🧵 Ten thoughts for Christians and the Trump criminal indictments:

1. No one should be above the law.

2. He is entitled to a presumption of innocence.

3. He is entitled to a fair trial.

4. He is entitled to an impartial jury. + 5. As citizens, we should reach our opinions about the charges based on law, facts, and prudence, not based on tribal loyalty.

6. Pretrial release shouldn’t be just for the rich and famous. +

🧵US Atty David Weiss, who approved the plea agmt with Hunter Biden, was appointed to that position by Pres Trump in Feb 2018.

Weiss was allowed to stay in office when Biden because president.

US AG Merrick Garland gave Weiss “ultimate authority” over the H. Biden prosecution. Concerns have been raised that Hunter Biden’s misdemeanor guilty plea to tax charges and pretrial diversion of the gun charges against him were unduly lenient.

I don’t know how good the evidence of those charges was to say definitively whether this deal was too lenient.

Juneteenth 🧵 on slavery and the 13th Amendment:

President Lincoln, using his war powers, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in Sept 1862 declaring that, as of Jan 1, 1863, all slaves in rebel states were free. But slavery was not yet eradicated in the US. The Civil War was still raging. The proclamation did not apply in loyal states (MO, KY, MD, DE) that still allowed slavery. And the proclamation would not reach the furthest outpost of Galveston, TX until June 19, 1865.

🧵 on the rule of law:

In the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, John Adams wrote that the state government he was proposing was designed to be "a government of laws and not of men." In 1787, the US Constitution was drafted and then, in 1788, ratified.

In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall, writing in 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘣𝘶𝘳𝘺 𝘷. 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘰𝘯, described the federal government created by that federal constitution as "a government of laws, and not of men."

🧵 “By 1790, most Baptist churches in Virginia were biracial, and African Americans made up nearly one-third of all Virginia Baptists (30 percent).”

— Eric C. Smith (biographer of Rev. John Leland) “The influx of black church members prompted many white Baptist leaders to re-evaluate the institution of slavery in the 1780s.”

🧵The problem wasn’t that we lacked the “context” of the intro and first chapter of @butlerjosh’s book.

The problem was that Josh tried to interpret Eph. 5:31-32 divorced from the context of Eph. 5:25-30.

/1 That context makes clear that the analogy being pressed in Eph 5 is not remotely a sexual one. Instead, Paul explains that Gen 2’s description of marriage was, as it turned out, about God’s care for his church.

/2

🧵on book signing, ministry, and @BethMooreLPM :

As I posted earlier today, through some happenstance, I ended up at Beth’s book signing today in Waco, TX. When I arrived at the venue, there was a small table set up for Beth to sit at and sign books. But what whoever set up that table didn’t realize was that, for Beth Moore, a book signing is no impersonal, conveyor-belt like exercise. Oh, no. Even at a book signing, Beth was there to minister to folks.

C.S. Lewis on a “Christian nation”:

“A great many popular blue prints for a Christian society are merely what the Elizabethans called ‘eggs in moonshine’ because they assume that the whole society is Christian or that the Christians are in control. This is not so in most… …contemporary States. Even if it were, our rulers would still be fallen men, and, therefore, neither very wise nor very good. As it is, they will usually be unbelievers. And since wisdom and virtue are not the only or the commonest qualifications for a place in the…

🧵 One of the interesting things about writing a book is thinking about the audience. Who can I persuade? Who is already inclined my way but needs bolstering with arguments? Who can’t I persuade?
/1 I understand that some people simply will never accept my core thesis, which is that we have an obligation to love both crime victims and the criminally accused (and convicted). They are both our neighbors. Or, more appropriately, we are to be neighbors to both of them.
/2

🧵Thinking some more about Ezekiel Kelly.

In 2020, at age 17, Kelly was charged with attempted murder in a drive-by shooting.

The prosecutor allowed Kelly to plead out to a lesser charge with a sentence of either 11 or 26 months (reporting unclear).
/1

commercialappeal.com/story/news/202… Fast forward to 2022 and Kelly stands accused of four murders this week.

