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Every court to decide on such a cross has said that it must come down or be moved to private property, but the conservative Supreme Court majority may rule in its favor. Have we simply forgotten how well separation of church and state has worked?

The army inquires about soliders’ faiths because it doesn’t assume the people dying to defend this nation are Christian. When one views the cross in that light, it seems antithetical to the ideals for which those same soldiers fought.

According to a retired attorney for the DOD, “When you proselytize as a commander…you necessarily send doubts to the subordinates that you oversee about your impartiality and thus degrade good order and discipline, and in turn degrade combat capability.”

Much of the discussion of white evangelicals laments the loss of their moral standing, but such criticisms suffer under the misunderstanding that white evangelicalism in the United States has somehow devolved from a once salutary moral vision to brute political opportunism.

Now that I’m a pastor, I hold this truth within me: Every person has the capacity to do horrible things and so our congregations need to be set up with ways to report that go beyond a distraught housewife armed with a telephone.

As America reels from the exposure of a massive child sexual abuse scandal in the Southern Baptist Convention, we should pause to take stock of the culpability of the broader conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture.

I hope Rep. Omar is able to move forward after this unfortunate, second charge of anti-Semitism; to do less social media and more of what she was elected to do: legislate.