Charleston was where America split apart in 1861. Maybe it's where America comes together in 2015.

Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It's about what it means to be human.

When we adopt—and when we encourage a culture of adoption in our churches and communities—we’re picturing something that’s true about our God. We, like Jesus, see what our Father is doing and do likewise (John 5:19). And what our Father is doing, it turns out, is fighting for orphans, making them sons and daughters.

Before we're Americans, we're Christians. And so we have to be informed by a certain moral sense, which means that we need to speak up for moral principle and for gospel principle regardless of who that offends.

I heard someone say that concern over the [Confederate] Flag is sensitivity to micro-aggressions, to which my response is to say that kidnapping and enslaving people, breaking up families, terrorizing families, if that's not a macro-aggression, I don't know what is.

Conservative evangelicals don't want government support for our faith, because we believe God created all consciences free and a state-coerced act of worship isn't acceptable to God. Moreover, we believe the gospel isn't in need of state endorsement or assistance. Wall Street may need government bailouts but the Damascus Road never does.

The biblical picture is not one of an upward, linear progress or a precipitous, downward decline. It is a more complicated picture of a fallen world in which there is a gospel of power.