We have covered this story here at Current. Check out Marvin Olasky’s piece, “David French is on a panel, oh no!” We also published “The Presbyterian Church in America disinvites David French.” Today French gives his own take on what happened.
Here is a taste of his piece, “The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day“:
Our family joined the P.C.A. denomination in 2004. We lived in Philadelphia and attended Tenth Presbyterian Church in Center City. At the time, the denomination fit us perfectly. I’m conservative theologically and politically, and in 2004 I was still a partisan Republican. At the same time, however, I perceived the denomination as relatively apolitical. I never heard political messages from the pulpit, and I worshiped alongside Democratic friends.
When we moved to Tennessee in 2006, we selected our house in part because it was close to a P.C.A. church, and that church became the center of our lives. On Sundays we attended services, and Monday through Friday our kids attended the school our church founded and supported.
We loved the people in that church, and they loved us. When I deployed to Iraq in 2007, the entire church rallied to support my family and to support the men I served with. They flooded our small forward operating base with care packages, and back home, members of the church helped my wife and children with meals, car repairs and plenty of love and companionship in anxious times.
Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related. First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.
There was no way I could support Trump. It wasn’t just his obvious lack of character that troubled me; he was opening the door to a level of extremism and malice in Republican politics that I’d never encountered before. Trump’s rise coincided with the rise of the alt-right.
I was a senior writer for National Review at the time, and when I wrote pieces critical of Trump, members of the alt-right pounced, and they attacked us through our daughter. They pulled pictures of her from social media and photoshopped her into gas chambers and lynchings. Trolls found my wife’s blog on a religious website called Patheos and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead and dying Black victims of crime and war. We also received direct threats.
The experience was shocking. At times, it was terrifying. And so we did what we always did in times of trouble: We turned to our church for support and comfort. Our pastors and close friends came to our aid, but support was hardly universal. The church as a whole did not respond the way it did when I deployed. Instead, we began encountering racism and hatred up close, from people in our church and in our church school.
The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.” We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her that she couldn’t come to our house to play because “my dad said Black people are dangerous.”
There were disturbing political confrontations. A church elder came up to my wife and me after one service to criticize our opposition to Trump and told me to “get your wife under control” after she contrasted his support for Trump with his opposition to Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Another man confronted me at the communion table.
Read the entire piece here.
The kind of “confrontations” French describes in his piece happen to him every day on social media. And the things that happened, and are happening, to the French family are happening in evangelical congregations all over the country.
I am not a political scientist, pollster, sociologist, or social scientist, but back in December 2020 I surveyed (on-line, using Google Forms) 1,155 evangelicals. The biggest batch of responders described their religious affiliation as “Non-Denominational” (27.5%), “Southern Baptist” (15.6%), “Baptist” (8.6%), “Presbyterian Church in America” (7.2%), “Evangelical Free Church (7.1%), “Anglican” (6.4%), Christian and Missionary Alliance (5.5%), and Assembly of God (3.1%). Most of them (75.9%) attended congregations with under 750 attendees on a given Sunday morning. Most of them went church weekly or more than weekly.
63.4 of these responders said that they had “experienced divisions or divisiveness” in their congregations “as a result of political differences.” Some of the stories these people told (there was an opportunity to describe how the political divisions have “played out in their church, with 822 people taking that option) are heartbreaking. I am saving these responses for another day.
51.2 of the responders said that they had “experienced divisions and divisiveness” in their congregations “over how to respond to racial unrest in America.” 700 people described how these differences played out. Again, I am saving these responses for another day.
So yes, French is not alone here.
In 2017, I wrote a piece on Trump at The Washington Post where I imagined how his presidency would change the course of American Christianity. Here is a taste of that piece:
Trump is different.
His campaign and presidency has shed light on a troubling wing of American evangelicalism willing to embrace nationalism, populism, fear of outsiders and anger. The leaders of this wing trade their evangelical witness for a mess of political pottage and a Supreme Court nomination.
Not all evangelicals are on board, of course. Most black evangelicals are horrified by Trump’s failure to understand their history and his willingness to serve as a hero of the alt-right movement.
The 20 percent of white evangelicals who did not vote for Trump — many of whom are conservative politically and theologically — now seem to have a lot more in common with mainline Protestants. Some in my own circles have expressed a desire to leave their evangelical churches in search of a more authentic form of Christianity.
Other evangelicals are experiencing a crisis of faith as they look around in their white congregations on Sunday morning and realize that so many fellow Christians were willing to turn a blind eye to all that Trump represents.
If the court evangelicals were students of history, they have learned the wrong lesson from evangelical political engagement of the 1970s and 1980s. Trump’s presidency — with its tweets and promises of power — requires evangelical leaders to speak truth to power, not to be seduced by it.
Read the entire piece here.
I took some of these thoughts and included them in my 2018 book, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump:
