Truth, Justice, and the American Way?

Truth, justice, and the American Way, or Lies, Injustice, and the Non-American Way. That is a topic we'll discuss today right here on the Christian Real View Radio Program where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host. The Christian Real View is a listener supported radio ministry. You can connect with us by visiting our website, thechristianrealview.org, calling our toll-free number, 1-888-646-2233, or by writing to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Before we get to the preview, I just wanted to say thank you to all who came out for the Christian Real View movie night to watch The Essential Church.

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And if so, why? That will be ironic as the word justice is bantered around so much today. Global warming believers want, quote, climate justice.

Those of you America as systemically racist call for, quote, social justice. Our guest this weekend is Abraham Hamilton. He is the general counsel and public policy analyst for American Family Association. He will provide context on questions of justice in our society, including those four indictments against President Trump. We will also look to the universal standard of justice, God himself. Scripture emphasizes over and over that God is just. He is perfect in his establishment of laws and perfect in the meeting out of punishment for breaking them. Deuteronomy 32 four says, His work is perfect for all his ways are just, a God of faithfulness and without injustice. Righteous and upright is he. So we hope you gain today as we look at the justice or lack thereof in some current events and how God is, quote, just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Let's get straight to the interview with Abraham Hamilton.

Abraham, thank you for coming on the Christian Real View Radio program. We're going to talk about justice today, but I think it's important to get a working definition of what that word means. It's thrown around a lot in society today. We need to pursue justice, social justice, this kinds of thing. So how would you define justice? And why is justice the foundation for a fully functioning good society?

Thank you for having me back on the program. I think it's appropriate to have this to be the initial question, to have this conversation, because we have to define our terms to make sure we're all speaking the same language and make sure we understand what we're conversing about. Very simply, justice is the equal and consistent application of the law according to God's transcendent and objective moral standards. That's basically what it is. And a good picture for that, we get right out of the scripture. You know, we have in Romans chapter 12, right about verse 19 to the end of the chapter where the Lord says to the apostle Paul, I am the one who will exact vengeance. Then you go on into chapter 13, immediately after the Lord says vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I will repay. He then goes on to say that government is his instrument for the administration of this wrath. He literally says in chapter 12, make sure that you don't become vigilantes basically to leave room for the wrath of God.

And then chapter 13, he says that government is his instrument for the application of this wrath, that it exists to reward and therefore incentivize righteousness and to punish the evil door. And as a result, restrain evil. And to your question about why this is necessary is because we live in a fallen world. You know, if men were angels, there would be no need for an external mechanism for the enforcement of God's moral, transcendent objective standard. But because men are fallen, men are sinful, we need a consistent and equal application from an external source of God's objective morality. No matter where you are a Christian or not a Christian, in order to have a fully functioning society, we have to have this application of justice because we'll have on one end an incentivization of lawlessness, where lawlessness will abound. Isaiah 59 talks about this in great detail. And on the other end, we will have vigilantism, which is also another form of lawlessness. And so God establishes government as one of his three primary human institutions to be the mechanism to incentivize and reward righteousness and to punish and restrain wickedness.

That's very well explained. Abraham Hamilton with us today on The Christian Real View, the general counsel and public policy analyst for American Family Association. We titled the program today, Not Truth, Justice in the American Way. That was a slogan, a catchphrase of a superhero named Superman.

Maybe some of our older listeners will remember that. It's actually seemed like it's been flipped on its head in our country over the last 10, 20 or more years. There's always been injustice, of course, but it seems to have become more prominent in our country as of lately.

And so not truth, justice in the American way, but how about lies, injustice in the non-American way? Has there been a change that you've discerned in our society when it comes to justness over the last 10 or more years? And if so, how do you see this proliferating?

To answer your question directly, yes, I have seen both a change and an intensification. As you rightly mentioned, there have always been instances of injustice because we do live in a fallen world, man dating back to the Garden of Eden. Soon after sin entered the human experience, you had a murder in the first family, you know, that got established. And so there has always been injustice. But what we're seeing currently is an intensification and a permeation into the highest levels of our body politic in our nation. And so many of us have not seen the consistency of injustice and this, as is commonly described, a two tiered justice system as we're seeing now. There have been instances that many have talked about dating back to, you know, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and the COINTELPRO investigation and all of these other kinds of things. But now you have a consistent operation at the upper echelons of the American governmental apparatus that has turned what should be the chief law enforcement mechanism in our country to the Department of Justice to really being an arm of political persecution and prosecution.

