Christianity and the Founders' Liberalism
Christian Roots of American Liberty Hits #1
On May 19, 2026, Law & Liberty published a review of The Christian Roots of American Liberty: A Reader (Acton Institute, 2026), the new book edited by Acton’s Director of Research & Publications, Dr. John Pinheiro, and Research Fellow, Dr. Dylan Pahman.
The review, by Dr. Alexander William Salter, concludes: “America’s 250th anniversary is only months away. The semiquincentennial will occasion many reflections on the past, present, and future of our nation. Pahman and Pinheiro’s careful editorial work could hardly have come at a better time. Thanks to them, we can better understand and discuss Christianity’s essential role in American public life.”
For the full review of this important new Acton publication, which today hit #1 on Amazon’s New Releases in Christian Historical Theology, click on the link below to Dr. Pinheiro’s Substack.
Perhaps abstracting from the particular matter here, some argue that liberalism circumscribed by Christian norms and the natural law was what prevented it from going off the rails.
To some degree, we can make that argument. Unfortunately, this also downplays or ignores two important things. First, that liberalism itself is a Christian heresy, birthed within the context of Protestantism. Second, that liberalism is a totalizing anthropology that dissolves everything it touches like an acid. Meaning, if a Christian society accepts liberal precepts, then eventually, its Christianity will give way to the metastatic corruption of liberalism. In other words, liberalism—like all ideas—is not static. It enters into a dialectic with other ideas and the human condition. As it does, it works to undermine them to achieve total suicidal domination.
We are seeing today the convulsions of a dying ideology. The question isn’t whether liberalism will die, but how soon. The open question is: what will replace it? If Christians do not renounce capital-L liberalism and return to the classical tradition and enter into the ring, the void left by liberalism may very well be filled with something terrible. Illiberal, yes, but terrible.