In a troubling trend, police in Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and Louisiana have arrested a number of church leaders in separate cases for failing to report alleged child abuse. The wave of cases, which have arisen in the last month, raises questions about church and ministry accountability and their legal and moral obligations to protect children in their care, specifically by alerting civil authorities when leaders suspect abuse. This basic duty has been a fixture of American law for well over half a century. Since 1967, every state has enacted some form of mandatory child-abuse reporting law. But in nearly...