And so that has been an amazing departure that has happened very quickly that's moved our nation closer to the realm, really, of a third world kind of banana republic type of governmental structure. So I'm going to ask you about some of these examples that we're seeing in our society today. One of them is going to be the prosecution, the indictments against former President Donald Trump. And then we'll get into some of the things I think you're referencing there to the justice agencies like the CIA, the FBI, the prosecution of those on January 6, 2021 with the riot at the Capitol building and other things. Just to get your view of some of these current events.

Well, let's start with perhaps the biggest one here, this from USA Today. Donald Trump has been criminally charged four times this year, that's in 2023. The former president who was seeking his second term in the White House, so he's running for president in 2024, faces state level cases in New York and Georgia. But those are separate from the two federal cases he faces stemming from investigations launched in Washington.

So four cases here. The first one has to do with hush money in New York State. This case centers on Trump arranging for his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pay women $130,000 to Stormy Daniels and $150,000 to, I can't remember her first name, last name is McDougal, to silence them over their claims. This case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and Trump in April pleaded not guilty to the dozens of counts against him. If he found guilty, it says he could face up to four years in prison. These are hush money payments for sexual encounters with these two women.

That's one. Number two, classified documents in Florida. Trump was indicted in June on 37 felony counts for allegedly storing hundreds of classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after his term in the White House. Charges include willful retention of national defense information and violence of the Espionage Act. And then third thing he's been indicted for, the 2020 election.

This has to do with the January 6, 2021 ride at the Capitol. A federal grand jury indicted Trump last month for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 presidential election from President Joe Biden. The indictment against Trump is wide ranging spanning from pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to reject the results of the election in Congress to attempting to put forth fake electors in pivotal swing states.

Here's the fourth one. This comes out of Georgia regarding the 2020 election. Again, Trump was arrested last month. Many people have seen his mugshot at Georgia's notorious Fulton County Jail on charges that he tried to steal the 2020 election. Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis charged Trump under the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations or RICO Act. This is the first time in American history that a former president has been indicted and arrested. And this, by the way, after being impeached while president two times by the Democrat majority in the House. So I'd like you to put these indictments in context, these four indictments in context, as far as the timing of them coming into an election year with Trump being the front runner in the Republican Party, likely to get the nomination, at least as of now, the validity of these indictments against Donald Trump.

I'd like you to compare them to the actions of other presidents who have done. I mean, I'm assuming and guessing that other presidents have done very similar things and never been indicted, including Joe Biden, and the fact that it's come to literally the targeting of your top political opponent coming into an election year. As I ask you about these indictments against former President Trump, it shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of him politically or morally. But just put these four indictments in context in regards to the timing, the validity and the comparison to actions of other presidents, including Joe Biden. First of all, the timing should be noted by all of your listeners, because there's nothing about any of these charges that run the risk of traversing the statute of limitation. That would be the legal time period that any law enforcement body, a charging entity like a state attorney's office, a district attorney's office or the Department of Justice would be prohibited from bringing this charge later if they were actually interested in securing justice concerning the alleged crimes, as opposed to attempting really to interfere with the American citizen's opportunity to choose who they want to be the next president of the United States. Each of the alleged crimes could be prosecuted after the general presidential election and not risk running afoul of the statute of limitations. So that brings to the fore, if that is the case, why then would these entities bring these charges now? What is the urgency with bringing them now?

And also, why hadn't they brought them prior to now? It gives the indication that their interest is in affecting the outcome of the election in one way or another. Now concerning the validity, it is remarkable that Alvin Bragg campaigned for Manhattan District Attorney by promising to put now former President Trump in jail.

That was his campaign promise. Now he has indicted him on a charge that frankly has no bearing to be felonious in the state of New York. So in New York at best, the alleged crimes would be a misdemeanor, which means the distinction between a felony and a misdemeanor is that felonies are crimes where the potential sentencing is one year or more in prison. Anything less than a year is a misdemeanor. In New York state law, the allegations themselves at best could only be a misdemeanor.

The paying of hush money is not a crime in and of itself in the state of New York. The way that the Alvin Bragg hamstrung an indictment together to make it a crime and in fact a felony crime is to say that former President Trump did this in an effort to effectuate another felony. He has to this day not named what the other felony is. The purpose of an indictment is twofold.