The system failed in 2020. It failed Kelly, it failed his victims, it failed society. The system failed because it failed to love.
/2

A 🧵 on Christian Nationalism and Democracy:

Lately, a number of Christian voices have been explicitly advocating for Christian Nationalism in America. This discussion raises two important questions, one theoretical and the other intensely practical.
/1 The first is what, as a theoretical matter, one means by Christian Nationalism. What exactly is it that the advocates of Christian Nationalism desire/intend to enact into law?
/2

🧵about qualified immunity:

In 1871, as part of the Ku Klux Klan Act, Congress enacted what has become known as Section 1983, which allows you to sue state or local government officials if they violate your constitutional rights. Beginning in the 1970s, the US SCt made up out of thin air some exceptions to Section 1983. Today, those manufactured exceptions are known as qualified immunity (for police), absolute immunity (for individual prosecutors), and Monel immunity (for the prosecutor’s office).

Things I do NOT do in my book:

Attack white evangelicals

Make a partisan argument

Rehash the same old talking points

Insist that particular policy proposals are the only Christian approach to criminal justice

Deviate even one inch from historic Christian orthodoxy. That last point is very important to me. When @between2worlds told me that @crossway was interested in my project, I was delighted. They are the publisher with which I’m most theologically aligned, so I knew their editing process would protect my theological fidelity.

Johan H. Bavinck, Between the Beginning and the End:

“Those sins that are individually committed still happen in the greater context of society, and society as such has been the provocation behind them. That is the reason why, when a crime is committed, we can hardly make one … person totally responsible for the act. Our judicial systems, which as a rule punish an offender in isolation, are always more or less one-sided because they do not take into account the role played by the parents, teachers, or friends of that person. All sin carries with it …

🧵A Baptist perspective on social justice - Carl F.H. Henry (1959):

1. Christian social leaders set their cultural objectives in the larger framework of the Christian mission, and do not regard themselves primarily as social reformers. 2. Evangelical social action throbs with the evangelistic invitation to new life in Jesus Christ. “Ye must be born again” is the Church’s unvarying message to the world.

🧵 Scripture tells us that God ordained government to bear the sword against wrongdoers for our good—to protect and to deter.

There is a fair debate to be had among Christians about when and against what wrongs a just government should bear the sword

BUT The bare minimum of any just government requires that the government bear the sword against those who would wrongly kill others.

On this Scripture has not left us without clear guidance (Gen 9:6, Rom 13:4).

🧵 on free speech and the Christian:

It’s not un-American to kneel during the national anthem.

But it is un-American to trample the First Amendment’s freedom of speech.

It’s also un-Christian to do so. The post-liberal notion some Christians are advancing that the govt should punish speech we don’t like overlooks basic teachings of Christian ethics.

Christians should support the speech rights of speakers with whom we disagree *because* we believe in mankind’s sinful nature.

🧵on systemic racism:

Much of the rancor today over the idea of “systemic racism” seems to boil down to two issues: one, differing definitions of the term “systemic racism,” and; two, a misunderstanding about how racism manifests itself in the law and structure of a society.
/1 I have elsewhere catalogued the different definitions that I understand people to be applying to the term “systemic racism.”
/2

https://twitter.com/martensmatt1/status/1506427530328301573

🧵 This is an enormously important story about how prosecutors abuse l power:

First, Pamela Moses was offered a no jail plea deal, which she rejected, insisting on here right to a trial.

Second, after Ms. Moses was convicted at trial, the prosecutors requested a 6-yr sentence.

https://twitter.com/srl/status/1517562704881405953

Third, after Ms. Moses was convicted, it was discovered that evidence of her innocence had not been disclosed by the govt, as the US Constitution requires. As a result, the court granted her a new trial.

🧵 This recent @WNGdotorg piece by @ThaddeusWill makes the unremarkable claim that, when it comes to the issue of racially-motivated police shootings, “facts matter” because “truth matters.” We should all agree on that.
/1
wng.org/opinions/anoth… But Williams goes on to assert that “the facts” are that “a Harvard University empirical analysis of 10 major U.S. cities likewise found no evidence of racial bias in police shootings,” citing a study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer.
/2

🧵On Christians, Judges, and CSAM:

It is disappointing, to put it mildly, that @TomBuck misrepresents the facts about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's record in an effort to discredit @KSPrior. Let's set the record straight:

https://twitter.com/TomBuck/status/1507083456139902980

First, let me say that, as a former federal prosecutor, I know firsthand how horrible Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM) is from my experience personally prosecuting a CSAM case. Having prosecuted such a case once, I never wanted to do it again. The material was monstrous.