Monday, February 3, 2025

It’s Monday, February 3rd, 2025. 

I’m Albert Mohler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Part I


A Parable of the Exceeding Sinfulness of Sin: Former Senator Bob Menendez Indicted on Felony Charges for Bribery, Fraud, and Foreign Agency Offenses

In all the rush of headlines and recent days, one big story hasn’t received adequate attention. That is the fact that former New Jersey Democratic Senator, Robert Menendez, was sentenced last week to 11 years in federal prison on numerous counts of corruption, including the very first case in US history of a member of Congress being found guilty of acting as an agent for a foreign government. Robert Menendez rose to political power in a system that was already marked by widespread corruption. He was elected the mayor of Union City, there in New Jersey in 1986, the son of Cuban immigrants. He was later elected to the New Jersey General Assembly and then to the New Jersey Senate. Later he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served between 1993 and 2006.

And then when one of the two US Senate seats in New Jersey was vacant, the governor appointed Bob Menendez to that position. He was later elected to the position, he held it until he resigned in disgrace from office last year under federal indictment, and not only indictment but trial and not only trial, but guilty verdict of about 16 charges. This is a massive case of political corruption in the United States. We are talking about the only elected member of the United States Congress ever to have been found guilty of the criminal charge of acting as an agent for a foreign nation. The foreign nation in this case was Egypt. But let’s go back just a bit. I said that Bob Menendez comes from a context in which there were already allegations of corruption. A part of this is just a part of the political system and the way that it is constructed in New Jersey, but it’s also just a part of the story of Bob Menendez.

It becomes something of a great tragedy. It becomes a morality tale, as the Victorians would’ve called it. It is a warning to us all, but the significance of it has been largely missed by the larger culture, probably just because of the avalanche, indeed, the incredible flood of stories and headlines that have been coming out, especially in the first days of the Trump administration. 

But let’s look a little closer at the story. How exactly does something like this happen? And once you look at the facts of this story, that question looms even larger. So Bob Menendez was in the state legislature after being a mayor there in New Jersey. He then is in the United States House of Representatives. He has a fairly conservative record when it comes to foreign policy, very typical of someone whose parents were refugees from Cuba, but on other issues, very liberal. On other issues, he just went with the times. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s, only to turn around and vote for the legalization of same-sex marriage, a matter of about a generation later. He had that brush with corruption charges going all the way back to 2006. And then in 2015, as an elected senator, as a member of the United States Senate, Bob Menendez faced multiple criminal felony indictments from the US attorney from the US Department of Justice. This led to a trial on corruption charges. Trial on charges that he had arranged federal contracts in order to receive a personal benefit. And that trial ended with what amounted to a hung jury. The jury was unable to come to an adequate consensus of conviction, thus he walked away. And as just about anyone would know under that circumstance, with allegations of corruption, a sitting United States senator having been indicted and then tried, and then getting off effectively because of a hung jury, you would think that that would be an adequate moral warning.

But no, by the time the federal trial was over on this round of corruption charges at the end of 2024, and the sentencing that was handed down just on January the 29th of this year, Bob Menendez goes down as a parable of political corruption in our times. You might say this is like a made for TV movie or maybe even a big screen movie, but this is even stranger than what you might come up with in a work of fiction. We are talking here about an elected member of the United States Senate and a senator who had served as chairman of the Senate’s Committee on foreign relations. He was found guilty of acting as a foreign agent, an agent for a foreign country. Now just think about that for a moment. Think about what is entrusted to any member of the United States Congress. Think of what is entrusted to any of the 100 members of the United States Senate.

Think of what was entrusted to him by the leadership of his own party, as he was elected the chairman of the Senate Committee on foreign relations. Imagine having a brush with the law, not once, but twice, but about three times. Imagine getting off only because a jury in the 2015 charges could not come to a consensus that he was guilty, even though some others were found guilty in relationship to the crime. And then imagine being found so corrupt that at the end of a long career, you are sentenced to more than a decade in federal prison, as the first US senator to face such charges to be convicted and thus to be so sentenced. But let’s just think about this for a moment, not just in a secular sense, where of course even the secular worldview understands this as a bracing morality tale. Let’s think of it as Christians for a moment.