It is a formal charging instrument to bring an allegation against a person charged with a crime as well as informing them exactly what the crime is. To this date, Alvin Bragg has not articulated what is the additional felony that he's charging him with. I have said on my program on the Hamilton Corner on American Family Radio that this is a ludicrous indictment that has no chance whatsoever of resulting in a conviction in a court of law. I believe Alvin Bragg knows this, which is why he's using this as a political mechanism not as a means to secure justice for a crime that has been committed. Again, as odious as hush money payments, adulterous affairs, those things are. The reality is Alvin Bragg is charging former President Trump for mishandling business records as to how these payments were accounted for and said that this mishandling of business records took place in order to facilitate some other still unnamed felony.

That is absurd on its face. It's absurd on its face because if a charged party cannot be made aware of what the crime is against them, how do they then render any type of defense? Whether or not it's true or not the allegations, how do they defend themselves? Which is why I suspect that you're going to find that this charge will be thrown out of court. It won't result in any conviction. OK, so what about the documents allegation in Florida? The documents allegation is also a very interesting one. It is the one that I believe that poses the most legal jeopardy to former President Trump. But at the same time, I also am confident that this is also another political persecution, because if you go back, the assertion of an indictment under the Espionage Act, the Espionage Act was amended because former President Barack Obama was found to have classified documents in violation of the Federal Records Act. And because he was discovered to have these documents, no one even hinted at bringing any type of prosecution or indictment.

What Congress did was amend the law to accommodate former President Barack Obama. You've had others like Hillary Clinton. I say she should never be president. She was literally found not only in the possession of classified documents from her time as secretary of state, but she had them in a private server on her home computer and her home server in New York. And when that information was discovered, she literally did two things, used computer software program called Bleachbit to delete files upwards of 30,000 from her server, from her personal laptop, from her iPad and other things.

And then not only that, physically use hammers to destroy iPads and tablets and other things that contain that information. Yet she was not even remotely prosecuted. In fact, James Comey, who was not the attorney general, but he was the director of the FBI at the time. He laid out the facts of the case and showed why she should be prosecuted, but then said no prosecutor would ever charge her with this crime. Go forward to current occupant of the Oval Office, Mr. Joseph Robinette Biden, who was discovered not only to have classified documents in multiple locations, several private residences and a private office that he held in Washington, D.C., but the documents that he possessed date back to his time as United States senator.

There is no law that would allow a U.S. senator to take personal possession of classified documents. And to date, even though there has been an appointment of a special counsel to investigate Mr. Biden, there has not even been a hint or whiff of a willingness to indict, let alone prosecute him for the exact same thing that former President Trump is being accused of. Now, I strongly believe in the equal application of the law. It has to be equally applied and consistently applied. If someone has violated the law, they should be held accountable. But if multiple people have violated the same law, all of the people that violated the law should be held accountable. Or if the interest of justice is that this is viewed as such a trivial occurrence that sometimes occurs with every sitting president of my lifetime has been found to have classified documents after their time in office. If the interests of justice dictate that prosecution for these things should not be applied, then it shouldn't be applied to anyone.

But the unequal, inconsistent application of the law foments a society that militates toward lawlessness and vigilantism. That's exactly why we asked you to come on today. As we talk about justice, it seems like justice is not being meted out equally just for the reasons you just gave. Let's take a brief pause for some ministry announcements. And when we come back, we'll get to these next two indictments against former President Trump and much more on this topic of justice. You are listening to the Christian Real View Radio program.

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Be sure to visit our website thechristianrealview.org where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. We are talking about the issue of justice today in America and our guest is Abraham Hamilton. He is general counsel and public policy analyst for the American Family Association. Abraham briefly discussed the final two indictments regarding the presidential election in 2020 and what occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Yeah, and they're interesting because they really both focus on the same types of activity but one being indicted at the federal level and then one at the state level in the state of Georgia.

You know, it was hilarious to me and all of the indictments you referenced, I've read them all. And it was so interesting to me that over and over again, the federal indictment and the Georgia state indictment referred to these fake electors, fake electors, fake electors. What it seems to me to be the objective here is threefold, persecute former President Trump with the means to interfere really with the 2024 presidential election, but also to kind of shoot a shot across the bow to the American citizenry to cause us to be less willing and to become more reluctant to petition our government for redress or grievances which is a right that we have under the United States Constitution.

And let me explain what I mean. So the consistent reference to this is a knowingly articulating false assertions concerning the stolen election. You're trying to cultivate false electors. What former President Trump did is something that presidential candidates have done throughout American history. In 1876, there was a contested election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes.

