R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 34

The Impotence of Secular Conservatism

National Conservative Conference

July 9, 2024

It is an honor to be here at NatCon 2024, and we all know that we are meeting at an urgent moment and we can also see that the urgency has been made clear by some events just even over the last couple of years that have been very sobering. When last I had the opportunity to address this movement in late 2022, I spoke on the impossibility of a secular state. What I want to speak about today is the impotence of a secular conservatism. I don’t mean thereby to divide the room, but rather to speak honestly about where I think we are and what I think we should be thinking. I do speak as a Christian. I do speak as a theologian. I speak with a great deal of common concern and common cause among all of us here.

I appreciate the invitation to address this conference, but I also want to acknowledge a bomb on our moral landscape that reshapes our consideration, and that is the 2022 Dobbs decision and its aftermath. These developments force a new awareness on us.

I have been a part of the pro-life movement my entire adult life. I’ve had the privilege of being in rooms where major decisions have been made, strategies have been laid, and where facts and analytics have been considered. I can tell you that there are those now, and were those in the past, who were quite convinced that this is an argument we were winning. Many had convinced themselves that we were winning the argument for life, even if we were not winning that argument everywhere evenly. But the pro-life movement shared the confidence that if indeed all those years of work in conservative argument, and conservative organizing, and what became a conservative legal recovery, a constitutional recovery – if all that led to a reversal of Roe v. Wade, we would be ready for it and we would discover a pent-up, pro-life conviction on the part of the American people, certainly in key states painted red, where we would see pro-life conviction translated into pro-life legislation.

And of course, what we’ve seen is exactly the opposite. First in Kansas, but then also in my own Kentucky, suddenly the bomb went off, announcing to us that whatever commitment there was to the pro-life cause—commitment to the sanctity of human life, to the life of the unborn— was much less substantial than we had thought. It was much less convictional than we had thought. It was, most fundamentally, far less ontological than we had thought. And that leads me to the consideration for today. To be conservative is to hold allegiance to certain fixed truths and principles.

Now, I’m old enough to remember in my own adult lifetime the argument that conservative basically means holding to a conservative temperament and a conservative commitment to timeless tradition. But the truth I want to underline today is that the tradition without a fundamental commitment to truth – and that truth being fundamentally transcendent and theological – will soon evaporate.

I would take that argument further and insist that conservatism requires fixed religious truths as well as traditions. I would underline the fact that these fixed religious truths are grounded in specific acts of divine revelation, on which we are entirely dependent.

There are two points of urgency I want to make. Number one, conservatism is not just another form of liberalism, and then secondly, conservatism is not just liberalism or progressivism arriving later on the schedule with greater respect for the costs and challenges of what is defined as inevitable social and moral progress. Neither of these positions is genuinely conservative.

I believe the great challenge that now confronts conservatives, and I mean to include conservative Christians here, as well of course, all conservatives writ large in the United States, is the challenge of first things and fundamental truths. I do speak with a particular appeal to religious conservatives and American evangelicals. The great challenge is understanding that any worldview that does not ground itself in divine revelation, in the moral character of the self-existent, omnipotent, omniscient God – any conservative tradition that is not grounded in a prior commitment to ontology is going to evaporate. The only question is, will that evaporation happen quickly or more slowly?

One of the things we’ve witnessed in recent weeks, as a matter of fact, just in recent days, is the collapse of the Conservative Party in Great Britain. I follow that party and that Anglo-American tradition very closely, and the argument I made in an article published immediately after the election is that we should not be surprised that the so-called Conservatives lost, because the Conservative party had abandoned conservatism long ago. I would point to an incident that had taken place now more than a decade ago, when David Cameron, then the British Prime Minister and head of the Conservative Party, just basically came out and demanded that the party abandon what had been a very longstanding commitment to social conservatism. Indeed, he called for the party, and thus the government, to abandon the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. In his memorable words: “I don’t do this despite the fact I’m a conservative. I do this because I am a conservative.”

At that point, it was just like the entire ontological structure of Creation Order was just denied by a party that still dared to call itself conservative. I don’t believe a party that does such a thing deserves a conservative reputation, much less conservative affirmation. This act, taken so brazenly, was a repudiation of Creation Order and the order that had made his civilization possible.