How do we come to understand this? How could something like this happen? Well, for one thing, sin is progressive. That is to say, I doubt that at any point early in his career, Bob Menendez said, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go out in a massive scandal and I’m going to cap a long career in the United States Senate with a career in a US federal penitentiary. I don’t think that’s what he aimed for. And I don’t think that Bob Menendez probably in the beginning saw himself as the kind of person who would sell out in this kind of situation, but he did. One of the things that we understand about sin in a biblical sense, is how dangerous it is to flirt with sin, to countenance sin, to consider sin, to get close to sin. And it’s that last part that really is troubling here because as you look at the story of Bob Menendez, we’re talking about someone who intentionally put himself in a situation in which he was tempted as he evidently had been in the past.

He succumbed to it in a bigger way even then he had in the past, and thus he is a broken man. He ended his senate career in disgrace and he is now headed for federal prison, at age 71. He’s been found guilty of bribery, fraud and foreign agent offenses. That’s a lot. Bribery, fraud, just think about that for a moment. And by the way, as you might expect, when you look closer at the evidence in this kind of story, it just turns out to be more and more tawdry. So for example, how in the world was he caught? Now, he was caught first of all because he had at least in some of the payments made to him, received it in the form of gold bars, gold bars, where if you were involved in this kind of criminal conspiracy, would you hide such gold bars? Well, how about in the closet of your house, in a coat that has your initials on it. How’s that for logic? 

And then you also have the fact that at least some of the evidence in the trial had to do with letters that were supposedly written by foreign agents to the United States that were represented to senators, members of the United States Senate, as documents coming from outside the United States. And it turned out that Senator Menendez, who happened also to have experience as chairman of that very same committee, he turned out to have written the letters himself. Now, one of the federal prosecutors that had a real interest in Senator Robert Menendez years ago, was former New Jersey governor and former US attorney, Chris Christie, who also ran for the republican presidential nomination in 2016. Chris Christie as prosecutor, as United States attorney there, had a big interest in corruption allegations against Senator Menendez.

Now, he has cited in the media where reporters went to him to ask him what he thought about the conviction, and he made a very interesting moral point. Chris Christie said, “When you’re in public office, you make a trade. You get influence in return for not getting money.” And he went on to say, “If you believe that you can have influence and money as a public official at the same time, you’re probably going to jail.” Former Governor Christie went on to say, “I think Bob Menendez just concluded he could have both.” And then Mr. Christie said, “And you can’t.” It’s also really interesting in moral terms that with the sentencing looming on the 29th, Bob Menendez, who by the way had thrown his wife under the bus, so to speak. His current wife, he threw under the bus blaming the entire thing on her. Now, since she has a separate trial, as she’s also been struggling with some medical situations.

Now, she is going to trial on her own, and Bob Menendez has asked that his prison sentence be delayed so that he can go to her trial. After, in his testimony, he basically said “she did it.” Okay, really interesting coverage in the New York Times and given the proximity of New Jersey to New York City and the New York Times, you can imagine there was a lot of coverage here. But one of my favorite parts, just in moral terms, just in terms of thinking about this as a Christian from a Christian worldview, and just looking at how something like this becomes just a parable. A parable, a parable within a parable, of how corruption leads to this kind of downfall. Mr. Menendez, formerly Senator Menendez, had the opportunity to arrange some character witnesses. Now, what kind of character witnesses would make statements in support, perhaps of leniency or mercy to the former senator having been found corrupt and the first member of the United States Congress ever to be found guilty of serving as a foreign agent?

Well, one of the documents presented on behalf of the defendant, now convicted criminal, to the judge, was from a man identified by the Times as a, “Prominent lawyer, Henry J. Amoroso.” What did he say in his document? He “Recounted how the senator gently intervened at a dinner to mark his 60th birthday to help him deal with a debilitating shoulder injury.” Here’s what the lawyer said, “During dinner, he obviously noticed I was struggling to cut my steak and without any hesitation and without bringing attention to himself, he gently leaned over with his own knife, grabbing my fork and cutting my steak for me while remaining completely engaged in conversation.” Well, evidently this was a statement coming from a prominent lawyer saying that Senator Menendez, former Senator Menendez, should receive a shorter sentence because he was so kind as to cut his steak at dinner. But as the Times noted, “Even those closest to Mr. Menendez acknowledged the futility of their task.”