You know what happened? You had separate sets of electors that descended upon the U.S. Capitol building because both candidates believed that they were rightfully the next U.S. president. No one said that you have cultivated fake electors. The conclusion was is that they were attempting under our Constitution to resolve who will be the next president. The American citizen should understand when we go to cast our votes on election day for the presidency, if you read your ballot, you'll notice you're not voting for the presidential candidate. You're actually voting for the electors who will participate in the Electoral College on behalf of the candidate who, according to the various states laws, will be chosen to select who the next president will be.

This is a feature of our constitutional Republican form of government. 1876, you had competing electors. 1960, in JFK's election, you had competing electors. The state of Hawaii did not purport to offer the same slate of electors that was consistent with the state's general election vote concerning the presidency. So what you had there were dueling slates of electors. You had the exact same thing that happened with Bush v. Gore, with the hanging chads phenomenon. Both presidential candidate Al Gore and presidential candidate George W. Bush had electors that were determined long before the election date. And depending upon how ultimately the Supreme Court ruled in the Bush v. Gore case, the electors that were consistent with the candidate, according to that conclusion, the conclusion of the case, would be the ones who would cast their vote for the candidate of their choice. A similar thing occurred in 2016, when she or Shannon B.

B. President, also known as Hillary Clinton, refused to concede the election initially, when you had Maxine Waters, who objected to the calculation of Electoral College votes in Congress because she thought, wait, wait, what did she say? This was a stolen election. Following the election, Hillary Clinton traversed our country, describing Mr. Trump as an illegitimate president. This is something that is consistent with our constitutional Republican form of government.

No matter what you think about the president's challenging of the 2020 election, he has the lawful authority to petition our government for redress of grievances. You literally had Alan Dershowitz, who did the exact same thing for Al Gore in 2000. The references to President Trump cultivating fake electors, it truly is a misnomer. It makes it seem like former President Trump went down to the local gas station and found Ricky and Bubba and Johnny and said, hey, y'all, hop in the back of my pickup, we're going to go and offer you as electors. Well, the facts are, the people who were electors for former President Trump were determined long before the election.

It's not as if he was just whipping them up after the fact. What he was saying is that there were things that happened, irregularities in states, functionings of their elections, that result in the necessity in order to preserve the right to challenge those states' tabulations of their votes, that we have to present this alternative state of electors in order to preserve the right to ultimately pursue litigation on this matter. So to present this or represent it as if former President Trump is doing something where he's trying to destroy democracy or he's trying to be a tyrant to upend what's happened is no different than what has already transpired numerous times before in America's electoral history. And even the reference to trying to force former Vice President Mike Pence to change the electoral votes and things of that nature, there was a legitimate argument as to what is the vice president's authority in the certification of electoral votes. And we know this to be a fact.

You want to know how and why we know this? Because Congress passed a law after the fact to try to limit the authority of the vice president in the tabulation of electoral votes after the 2020 election. If former Vice President Pence did not have the authority to do what many thought he should have done, why would Congress pass a law to try to truncate and minimize his authority after the fact?

That's very well stated. And I hope we all can just remember that very thorough answer you just gave, because we all know full well in 2024, when this election season heats up even more, if Donald Trump does in fact become the nominee, that he is way ahead at this point, that you're not going to hear any of the detail of the explanation you just gave. It's all going to be, well, he's been indicted four times. There's this many things against him, this many different charges. And you can't have a president who is being indicted, who's going to be put to jail.

And that brings up my next question for you, Abraham and again, Abraham Hamilton, the general counsel and public policy analyst for American Family Association is our guest today. The next question is, and this will be the last one on former President Trump before we get into some other examples of injustice taking place. Is there a path to the presidency for Trump in all of this?

Even the bigger question is, how likely do you think that he could end up actually going to jail for the rest of his life? Your question reveals what I believe is ultimately the coordinated strategy here. The objective, in my view, is to besmirch former President Trump sufficiently to make him persona non grata among independents and even people who identify as Democratic voters. It's not a secret that former President Trump's path to the presidency in 2016 included Republican voters, but as well as a contingent of independents and Democrat voters, especially in Rust Belt states, who instead of voting for Hillary Clinton, voted for him.