I’m not denying the importance of social traditions, morals, political principles, constitutional norms, and much more shared among conservatives and shared as a glad stewardship. I want to emphasize anew how important that stewardship is, but I do want to argue that if it all is a matter of constant negotiation and a process of accommodation to changing circumstances, we are losing and are destined to lose. There is no lasting conservatism that is not self-consciously grounded in revealed truth and in ontology. To be conservative is to affirm what is real. If we lose this conviction, we lose everything.

Now, when you consider the challenges we face at this moment, it’s impossible to say the challenge is not ontological. We’re living in a society that increasingly believes a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy. Just in terms of fundamental ontology, if we don’t understand anything else, we would just understand that it has been assumed rightly throughout virtually all human history that anatomy and ontology are definitive, and determinative, and, frankly, are not impositions but gifts.

But we now live in a time in which the progressive idea of personal autonomy has reached the point that many in our society (including a disproportionate number among the cultural elites) believe human beings to be autonomous from ontology. I think this cultural crisis underlines the fact that when you have a conservative movement that is not itself committed to ontology, everything collapses into a matter of endless negotiation. The ontological grounding of the American order was made very clear in the Declaration of Independence and in other founding documents. When the founders spoke of nature and nature’s God, when they claimed we are ‘endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,’ that’s a language that is not just decorative, it is not just illustrative, but makes a truth claim. The language hearkens back to what in the Lutheran tradition is explicitly referred to as Creation Order, and I’m glad to say behind that the affirmation of what might rightly be called a Natural Law. The point is it is a created order. It is a revealed order, and it is an order. Behind that order is the God of the Bible, the God of Genesis. Behind Creation Order is the Creator. Behind the Natural Law is the supernatural Lawgiver.

Now, one of the interesting things we should note is that all I have stated there would have been noncontroversial at the time of the American founding. For one thing, the set of intellectual circumstances at the time was such that, prior to Darwin, there was really no other explanation for the existence of the world. The only explanation for creation was the prior existence of the Creator. Western civilization was the inheritance of Christendom, with a very clear biblical worldview, and there really was no alternative cosmology. At least not until Darwin. This is where Richard Dawkins’s interesting statement comes to mind – that it was impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist until Darwin. The dominant worldview of the age was not merely supernatural, not merely Christian, but explicitly Protestant. Historians even refer to the existence in North America of a Protestant Empire.

And we do see this great break in modernity with the arrival of a modern secular metaphysic and what was claimed to be a modern secular ontology, but it’s an empty ontology that comes with absolutely nothing determinative. What does it mean to affirm rights endowed by our Creator, when the Creator is denied? Our entire system of rights and reality is based in a Christian ontology and morality, which is based upon Jewish antecedents in both general and special revelation.

The secular experiment that is now underway, and has been underway for some time, is now seen in retrospect as that which is actually based upon nothing at all, nothing ontological, nothing in terms of reality, no particular metaphysic. You see this reference now in open arguments made among the Left. The ideological and political Left no longer shares any objective moral order. It seeks to impose a new morality (and view of reality) that explicitly rejects the ontology and the ontological commitments of the Christian tradition. But the Left brings to the table absolutely no ontological commitments of its own. It’s all just politics and power. It’s all they can see.

A conservatism that plays the same game and shares the same assumptions is no genuine conservatism. It just a language game or a way of playing for time.

You look at American history, at the Protestant empire, the longstanding Christian consensus, and then we understand the rise of conservatism, which came as a response to the early cleavages in our society and in particular to the Wilsonian period and beyond in the 20th century. Then, suddenly, there was this enormous appreciation among many conservative Americans for the work of someone like Edmund Burke, but it was a half-hearted appropriation of Burke. The appropriated right was Burke’s understanding of the importance of the tradition and the binding authority of tradition on society. The part many left behind was also essential to Burke. And that is the existence of an ontological order behind that tradition, truth behind that tradition. Ontology behind the tradition.

You look in the United States, and even much of what’s been called conservative turns out to be either a conservatism which is another form of liberalism, or conservatism that is nothing but an attempt at a delayed fuse. You look at back at previous Republican administrations and you understand that we can see that that’s exactly the strategy that was undertaken for so long. The post-Dobbs position now makes that very clear, even in conversations within the Republican Party. Behind all of this is also the experience of the Reagan Revolution, and behind that William F. Buckley, National Review, and fusionism.

