Criminal Or Not, Trump’s Case is a Moral Test for Christians

The former president’s potential arrest shows that character does matter.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

As I write this, I have no idea if or when we will see something no generation of Americans has ever witnessed: a mug shot of a former president of the United States. What I do know is that the entire country is waiting with a sense of unease about just that possibility and about what happens next.

Last weekend, former president Donald Trump posted on his social media platforms that he expected to be arrested this week, on charges by a New York grand jury of illegally reporting the hush money cover-up of an alleged affair with “porn star” Stormy Daniels.

Part of the confusion is that this potential indictment is almost universally considered the weakest of the (at least) four criminal investigations now ongoing regarding the former president.

The biggest difficulty related to this potential prosecution is the fact that we are dealing with probably the single most polarizing figure in American life in at least a century.

Not many families were divided into seething groups who refused to speak to one another over the relative merits of Hubert Humphrey or Bob Dole. I can’t imagine that very many pastors agonized over whether they would lose their pulpits over inadequate enthusiasm for Adlai Stevenson or Gerald Ford.

Imagine trying to find a jury of 12 people without already-fixed views on Donald Trump, even if the entire country were the pool for the search. That’s amplified for us as evangelical Christians because there’s an assumption in American life that “evangelical Christian” and “Donald Trump enthusiast” are synonyms.

Not all of us are, by any means. But it is fair to say that, in some ways, the ...

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