I think the objective here is to try to cause him to appear to be so entangled with legal issues so that should he survive the Republican presidential primary, that independent voters and Democrat voters won't even remotely consider him as an option because of that. There's no legal basis that would exclude former President Trump from the ballots, even in light of these indictments. It is very unlikely, in my view, that Mr. Trump will be incarcerated and convicted of these alleged crimes. I expect the New York case, the January 6th election cases, both in Georgia and the federal cases, to be dismissed or to be ruled as being not legally established.

It's my view that Mr. Trump should file an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to cause a stay on all of these cases so that they cannot proceed until after the presidential election. Like I said earlier, there's no risk of legal jeopardy concerning the statute of limitations. There's nothing that prohibits those cases from being prosecuted after that.

But I believe the American people should be allowed to consider who they would have to serve as a president without the interference of these various governmental entities advancing these charges that are vacuous at best, in my estimation. So I do not believe that he will be incarcerated for them. As I said earlier, I think the one that poses the most jeopardy is the documents case in Florida. But you have to take consideration it would be a jury in Florida. And the jury may also consider what is the severity of this instance when we know for a fact that this is something that presidents have done routinely at a minimum the last three to four presidents.

When you step back from what the allegations are, when you consider their severity, it remains to be seen how that will be perceived by a judge, a federal judge in Florida and ultimately a jury in Florida. I think the most troubling development here, Abraham, is that the judicial branch of our government has become politicized. In other words, judges and attorneys, they make rulings or indictments according to their political beliefs.

If I'm President Trump, I'm thinking, yeah, not a lot of merit here and so forth. But if you get the wrong judge or the wrong attorney here, they'll kind of reinterpret things the way they want to see things turn out. This seems more prevalent now in our judicial branch. Do you think that's accurate? And do you think there's a growing sense of skepticism, resignation, even cynicism that Americans can't count on equal justice under the law for all citizens in our society now?

I do believe that that has happened. There was a time when the judiciary was viewed as a neutral and separate branch. It's supposed to be the nonpolitical umpire, so to speak, the baseball analogy. They call balls and strikes.

They're not putting on uniforms and pitching or batting. It's become that. And I believe this is an inevitable consequence of what the prophet Isaiah articulates in Isaiah, chapter 59, as truth having fallen in the street. Ultimately, we know scripturally truth is a person. But when objective truth, which is connected to morality and the scripture teaches as well that love requires truth. When we as a society reject truth outright, what inevitably occurs is corruption in the society through and through. And that corruption even infiltrates our systems of justice. As Isaiah says, Isaiah 59, truth has fallen in the streets.

The next consequence, justice has turned backwards and uprightness cannot enter. The way that Isaiah articulates that it shows that the downstream consequences of a society that rejects objective truth is that then there is nothing left but subjectivity. So then when you have a country like ours, I know many people like to describe it as a democracy, but we have a constitutional republic with democratic features. When you have no longer an adherence to objective truth, everything becomes subjective. Then that subjectivity is manifested in those who are entrusted with various iterations of civic power.

They employ that power for their own personal objectives or to advance the objectives of their particular size. And so that's what I think we're witnessing that now it started at smaller scales, but the corruption has infiltrated so much so in our society that is now filtered all the way into the halls that should be the halls of justice, but they've become the halls of injustice. Hence your description of our nation, which has resulted in the types of skepticism that would cause people to descend upon Washington DC on January 6th.

People like to talk about what happened in the riot at the Capitol building, but people don't want to talk about what transpired that led to this. I will never forget right after the 2020 elections when South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos and George Stephanopoulos said categorically, unequivocally, there's no fraud in this elections. Governor Kristi Noem then began to tick off several instances of what could rightly be described as fraud and election irregularities and violations of the US constitution and the administration of the government of the federal election, which on a moment's notice on a dime, George Stephanopoulos turns to then says, well, there's no evidence of widespread fraud. And I remember thinking, wait a minute, are you admitting tacitly that there is fraud? You're parsing your statement by saying, well, it's not widespread.

My question is, how do you know? And you see that even in the indictment, the Georgia indictment, the federal election indictment from Jack Smith, they consistently say that there's not widespread fraud or outcome determinative fraud. Well, my immediate response is, so are you admitting that there was some fraud?