Listen to this, “In her own letter to the judge, Alicia Menendez an MSNBC anchor and the former senator’s only daughter, lamented that he had already lost his job in the senate. His name she said, was recently taken off in elementary school near her home.” Her quote was this, “A legacy of service 51 years in the making has been reduced to a punchline about gold bars.” And there’s the moral lesson in all of this. When you dance around sin and then you give yourself to sin, you betray your own country as a sitting member of the United States Senate, eventually you go to jail. They take your name off the elementary school. Of course, you have to resign from the senate and eventually you go from being a senator to being a punchline. That’s the exceeding sinfulness of sin as the Puritans defined it.



Part II


Trump is Following Through on DEI Promises – But What Policies Will President Trump Enact to Institute Lasting Change?

All right, let’s shift to another story that’s been in the headlines and we have to come back to it because the headlines continue and the story is unfolding. This has to do with the executive order signed by President Donald Trump, having to do with eliminating transgender references, requiring male or female pronouns in terms of federal websites. Removing DEI material, even furloughing DEI employees. But the transgender issue has really stuck when it comes to the cultural opposition. Frankly, I think they can’t believe that he followed through with this promise, and as I mentioned, he made that clear in his inaugural address of all things. I’m still struck by the fact that a president of the United States had to say, male and female are the only two sexes, in an inaugural address to the nation, but President Trump did. He has followed through with executive orders and of course a flurry of executive orders, and I think many conservatives are surprised that he has been so incredibly thorough on the transgender issue, and addressing it all across different dimensions of the federal government.

One of the tricky things is now how to make that last, how to change the policies in such a way that they will not just go back into place. That’s also true in a lot of the DEI situations where frankly, you could have people just make cosmetic changes, change some of the language, and the same people with the same toxic ideas can show up with a different title. I do think the people around the president are quite determined not to allow that to happen. But on the gender question, on the male-female question, I think one of the most remarkable things is that clearly President Trump is very committed to fixing the problem. And he has gone well beyond what any kind of political necessity would’ve required of him. His promises to deal with the transgender revolution, to seek to correct it in terms of federal policy, that was something that of course conservative Christians desperately wanted to see. And interestingly, across the political and even across the say, liberal conservative divide, an increasing number of liberals also evidently see the transgender issue as a bridge too far. 

But President Trump has responded with far more than had been expected. He has responded with a lot more detail and a lot more grit to the policies than many had expected, but he’s up against enormous opposition. And I just want us to understand as Christians how this opposition works. It’s the opposition of the cultural elites. Yes, we knew that. It’s the opposition of the academic experts, we certainly knew that. It is the opposition of the media class, uou got to expect that. It’s also the opposition of the administrative state, the of the courts and the opposition, in many cases, just of the lethargy of federal bureaucracy.

For example, some of the orders, some of the changes, some of the policies that were developed under the Obama administrations and under the Biden administrations, they’re so deeply embedded, it’s going to take a Herculean effort to remove them and to clarify what they confused. One very relevant area in which you can see this, is the issuance of American passports. And that is because under some administrations, and particularly under the Biden administration, individuals have been able to choose an “x”  rather than male or female in terms of an American passport. That is now being eliminated. But that means that a whole lot of “x”s are going to have to become M or F pretty quickly. And is leading to a situation in which you do have a distinction between the federal government and at least some states, in which you can have a driver’s license issued by a state that supports the transgender confusion and then you could have a passport issued by the federal government that could have different names. Some foreign countries aren’t going to let someone come in under the circumstance of ambiguous documentation. But I’ll just point out that the transgender revolution is all about pushing ambiguity. That’s the whole point. And so ambiguity just doesn’t work, and that’s the reason why I think the transgender revolution has run out of steam even among many people on the Left, at least for some time. They may try to come back and figure this out and reformulate their arguments, but at this point, but the fact is that right now the vast majority of Americans don’t actually believe that someone who has a male body should show up on a girl’s athletic team. And that would seem to be common sense. But you’ll also notice something, and that is that when the mainstream media are now pushing back, many on the cultural Left are now pushing back, they’re coming right out and making the argument that any prohibition of someone who’s biologically male, which is to say a boy or a man, playing on and competing on a girl or women’s team, that that should be seen as completely legitimate. 

