Donald Trump arrived yesterday afternoon in Miami, where he spent the night. He will motorcade to the federal courthouse today, where he will be arraigned on thirty-seven felony counts to which he will plead not guilty. His supporters have already begun lining up at the courthouse; the city is preparing for five thousand to fifty thousand protesters.

Yesterday we noted the fraught nature of this moment in American history. To expand on its perilous significance for our democracy, consider two plausible scenarios.

“MAGA Republicans” and “socialist Democrats”

Outcome A: Mr. Trump is exonerated of the charges against him, but many of his opponents consider the verdict a miscarriage of justice. If he is reelected next year, they refuse to recognize the authority of the presidency, leading to unprecedented consequences for our democracy.

Outcome B: Mr. Trump is convicted of the charges against him, but many of his supporters consider the verdict a miscarriage of justice. If he is defeated next year, they refuse to recognize the authority of the presidency, leading to unprecedented consequences for our democracy.

When a significant number of citizens believe their government to be illegitimate, their democracy is imperiled. Such a government could then be forced to use force to compel its citizens’ obedience to its dictates. I have seen such autocracy at work during my many trips to Cuba over the years. We are watching the same story unfolding in China under Xi Jinping and in Russia under Vladimir Putin.

I am not predicting that America’s future lies in a similar direction, but I do believe that we are closer to a grave crisis of confidence in our leaders and institutions than at any time in many decades.

Consider this: a recent poll found that 69 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans say our democracy is “in danger of collapse.” Illustrating the danger, however, one side blames former President Trump and his “MAGA Republicans,” while the other side blames President Biden and his “socialist Democrats.”

“What religion without religion looks like”

When Adam blamed Eve for his sin, he objectified her as his moral inferior and a means to his ends. From then to today, one foundational characteristic of fallen human nature is our tendency to demean our fellow humans in the same way.

Philosophers refer to this as “Othering,” our propensity to “turn fellow humans into abstract entities we can distance ourselves from or treat as less-than-human.” Simone de Beauvoir noted that this tendency is basic to thinking: as soon as we think about something, we think about its opposite, the Other. But it is also central to our fallen “will to power”: once we identify people as the Other, it becomes easier to justify treating them in ways we would not treat our fellow humans.

Each time I visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, I am reminded of the horrific Othering of Jews by Nazis. The slave trade and the Rwandan genocide are other examples.

Now we are witnessing the Othering of Americans by Americans along political divides. Not only does each side see the other side as dangerous to society, they do so with a fervor that is religious in its zeal.

Shadi Hamid notes in The Atlantic: “As Christianity’s hold, in particular, has weakened, ideological intensity and fragmentation have risen. American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it’s just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief. Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like” (his italics).

He adds: “Christianity was always intertwined with America’s self-definition. Without it, Americans—conservatives and liberals alike—no longer have a common culture upon which to fall back.”

“When the church is absolutely different from the world”

The solution to Othering is found in the Christian gospel, which Paul described as “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16, my emphasis). As Tim Keller explained, “The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.” This means that no person—Democrat, Republican, or Independent—is fundamentally any worse or better than I am. No person is loved by God any less or more than I am.

Now it’s our turn to see others in the same way. Imagine the difference if America’s two hundred million Christians prayed daily for God’s Spirit to enable us to love others as Jesus loves us. Imagine the impact if we modeled unconditional love for others whatever our political differences. Imagine the difference if others saw the difference God’s love has made in our hearts as “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Josh McDowell was right: “Whenever Jesus has been proclaimed, we see lives change for the good, nations change for the better, thieves become honest, alcoholics become sober, hateful individuals become channels of love, unjust persons embrace justice.” This is because, as Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones observed, “The glory of the gospel is that when the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.”

How “different from the world” will you be today?

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Former President Donald Trump is set to appear in a Miami courtroom tomorrow after a federal indictment unsealed Friday charged him with thirty-seven felony counts related to his handling of classified information.

Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, said of Mr. Trump and the charges against him: “Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but we don’t need a judge or jury to determine if his destruction of decency and dangerous incompetence continues to stain America.” Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia of California added: “Donald Trump is a con man who damaged our institutions, turned us against each other, and who will finally be held accountable by the country he tried to destroy.”

By contrast, just 17 percent of Republicans in a recent poll thought Mr. Trump should be charged over how he handled classified documents; 75 percent said he should not be. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called the indictment a “brazen weaponization of power,” and several other Republican leaders voiced similar protests. Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters even called for civil war, other acts of violence, and public executions of the “traitorous rats” behind the charges.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the Donald Trump indictment “a fraught moment for American democracy.” It explained: “For the first time in US history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former president who is also running against the sitting president.” The board predicts that the indictment “will roil the 2024 election and US politics for years to come.”

New York Times columnist Peter Baker likewise writes that the Donald Trump indictment “poses one of the gravest challenges to democracy the country has ever faced. It represents either a validation of the rule-of-law principle that even the most powerful face accountability for their actions or the moment when a vast swath of the public becomes convinced that the system has been irredeemably corrupted by partisanship.”

How have we come to this “fraught moment for American democracy”? What is the way forward?

Our “propensity to this dangerous vice”

James Madison wrote in 1787, “Among the numerous advantages promised by a well- constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction” (The Federalist Papers No. 10). Madison, often called the “Father of the Constitution,” was deeply concerned about the threat of factions to America’s governance: “The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice.”

The Founders’ solution to this problem, as embodied in the US Constitution, was to create a republic in which the wishes of the majority and the rights of the minority are balanced. This balance, however, was predicated on a foundational commitment to objective truth and consensual morality.

George Washington was convinced that “truth will ultimately prevail where there are pains taken to bring it to light.” In a biography of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Stuber wrote, “A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”

As a result, according to Alexander Hamilton, “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force” (The Federalist Papers No. 1).

It is this “important question” that stands before us now.

A seminar in two paragraphs

For many years, I taught a doctoral seminar at Dallas Baptist University on the history of Western thought. To summarize that seminar in two paragraphs:

What we call Western civilization was founded by the Greeks and Romans on the belief that the world can be understood by human reason operating through objective principles of logic and investigation. The rule of law developed over time as the cultural foundation for a moral and stable society. While thinkers varied widely in their interpretive methods, they held in common the belief that truth is objective.

The postmodern revolution that began in the mid-twentieth century shook this foundation like an earthquake. Building on the work of Kant and Nietzsche, postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty convinced us that since our subjective minds interpret our subjective sense experiences, all truth claims must be subjective. (This is, paradoxically, an objective truth claim.)

This insistence on subjective truth soon paved the way for subjective morality with the sexual revolution that has legitimized pornography, premarital and extramarital sex, same-sex sexual relations and marriage, and the larger spectrum of LGBTQ ideology. Now we are witnessing the damage this cultural earthquake is doing to our larger democracy and the political institutions upon which it stands.

“Where there is no law, there is no liberty”

Clearly, a large percentage of Americans have decided the guilt or innocence of Donald Trump not on the merits of the charges against him (which few have even read) but based on their preconceived opinions of him.

This reflects our larger loss of faith in the judiciary: only one-third of Americans have confidence in our courts. Nor do we trust the media to report this story fairly: only 16 percent of us have confidence in newspapers, and only 11 percent trust television news. Nor do we trust our elected officials to respond fairly: only 7 percent of us have confidence in Congress.

When all truth and moral claims are viewed as subjective impositions of personal opinions, there can be no objective laws. And, as Benjamin Rush noted, “Where there is no law, there is no liberty.”

Tomorrow we’ll explore biblical solutions for this cultural crisis. For today, I encourage you to pray David’s words with me: “Teach me your way, O Lᴏʀᴅ, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name” (Psalm 86:11). Now pray them for our nation: “Teach us your way, O Lᴏʀᴅ, that we may walk in your truth; unite our hearts to fear your name.”

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”

Do you agree?

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