National Guard soldiers arrive in Washington, DC

National Guard troops began arriving in Washington, DC, yesterday as part of President Donald Trump’s historic federal takeover of the nation’s capital. Armored vehicles were seen at urban centers and tourist sites around the city last night.

During a White House briefing on Monday, Mr. Trump announced that he would deploy eight hundred National Guard soldiers in the District, saying the action was to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse.” Between one and two hundred soldiers are expected to patrol the streets at any given time.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser called Mr. Trump’s directive “unsettling and unprecedented” but said the city would cooperate with the administration to the extent the law allows. Others were far less positive.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–NY) called Mr. Trump’s crime narrative a “political ploy.” Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) said the president is “testing the limits of his power.” The Democratic Mayors Association accused Mr. Trump of a “charade.”

A tale of two cities

Critics of the president’s action cite Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) statistics showing a 26 percent drop in violent crime so far this year, compared to the same period the previous year.

However, a White House report stated that in 2024, Washington, DC, saw a homicide rate of 27.3 per 100,000 residents, the fourth-highest homicide rate in the country. If the District were a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation. So far in 2025, there have already been nearly 100 homicides, 1,600 violent crimes, and nearly 16,000 total crimes reported in Washington, DC. The report also noted that vehicle theft is more than three times the national average.

Black boys and men in the District die by homicide at a rate nearly 3.5 times higher than the national rate. These rates of death are on a par with those of American combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And there are significant questions regarding the accuracy of statistics showing a decrease in crime this year in the District. The police union claims police supervisors manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year. The union’s leader said claims that violent crime is down significantly are “preposterous.”

Whatever your view of the president’s action and the conditions that prompted it, no one can disagree that crime in our nation’s capital is too high. Whether National Guard troops can help or not remains to be seen.

But even they cannot remedy the problem that underlies all our nation’s other problems.

“There’s a lot of cultural work to do”

In his recent New York Times article, David Brooks begins with the good news that “more people around the world report that they are living better lives than before.” He cites a new Gallup survey showing that the number of people who say they are thriving has been rising steadily for a decade.

However, the share of the population that is thriving in America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand is falling. In 2007, 67 percent of Americans and Canadians said they were thriving. Now that number is down to 49 percent.

Said differently, nations with some of the highest standards of living are seeing the greatest declines in well-being. What explains this disparity?

According to Brooks, “we in the West have aggressively embraced values that when taken to excess are poisonous to our well-being. . . . Since the 1960s, we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic, and more oriented around self-expression” than values that prevail in more religious societies.

He concludes:

Let’s be clear about what’s happened here: greed. Americans have become so obsessed with economic success that we’ve neglected the social and moral conditions that undergird human flourishing. Schools spend more time teaching professional knowledge than they do social and spiritual knowledge. The prevailing values worship individual choice and undermine the core commitments that precede choice—our love for family, neighborhood, nation, and the truth. There’s a lot of cultural work to do.

Jesus “standing visibly before us”

Economic success tempts us to choose the god of self in ways that less self-sufficient cultures would not consider. It cannot be a coincidence that, as Brooks reports, the wealthier we are, the less happy we are.

God clearly warns us, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). One reason is its fleeting nature and the quest it drives for more. As the richest man in the world testified, “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income” (Ecclesiastes 5:10).

Another factor is the fact that money cannot meet our deepest needs. Jesus urged us, “Be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15). This is why we are warned, “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have” (Hebrews 13:5).

As crime in our nation’s capital illustrates, greed can also drive those who do not have money to victimize and steal from those who do. By contrast, as we noted yesterday, those who submit to God’s Spirit are changed into the character of Christ and serve others sacrificially in his name and nature.

We do this out of gratitude for the grace we have received, taking Jesus at his word that “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). John Wesley noted:

One of the principle rules of religion is to lose no occasion of serving God. And, since he is invisible to our eyes, we are to serve him in our neighbor; which he receives as if done to himself in person, standing visibly before us.

I know of no other remedy for the greed and criminality that afflict our secularized society than the grace that transforms sinners into people of grace.

When last did you serve Jesus “standing visibly” before you?

When next will you?

Quote for the day:

“Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all who need us desperately.” —Elie Wiesel

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