Let me be clear: I’m not denying that Christian conservatives can have secular allies. I’m not denying that we can share vast areas of common agreement and common concern, but I am saying that at the end of the day, without an ontological commitment which is grounded in theological conviction, I don’t believe there’s any lasting conservatism to be found. Actually, I am certain that without ontological commitments (grounded in theism), conservatism is just an endless negotiation with progressivism and its progeny.

Conservatism has to be grounded in a commitment to truth. The fight to conserve reality is going to be very costly. If we are not contending for revealed truth, if our position and argument is just another theory to be placed alongside competing theories, an argument to be placed alongside other arguments – if that’s all there is to it, we are doomed.

That is not what I believe is at the very core of our argument and at the core of our convictions. An impotent conservatism that is grounded in no ontology cannot sustain itself, cannot perpetuate itself. It cannot accomplish its stated aims. It cannot defend its most basic principles and postulates. A secular worldview, consistently held, denies what we believe to be absolutely necessary and foundational.

Now, if you want to see evidence of what I mean, just look at the collapse of Protestant liberalism. Last year marked the hundredth anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s famous book Christianity and Liberalism, in which he rightly argued that the conflict between the orthodox and the liberals in the churches was not a conflict among Christians, but a conflict between adherents of two different religions – the Christians versus the liberals. He was absolutely right, and the tragedy of liberal Protestantism is that it has become so endlessly accommodationist that it is merely a cartoon of the age. That is what accommodation produces. That is what denying ontology produces.

What we see in the larger society is the collapse of conviction, the replacement of Christianity with a new religion. That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised by the rise of Marxism in all its different forms, such as critical theory. It is a reminder to us that when Adolf Von Harnack, the paradigmatic German liberal, argued that modern Christians must learn to separate the kernel and the husk of Christianity, keeping the kernel and throwing the husk away. You keep the kernel, which is religious experience, and you get rid of the husk, which is the claims of divine revelation. What you end up with is not theological liberation but European decadence. A secular conservatism cannot meet the challenge of the day, and an accommodationist Christianity will do no better. A flimsy theism will disappear in the midst of modernity. Most has disappeared already.

In Robert Kagan’s latest book, he makes an amazingly honest argument: “Liberalism is not inherently about progress, therefore, except the progress that comes from the expanding recognition of people’s rights. It has no teleology, no final resting point toward which it aims.” What an amazing statement. He admits the bare fact that there is no end game to liberalism. It is an endlessly open game with no teleology at all. There is no ultimate goal to the unfolding of inevitable Hegelian progress. The revolution never ends. We have been warned.

My response is simple. The only answer to that argument cannot be anything short of ontological in force, and that ontology has to be grounded in theism.

Cardinal Manning, perhaps an unusual person for an evangelical Protestant Christian to cite, said something profoundly true and nearly irreducible in terms of words. He said famously, “All human conflict is ultimately theological.” I want to end by saying this is exactly right. The cardinal nailed it. All human conflict is ultimately theological. Many will claim there is no theology here, nothing remotely theological. Don’t believe your eyes.

But the reality is all human conflict is ultimately theological. It is good to know what the alternatives are. It is good to know the challenge we face. It is good to speak honestly.

We face the most insidious attacks upon human dignity and the sanctity of life, the goodness of marriage and family, the structures of human society, even the reality of good and evil. We live amidst a great rebellion against transcendent reality, the good, the beautiful, and the true. Our answer to that cannot be less than political. Our answer to that cannot be less than cultural. It cannot be less than strategic. And I also want to say it cannot be less than theological, and it is good and necessary that we acknowledge this truth

I speak as a Christian theologian. I do not want to confuse Christian theology with some vague idea of nationalism or conservatism. Vague ideas will not hold. I want to say that I do not believe this nation and all that it represents can survive abandoning its theological roots. We will recover those roots and commitments or lose everything.

May God Bless America.

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Southern Baptists take a stand: The SBC removes an historic church and passes an historic statement on IVF

More than 10,000 Southern Baptists gathered in Indianapolis last week for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC was confronted by an unusually urgent set of decisions this year, and the messengers, as those sent by the churches are known, had a full agenda.