And if there was some, how much was there and how do we know what is the Rubicon? What is the dividing line to determine what is outcome determinative and what is not? Because the issue is, and I do think that Mr. Trump had a little bit of undisciplined concerning messaging because I don't think he needed to say fraud. I think the articulation should be election irregularities and elections and violations of the U.S. Constitution, because there's no doubt about it. You have places like Michigan where you had the law in Michigan says that in order for someone to receive an absentee ballot or a mail-in ballot, they have to ask for it. Well, all over the state of Michigan, you have people that receive mail-in ballots, many of them after they had voted in person. That's evidence of an election of irregularity that could have an impact. You know, you have other states where you had like North Carolina, the time, manner and place of the election was changed without the legislature's approval. Well, the law says the U.S. Constitution and North Carolina's constitution says that the state legislature alone has the authority to determine time, manner and place. So if you have an election in a state where the courts are the ones who change time, manner and place, is that not an election irregularity? These are things that transpired. And so what has happened, you have people that cannot outright say there was no irregularities, there were no violations of state law, there was no fraud at all. But they tried to hedge that statement by saying, well, it's not widespread. My question is, if we have a constitutional republic with democratic features where the franchise for the vote is so important, are we interested in finding out just how widespread fraud is? How consistent is it? How determinative is it at a minimum to try to prevent these things from being repeated in subsequent elections?

Or are we so committed to our partisan affiliations that we don't really care about what transpired in previous elections as long as our guy is the one who occupies the Oval Office? So well said. Abraham Hamilton is our guest today here on The Christian Real View, talking about the issue of justice and injustice taking place in America. He is the host of The Hamilton Corner on American Family Radio. We have links to him and his radio program and other things he does at our website, theChristianrealview.org. We'll take a short break for some ministry announcements, but more coming up on this issue of justice as it relates to crime in our cities. You are listening to The Christian Real View radio program.

I'm David Wheaton. There is a war ongoing. There are two sides in this war. There are those who are with Christ and there are those who are against Christ. And sometimes it's not always easy to see the difference. But as we go through this information about the great reset, I think you'll find out very quickly what side these great resetters are on. Their own words condemn them.

Know that this has implications for everything, for education, for health care, for your job, for business, for government, for law, for property rights, the social contract, as Klaus Schwab will explain. That was journalist Alex Newman speaking at our recent Christian Real View Speaker Series event on being informed and prepared for the great reset. Alex's presentation is full of sound bites from those who are seeking to transform the world into a godless dystopia.

You can download the audio of the event or order a USB thumb drive by going to our website, theChristianrealview.org or calling toll free 1-888-646-2233. God's truth is enduringly true throughout all the generations. It transcends culture. The church is always going to be an embattled people. If it's swimming with the tide, it's not being the Church of Jesus Christ.

Look to the past, learn from the past, because the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. That was from the just released documentary The Essential Church, which chronicles how three churches followed God's command to gather during the pandemic rather than comply with arbitrary government mandates. Normal retail is $12.99 plus shipping for this two-hour film. For a limited time you can order the DVD for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View. Order at theChristianrealview.org or call toll free 1-888-646-2233 or write to Box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Welcome back to the Christian Real View. I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit our website, theChristianrealview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Our topic today is Truth, Justice, and the American Way, or has it turned into Lies, Injustice, and the Non-American Way?

And our guest is Abraham Hamilton. He's the General Counsel and Public Policy Analyst for American Family Association. Abraham, I want to get into the issue of the increase in crime in our cities across this country. Now, those on the left will say, oh, no, crime hasn't increased.

Look at the statistics. Looking at what's taking place night after night, day after day in our cities, tells a very different story. And what happens is in these leftist controlled cities is that there is a reluctance to prosecute those who commit crimes. There is an idea of releasing those from prison who are there for crimes. And so I'd like you to explain the worldview behind that that thinks that we should prosecute criminals less for committing crimes or to release those already in prison, because we're seeing what I believe is just an explosion of lawlessness in our cities and places around this country.

You're absolutely right. And these ideas, these concepts are actually related. The undergirding notion that really connects both of these concepts that we're talking about here, the lack of justice generally and the ascendancy of crime in many of our largest cities is a lawlessness that flows from a rejection of truth, objective moral truth.

Objective moral truth includes coming face to face with the reality that man is inherently sinful. You have people who do not embrace, who reject that biblical anthropology, that theological truth about mankind, who would assert things like, well, we don't we don't need more police officers on the streets. What we need are social workers to do traffic stops. I was a prosecutor for 10 years where I prosecuted major felonies. I worked hand in hand with law enforcement. Traffic stops are one of the most dangerous things that police officers do because you walk up on a car not having any idea what is on the other side. And so the notion that we don't need trained law enforcement professionals to execute that task, but we can accomplish that task with the same or even better objectives by having social workers shows a woeful and a pitiable naivete concerning the sinful nature and the egregious reality that when that simple nature is applied, it has fatal consequences.