There’s another form of argument I want to point out. There was ample coverage in USA Today about these changes, and indeed, USA Today ran a very large article about the passport issue. That very same day, USA Today wrote an opinion piece. The headline was, “Number one voter concern is economy, not trans.” Sara Pequeño is the opinion writer in this case, and she makes the argument that the Trump administration’s made a mistake by dealing with so many issues, including these trans issues, when the number one concern of Americans is the economy. Here’s the form of argument I want us to be able to detect.

This is deflection. The article doesn’t come out at first and say, this is a pro-trans position. It comes out first making the argument that President Trump has misread the hour because voters are primarily concerned about economic issues, not the trans issue. But then the deflection has to cease when she comes back and makes very clear she is f8or the transgender revolution. So the deflection is this, someone says, here’s the reason why. Say President Trump should back off of these orders. It’s all about the priority of the economy, but then you just go a few paragraphs and it’s clear that isn’t the argument at all. And by the way, the president of the United States has to deal with multiple issues at once, just about every hour. And so there is nothing unusual about a string of executive orders dealing with all kinds of issues, especially when President Trump had plenty of time from his first terms experience, to put together people who would be ready with executive actions across a waterfront, really unprecedented in American history. And it comes from the fact that he really didn’t understand the office.

He’s made that very clear himself when he was elected in 2016. He understands it in a completely different way in this second term. He’s had time to think these things through. He’s had time to put together people who had the executive orders ready, and he obviously enjoyed signing them.



Part III


Buddhism and the Legalization of Same-Sex Marriage in Thailand: Buddhism Does Not Have the Ontological Legs to Stand On in the Fight for Marriage

Finally, for today, I want to point to the fact that just in recent days, just at the end of last month, Thailand became the first country in that region to legalize same-sex marriage. The headline in the New York Times “Celebrating Thai Same-Sex Marriage En Masse,” very large group. And we are told that this is the fulfillment of much activism on the part of LGBTQ groups there in Thailand. And Thailand is seeking to become, according to its own self-declaration, a model to other nations in the region. Most of them far more conservative in terms of moral issues, unlikely in any short amount of time to turn to follow the example of Thailand.

But the reason I’m bringing it up is this, why would Thailand do this? Well, Thailand, when it comes to sexual morality, is already associated, sadly enough with sex trafficking and many other things. But it’s also true that if you want to have the positive attention of western nations, and in particular the liberal nations, when you are looking at Europe and you’re looking at Canada, you’re looking at the Biden administration in the United States, if you want to gain favor, you take this kind of action and you’re going to be applauded by the US government under Biden. You’re going to be applauded by western governments under liberal leadership. You’re going to be applauded by the diplomatic community of the liberal nations. You’re probably going to get a slap on the back from at least some officials at the United Nations, and you’re going to get a shout-out about how progressive you are from the New York Times. You can take all that to the bank, and that’s the point. 

There’s also an interesting theological point made here, or at least in thinking about world religions. It’s an interesting point, that when there is reference in this article to opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage, not only in Thailand historically, but also in the region, it is often blamed on Buddhism. But here’s the point. All the major world religions, even just by common sense and biblically, we would say perhaps even by common grace, they’ve come to an understanding about sexuality and marriage. That means wherever you find deeply committed persons when it comes to a specific religious faith, you are likely to find, let’s just say, less progressive views on issues related to sexuality and gender and marriage. But that is particularly true, I need to note, of Judaism and Christianity and Islam. And so even when you look at world religions and you understand there’s a lot of diversity there, for one thing, it’s virtually illogical to speak about Buddhist doctrine in terms of any kind of creed or what we would say theological content specifically. It is more a philosophy of life. It doesn’t require theism at all. 

But when it comes to Judaism and Christianity and Islam, it is a matter of divine law. And so you’ll see, in many western contexts where you have liberal Judaism and liberal Christianity alongside orthodox Judaism and conservative Christianity, I’ll just make the note that in the majority Islamic world, you do not at this point find that division on such an issue. And I just want to end by saying that theology always matters. And by that I mean to say that it’s not just the where (Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North America, Europe), it’s more importantly the what do people believe there when it comes to their most basic worldview and their most basic understanding of reality. The more explicitly religious and theistic it is, the less likely same-sex marriage is going to be supported. 

As always, lots to think about, and theology is always there, even if just under the surface.

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter or X by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.



R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

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