That agenda included several blockbuster actions on issues of controversy in the larger culture as well as regular reports from the convention’s ministries and boards. Anyone who thinks the annual meeting of the SBC is boring should come and watch next year in Dallas. This year, there wasn’t a spare moment on the agenda.

SBC president Bart Barber of Texas finished his term only after he presided over a complicated meeting with massive challenges. The first of these challenges is presiding in a way that allows a maximum number of messengers to speak to issues, following the convention’s adopted rules. In a hotly contested election that required three ballots, conservative North Carolina pastor Clint Pressley was elected the convention’s next president. It had been a long time since six candidates were nominated for the office at a single convention. The tellers committee got a real workout.

In terms of pressing business, the two issues that loomed largest as controversies were a proposed constitutional amendment that would have defined the use of the title “pastor” for any woman as grounds to find a church no longer in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC. That measure, passed last year by a large margin, required another supermajority vote in this year’s convention. On the second vote the measure failed by only a few percentage points. Interestingly, the same messengers made the SBC’s convictions on the matter clear by removing a prominent church from the “friendly cooperation” status by a very large margin—and over the same issue. The historic First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Va., was removed from the “friendly cooperation” status after the congregation had expressed its support for women serving as pastors. The SBC’s confession of faith states that “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” and messengers showed their unity on this question. The constitutional question is likely to arise again.

The convention took action on issues ranging from sex abuse prevention to support for Israel in its war against Hamas, but the other big headline had to do with something most messengers probably did not expect to confront—issues related to IVF.

The IVF resolution turned into instant headline news. Frankly, evangelical Christians have been late to get serious on this issue, and it was the recent Supreme Court of Alabama decision that served to focus evangelical attention. To put the issue bluntly, most evangelicals are reluctant to engage the issue. Far too many Christians say they believe in the sanctity and dignity of human life at every stage, from fertilization to natural death, but when the issue turns to the massive ethical issues related to IVF, many evangelicals, including far too many Southern Baptists, have refused to connect the dots.

The resolution does connect those dots, and it passed by a large margin after open debate on the convention floor. The resolution recognizes that many Christian couples “experience the searing pain of infertility” and affirmed that “all children are a gift from the Lord regardless of the circumstances of their conception.”

But the resolution goes on to state that “though all children are to be fully respected and protected, not all technological means of assisting human reproduction are equally God-honoring or morally justified.” The resolution listed many of the grave concerns about the technology of IVF, with particular reference to current standard procedures that produce untold thousands of “excess” human embryos destined for eventual destruction, often involve the selection of embryos based on quality or preferences, may involve human experimentation on embryos, and involve a host of other related issues. At the top of that list is now the reality that IVF is part of a giant human reproduction industry that turns human embryos into consumer products that are marketed to single women, same-sex couples, and a host of others.

Response was swift and predictable. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough rejected the pro-life argument in general, and the SBC resolution specifically, by referring to the SBC action as “very judgmental” and “very driven by politics.” Well, that last statement is false on its face. The SBC gains nothing politically by speaking up for human embryos. We speak up because we truly believe that human life is sacred from the moment of fertilization. That is what evangelical Christians have said we believe for decades as we have fought against abortion. Did we not mean it?

The SBC resolution affirms “the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage,” and calls on believers “to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation.”

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post went after me in particular, arguing that “Mohler speaks for a minority that believes all abortion, from the moment of conception, is murder.” Well, he got that much right. Robinson went on to argue for a woman’s right “to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy”—categorically. No one said this battle for human dignity and unborn life would be easy, and we clearly have a lot of work to do. But I must say that I am very thankful to be part of a convention of Baptists that will take a stand for life and adopt one of the first major statements on IVF to come from any Protestant denomination. This will not be the last moral witness we will need to make on this urgent issue, but it was an historic start.

Editor’s note:  Managing Editor Andrew T. Walker and I authored the IVF resolution and submitted it to the Resolutions Committee. We deeply appreciate the work of this year’s SBC Resolutions Committee and the clarity and conviction with which the committee brought this resolution to the floor.

This article originally appeared at World Opinions on June 17, 2024.

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National Conservatism 2024 | Crisis of Meaning and Morality in the West

Special session panel, featuring Albert Mohler and Douglas Wilson, moderated by Yoram Hazony, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC.