Many times this is just a fact. You have jurisdictions all around the country who have people who have run for and been elected to the offices of attorney general or state's attorney or district attorney who have been supported by George Soros, who has long expressed his commitment to overthrow the established social fabric of the United States of America of America to make us more easily fit into a global whole similar to like a North American version of the European Union. And instead of consistently pouring his money into traditional electoral races, he said, well, I'm going to now turn my attention to the district attorney's races because I can be more effective. They're more effective in doing what? In perpetrating lawlessness.

We mentioned Alvin Bragg earlier. In addition to him announcing his campaign objective to have former President Trump arrested, one of the first things he did after election was to say we're no longer going to incarcerate criminals who are arrested for a whole bevy of crimes, including some instances of egregious felonies. And so one of the things that happens by attrition, and this is a story that's gone grossly underreported, is that law enforcement officers who do the hard work of arresting the criminals, conducting investigations only to arrest them and have the district attorney's offices release them on bail or even worse, to dismiss the cases against them. This has resulted in a crises of law enforcement officers retiring and resigning from work to where we have massive officer shortages all across our country. So when you have the combination of a crisis of police officer shortage and an announcement of district attorneys in New York, in San Francisco, in Philadelphia, in New Orleans, in Baltimore, who say even if you get arrested criminal, we are not going to prosecute you. Do you think that will result in more or less instances of crime?

Yeah, it just seems hard to believe when we see it here in Minneapolis all the time. This city, where the George Floyd death by the police officer took place, and then the resulting riots in this city just burned much of the city. It's just incredible what you see now, how much this city has changed because of the worldview you just described.

The city council, the legal office this year, Keith Ellison, just have very, very little interest in being tough on crime. Those who have this humanistic worldview, believing they will say that they want a more just society, Abraham. But is there something to their definition of how they would define justice that is actually a rebellion against God? You touched on it in your last answer, how they do not see man as inherently sinful as the Bible and God described.

They see man as inherently good. But is this really a rebellion against God's design for, let's say, something like government, how it is, as you mentioned earlier, to restrain evil and punish good? They're rebelling against that. They're rebelling against God's design for marriage, that they deem marriage as a patriarchal oppression. Do they see a new definition of justice as God's definition of morality as being, this is what is good and right? They see morality as not according to how God designed it, that his definition of morality is in fact oppressive and restrictive. And so they have a different definition of justice. So maybe you could finish today talking about how the difference between biblical justice as defined by God and this new definition of justice as defined by those who reject God.

Yes. Proverbs 28 says, Wicked men do not comprehend justice. They are institutionally incapable of navigating justice, as I described earlier, the equal and consistent application and enforcement of the law, according to God's moral and transcendent standards. This is the personification of a rejection of God, of his revelation to mankind in scripture and his objective standard morality.

They view it as being oppressive. Isaiah 5-20, evil will be called good, good will be called evil. So because they reject the overarching reality of the biblical worldview and God's standard of justice, then you're left with man attempting to assert his view of justice. Pursuits of justice that are void of the cross will rapidly descend into a pursuit of vengeance. And so what has happened is that these people who have gotten into positions of authority, positions that are made by God to enforce the law, according to his transcendent moral objectives, they've rejected that and now see themselves to say, no, we are going to assert justice in our eyes. It is the reiteration of what happened in the garden.

Did God surely say, you won't die, you won't surely die. You have men now saying, no, the way things have been, we don't like it. So now we will rebalance the social fabric in our means. And so this is one of the most egregious realities, like you mentioned, even in Minnesota where you are, that when you have this lawlessness percolate, some of the same people who are really advocates and aiders of this lawlessness, they live in gated communities. They have private security. They have access to firearms.

They have all of these things. But the ones who are most vulnerable are the ones who are being subjected to the reign of terror implemented domestically in our cities. And so because you have this pursuit of justice that is void of the cross, they're devolving into a pursuit of vengeance. And so now they view, well, we want to allow the criminals out and the people who don't want the criminals to have a reign of terror. Well, they're the ones who need to be prosecuted.

