Mitt Romney Chose Truth Over Tribe. We Should Too.

Character and competency matter all the time, whether that’s in public office or the church.

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

This week, all of Washington is abuzz about journalist McKay Coppins’s profile in The Atlantic of US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), which revealed Romney’s forthcoming retirement from the world’s most important deliberative body.

The piece, excerpted from Coppins’s forthcoming book, Romney: A Reckoning, is striking because in it, the senator does not retreat into euphemisms or PR-speak in disclosing what he believes to be the problems in the country and in his own party. Instead, he lets his “yes” be “yes” and his “no” be “no,” no matter what people might think of that.

Setting aside for a moment whether one agrees or disagrees with Romney’s viewpoints, now might be the time for us to reevaluate what we once knew about the importance of character—not just in public office, but also in the church.

As I read the profile, many thoughts came to mind, but one memory kept flashing to the forefront. Several years ago, I was interviewed on a media format I rarely engage—a drive-time radio comedy/news/sports/politics show. One of the hosts challenged me on my saying that a lack of character makes someone unfit for office. He said he had found evidence that I once thought the exact opposite.

Now, there are lots of things that I have said in my life where I now think the exact opposite (I’ve discussed some of them here), but I was hard-pressed to think how this was one of them. The radio host pointed to a panel I had done back in 2012, when the controversy in the evangelical world was over whether Christians could vote for Mitt Romney, then the Republican nominee for president, ...

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