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Special Edition: God’s Sovereignty, Moral Evil, and the Attempted Assassination of Former President Trump: The Theological, Historical, and Political Issues

The post Special Edition: God’s Sovereignty, Moral Evil, and the Attempted Assassination of Former President Trump: The Theological, Historical, and Political Issues appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

J.N. Darby, the Father of Dispensationalism … or Maybe There Is More to the Story — A Conversation with Historian Crawford Gribben

The post J.N. Darby, the Father of Dispensationalism … or Maybe There Is More to the Story — A Conversation with Historian Crawford Gribben appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

The exodus of the faithful: The United Methodist Church loses more than a million members—in a single day

How do you lose a million members—in one single day? Last week, in just one vote, the United Methodist Church experienced a massive exodus as a group of African Methodists declared they could abide the UMC’s theological liberalism and moral revolt no longer. Maybe you need to let that sink in for a moment. With that single vote, the Ivory Coast Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church just left the church, taking 1.2 million members and declaring that “the new United Methodist Church which distances itself from the Holy Scriptures is no longer suitable.”

The unprecedented exodus of the faithful from the United Methodist Church is one of the biggest developments in recent church history. In the span of just two years, ending in December 2023, more than 7,000 American congregations left the church. Those congregations included some of the denomination’s largest churches. In just one very important annual conference, nearly 80 percent of the congregations departed, shaking the dust off their feet as they left.

Those churches were finally fed up with the mainline denomination’s refusal to stand by its clear doctrine and discipline on the issue of homosexuality. By the time the schism came, the issues covered the entire LGBTQ waterfront, including same-sex marriage, openly LGBTQ clergy, and a range of related issues. Just last month, what’s left of the UMC met in North Carolina and surrendered to the theological revolutionaries. With the conservative congregations gone, the liberals were entirely in the driver’s seat. Predictably, they drove the denomination off a cliff.

Of course, the theological disaster did not start with homosexuality. It began with theological liberalism and surrender to the spirit of the age. By the time the UMC met last month, speakers lined up to voice their “preferred personal pronouns” and assorted sexual and gender identities. It was like a drama based on Romans chapter 1. They just capitulated to the LBGTQ revolution and cloaked it all as a giant Pride event.

The UMC leadership had to know this was not going to go over well in Africa. At the meeting in May the assembly voted to allow some kind of autonomy on the part of annual conferences (districts of the church), outside the United States. Setting the stage for others to follow, the Methodists in the Ivory Coast decided to exercise the kind of autonomy that told the United Methodist Church to take a hike.

God bless them, they didn’t mince words. The Ivory Coast Annual Conference declared that the United Methodist Church “is not based in any biblical and disciplinary values” and that it “is now based on socio-cultural and contextual values which have consumed its doctrinal and disciplinary integrity.”

The new UMC “has preferred to sacrifice its honorability and integrity to honor the LGBT.” And, since it “distances itself from the Holy Scriptures” it is to be repudiated and abandoned.

That is a courageous statement of theological outrage and an accurate depiction of what the United Methodist Church has become. The action was predictable and necessary and the African church stood up for the biblical truths the American church had abandoned. It has happened before.

A generation ago, the same pattern played out in the Anglican Communion. When the Episcopal Church in the United States elected an openly gay bishop and then went on to embrace the entire LGBTQ agenda, conservative national churches in Africa and the larger Global South responded with repudiation. During the most intense period of controversy, after the election of the gay bishop by the Episcopalians, I was seated at a dinner in New York City next to one of the Anglican Communion’s famous African archbishops. We talked about the recent developments and the archbishop said to me, “We have our own temptations, but confusing marriage and endorsing homosexuality is not one of them.”

In a jarring irony, one liberal UMC minister, Rev. Dorothy S. Boulware, celebrated the tidal wave of LGBTQ affirmation by writing a report with the headline: “United Methodists Embrace a Big Tent After Historic LGBTQ Inclusion Vote.” Well, Reverend Dorothy, you are not going to need a big tent after all. For the sake of your “inclusive” theology you now include a few million fewer members. You just lost over a million in a single day.

The Methodists in the Ivory Coast serve as an example of what biblical faithfulness and gospel witness will require of us. To stay in a church that abandons Holy Scripture and surrenders to the spirit of the age is unfaithfulness. To stand for truth is often costly. Thank God, there are still Christians of courage and conviction in this world. May we all learn from them and, in our own churches, emulate their courage.

This article originally appeared at World Opinions on June 5, 2024.

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The verdict is in: The Manhattan show trial ends with former President Trump convicted—but now the real trial begins

The verdict is in. Just hours ago, a Manhattan jury found former President Donald J. Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. The jury deliberated only a matter of hours before making their judgment known to the court. Within seconds the news was spreading around the world. A former president of the United States is now a convicted felon. It will take some time for that fact to settle on the nation’s conscience, and the political ramifications are yet unknown. But before turning to the many implications of this verdict, we need to let the moral seriousness of the tragedy settle on us. Whatever happens in days to come, this verdict represents a major turning point in American history.

As difficult as we find this moment, Americans need to think carefully about what all of this means. We all know that Americans face a dangerous political moment, with constitutional dangers and legal complexities tossed about as weapons of political warfare. It seems just about impossible that we are overestimating the importance of this moment.

I have to put my cards on the table. I think Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump, coming as a result of a campaign pledge he made when he ran for Manhattan district attorney, was a political stunt from the beginning. Bragg had to construct an argument without legal precedent to press felony charges against Trump, and it is hard to see Bragg’s office taking a similar approach to any other defendant. To make the point bluntly—it has never happened before. Furthermore, the entire process played out almost as if it were a staged political show trial. And does anyone believe that a Manhattan jury is representative of the U.S. population? Major media described the New York proceedings as “Trump’s hush money trial,” even though the paying of hush money is not illegal. The seven-week trial was nakedly political, and the judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, made so many questionable rulings that a good number of observers on the liberal side acknowledge that Trump has strong grounds for an appeal.

But, of course, that appeal will come long after the 2024 presidential election.

The bigger scandal is that the forces allied against the former president were so blatantly political and the entire process was timed to inflict maximum political damage just as the 2024 presidential campaign was hitting high gear. Trump seethed as he was tied up in court, even as President Joe Biden was able to hit the campaign trail. The raw political agenda at work was seen as the Biden-Harris campaign dispatched actor Robert De Niro to hold an official campaign event outside the courtroom, timed for when the case went to the jury. Legal authorities friendly to the Democrats, and particularly friendly to Biden, could have acted earlier but didn’t. Their political calculation and manipulation are easy to see, and the former president will not have a hard time convincing untold millions of Americans that the whole trial was a sham—which it was.

At the same time, Christians trying to think and act within a Biblical frame find the entire picture just sickening. We have a former president, just about ready to pick up his third Republican nomination for president, whose major defense was that paying hush money to a porn actress isn’t illegal. Technically, it’s not illegal, but it’s hard to imagine that many evangelical Christians can look to Donald Trump without shaking their heads and wanting the whole sordid picture to just fade away. Whether or not Trump ever knew Stormy Daniels, he did arrange to pay her off. There is very little there that could surprise most of us when it comes to Donald Trump and scandal. The moral weight of it all is massive. And yet, President Biden is a half-lucid geriatric who is now little more than a tool of the radical left. To vote for Biden is to authorize continued incompetence and moral liberalism, now set to push a set of progressivist ideological goals over the finish line.

Say what you will about Donald Trump and his sex scandals, he doesn’t confuse male and female. Furthermore, the events connected to this trial will only serve to fire up Trump’s base and give him even more moral credibility when tells the American people, “I told you so. It’s me today and they’re coming for you tomorrow.” The biggest effect of this verdict, reached so suspiciously fast, is likely to be that Biden’s team feels self-satisfied and Trump’s team is fired up. My guess is that far more Americans will be fired up than satisfied by this verdict and New York’s misuse of the law.

Christians trying to think Biblically about politics will be tempted to try to find a way out of the melee. There is no way out. Barring something unforeseen, either Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be elected in November. The basic issues have not changed, nor have the candidates. In that sense, we are just where we stood at the beginning of the week. “Nov. 5 will be our liberation day,” Trump defiantly declared. Today was a dark day in American history, but all eyes are now focused on that date 159 days ahead of us. For America, the real trial is just beginning.

This article originally appeared at World Opinions on May 30, 2024.

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