Here's a great example of it. This same Merrick Garland, who is prosecuting January 6th people and making all of these prognostications, is the exact same person who said, well, we really can't have any arrests of those who would deface and vandalize and destroy crisis pregnancy resource centers, you know, because most of these people commit their crimes at night. You know, it's hard to arrest people at night. It's a revelation of him simply saying we don't really want to arrest those criminals. We want to get these other types of criminals, those who would try to assert their constitutional rights to a political ends that we disagree with. That is an example of justice pursuit, void of the cross, rapidly descended in the humanistic pursuits of vengeance.

You've painted a very accurate picture of what is taking place in our country. And we so appreciate your coming on to explain what can sometimes be complicated, complex issues and making them very clear from a biblical perspective. So what do Christians listening today do with this information to be promoters of justice when it seems like this is all above and beyond anything we can control? First and foremost, the body of Christ must be committed to prayer. You know, a lot of people ask me all the time, what can I do other than pray?

That reveals a lack of confidence in prayer that actually is not steeped in a lack of confidence in prayer, but a lack of confidence in the God who answers prayer. The next thing that I would encourage believers to do is to live locally. Don't allow what's percolating in the national media to manipulate you and manipulate us into looking at our neighbor with a jaundiced eye, projecting onto people immediately around us the things we read about in the newspapers. But let us live in submission to the authority of scripture, loving our neighbors as ourselves, right in our immediate neighborhoods and having this crescendo building in our local communities, even burgeoned into us being willing to put ourselves out to man these positions of authority in our local neighborhoods. Why can't we become the sheriffs in our cities and towns?

Why can't we become the district attorneys and the state's attorneys in our towns? I encourage people within the body of Christ to live locally. Psalm 128 lays this out beautifully. It has transformed individuals that build transformed families, transform families, build transformed churches, transform churches, build transformed communities and transform communities, transform society.

We should live locally. And a lot of manipulations in the national media that cause us to stay away from living the way we are called to live by God, instructed and commanded by God in scripture in our immediate communities and locales. Abraham, that is just so well said and just a great exhortation for us to conclude our conversation today. We're very grateful for you, the gifts God has given you, the way you've been obedient to Him to be able to pursue a vocation in a legal environment and so important. And we thank you for coming on the Christian Real View today, Abraham, all of God's best and grace to you.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being with you again, David. Well, I hope your biblical worldview was sharpened through listening to the interview with Abraham Hamilton today of the American Family Association.

If you missed any of it, you can always go to our website to hear the replay, thechristianrealview.org. Evidence that we are made in God's image is that we understand justice and want justice. We know that punishing an innocent person for another person's crime is wrong.

It's injustice. Or not punishing a powerful person who has committed a crime is also wrong. Of course, the greatest injustice ever committed was sinful man executing the perfect Son of God. Jesus truly did not deserve any punishment.

He only deserves our praise. So it's important to understand the different terms with regards to the gospel. Justice is God giving us what we deserve for our sin. Mercy is God not giving us what we deserve for our sin. And grace is God giving us something of great value that we don't deserve and cannot earn. So how does that pertain to what it says in Romans 3, verse 26, so that He, God, would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus? Well, number one, we're all sinners and deserve God's judgment.

That's justice. Number two, God provides a way that we not be punished for eternity. That's mercy. Number three, God gifted us His Son to die on the cross for our sin.

That's grace. Number four, Christ's bloody death on the cross satisfied God's just wrath for our sin so the believer's sin is not overlooked but paid for. In other words, God is just. And number five, because all our sin has been justly dealt with, God can credit Christ's righteousness to the believer, and that's how God is justifier. He's the one who can justly declare us righteous for heaven. And if you have never believed in that gospel, please, we urge you today to repent and believe in this just God and in His redeeming Son, Jesus Christ. If you have questions about that, go to our website and click on the page, What Must I Do to Be Saved, or give us a call. Thank you for joining us today on The Christian Worldview.

In just a moment, there will be all kinds of information on this nonprofit radio ministry. Let's remember that God is both just and justifier, and that there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. So until next time, think biblically, live accordingly, and stand firm. The mission of The Christian Worldview is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. We hope today's broadcast encouraged you toward that end. To hear a replay of today's program, order a transcript, or find out What Must I Do to Be Saved, go to thechristianworldview.org or call toll-free 1-888-646-2233. The Christian Worldview is a listener-supported nonprofit radio ministry furnished by the Overcomer Foundation. To make a donation, become a Christian Worldview partner, order resources, subscribe to our free newsletter, or contact us, visit thechristianworldview.org, call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. That's Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Thanks for listening to The Christian Worldview.