked too often, but that it is invoked too thinly and even cynically.

Read the full essay at The Dispatch, and Kenneth Craycraft’s column at The Boston Pilot.

A century and a half later, in the year of America’s semiquincentennial, Brazil confronts a darker marvel: not that the voice can travel, but that it can be stopped.

This week on Acton Line I welcome back Marcel van Hattem, Brazilian congressman, journalist, and political scientist representing the state of Rio Grande do Sul, to discuss the state of free speech in his country and the perilous state of its institutions.

When Marcel first joined me on Acton Line last year, Brazil was in the midst of a constitutional crisis: a Supreme Court asserting ever-broader powers over the press, over social media platforms, and over the speech of ordinary citizens. Journalists deplatformed. Accounts banned. An entire social network switched off ahead of an election. That crisis has not passed. It has matured, and its fruits are now ripening across Brazilian public life.

Marcel knows this pressure firsthand. He has been investigated, threatened, and, in a scene seen around the world, had his microphone cut on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies. His witness raises questions that reach well beyond Brazil: What does the rule of law require when the guardians of the law become its greatest threat? How does a legislator fulfill his duties under authoritarian pressure? And what do free peoples everywhere owe one another when liberty is imperiled in one of the world’s largest democracies?

Censorship is never just policy, but claim about persons. That some may speak while others must be spoken for. A free society rests on the opposite conviction: that every person bears the dignity, and with it the duty, of bearing witness to the truth as they understand it.

This is why this year’s Brazilian elections matter so much. Marcel explains what change in the Senate would mean for the cause of liberty, why liberty-minded legislators cannot simply wait out the storm, and what ordinary Brazilians are doing to reclaim their constitutional inheritance.

Lord Acton reminds us that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” It is required, he wrote, “for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.” When the state presumes to decide which voices may be heard, it does not merely regulate politics; it forecloses the pursuit of those highest objects for everyone.

Dom Pedro II did not keep his throne; a coup deposed him in 1889, and Brazil’s constitutional history has been turbulent ever since. But his astonishment in Philadelphia still instructs. The human voice carrying farther than it ever had was the wonder of 1876. The wonder of 2026 is that men and women like Marcel van Hattem need to insist, at real personal cost, that their voices be allowed to carry at all.

That gap between the celebration and the commitment is, the subject of this week’s episode of Acton Line. My friend and mentor Bradley J. Birzer, the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College, and I talked about his new book, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty. It arrives in this semiquincentennial year as a welcome invitation to read our founding document again in the company of the people who wrote it.

We are accustomed to reading the Declaration as a lawyer’s brief against George III or a philosopher’s argument for natural rights. Birzer does not deny it is both. But he insists it is something more: a moral document that embodies a people capable of virtue with a robust traditions of self-government.

They inherited these traditions above all from Cicero. They knew his writings intimately. His Roman republic haunted their imaginations as model and warning. Republics are fragile things. Rights alone do not sustain them. It takes citizens formed in prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude to keep a republic once you have one. In our conversation, Birzer traces how these classical virtues are not merely background to the Declaration but woven into its very structure and argument.

Birzer’s boldest claim is that what Christianity accomplished theologically in proclaiming human dignity, the Declaration accomplished, or would eventually accomplish, politically.

Our conversation also takes up the dramatic narrative at the heart of the book—the crowded months from 1774 through 1776, the debates in Congress, Jefferson’s drafting and the revisions that followed, and the controversy the Declaration attracted from the moment the ink dried. The document we now treat as self-evident was anything but self-evident to its first readers.

That, perhaps, is the most useful lesson of the semiquincentennial. Two hundred fifty years on, we are tempted to treat the Declaration as a finished monument, something to be admired and then returned to its case. The signers knew better. The Declaration they signed was not a conclusion but a beginning, a radical experiment that would demand of them, and of every generation after them, the republican virtues it presupposed. The fireworks belong to July 4. The work belongs to every day after.

Listen to my full conversation with Brad Birzer on Acton Line: