Acton Institute Strikes Again

At the Acton Institute's "PowerBlog," the power is not exactly intellectual. They have a post up by Anthony Bradley in which he tells of his summertime sojourn in colonial Williamsburg and specifically his visit to Bruton Parish church. Professor Bradley - he teaches at King's College in Manhattan, the rightwing outfit formerly run by the disgraced and disgraceful Dinesh D'Souza- writes that "In 17th and 18th century Williamsburg, Virginia helping the poor was assumed, as a social norm, to be the responsibility of the church, not the state," he and wishes that things today were as they were then. He seems completely unaware of the fact that Bruton Parish was an Anglican parish and, just so, part of the Established Church of England in the colonial era. The secularization of English society was largely accomplished within the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who died before the first permanent settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. Church officials were government officials, paid by the government. Trying to link colonial Williamsburg to Marvin Olasky is a fools' errand. The distinction Professor Bradley draws was simply not meaningful. Acton runs something they call "Acton U" every summer. Perhaps they should include some history classes.