David French and the Polarizing Politics

In which I wade laboriously through Mr. French's latest Sunday column

[Updated because I confused William Wolfe with Stephen Wolfe.]

The internet waits for no person, so that, by now, it is basically old news, but I did have some thoughts about Mr. French taking up his keyboard in the New York Times to do down the PCA and, as usual, Christians in general. I congratulate myself that I’ve been able to refrain from commenting on any Mr. French Sunday column all these years, but this one is too rich with irony for me to pass up. I don’t have it in me to walk by on the other side of the road, past the beleaguered PCA. Think of this as me literaleigh loving my neighbor as myself. Let’s dive in, shall we?

This week, the leaders of the Presbyterian Church in America will gather in Richmond, Va., for their annual General Assembly. The Presbyterian Church in America is a small, theologically conservative Christian denomination that was my family’s church home for more than 15 years. It just canceled me. I am now deemed too divisive to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith. I was scheduled to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but I was considered too polarizing.

Isn’t it funny how that worked out? Someone in the PCA invited Mr. French to talk about how to endure the next several months till November, months which will, by every estimation, be extremely trying and divisive. This person, it seems, extended the invitation without having read Mr. French’s Sunday column for the last many months, a column that never misses an opportunity to malign Christians and make them into the bad guys. When it was pointed out to the organizers of the panel that, obviously, Mr. French is the source of so much of the polarization, and makes things more contentious wherever possible, the PCA took the sanest and most sensible path available to them and got rid of the panel and asked Mr. French not to come. And all of that because, just to say it one more time for those in the back, Mr. French is too too polarizing by half.

But no, this is not technically a “cancelation.” They canceled the panel, sure, and replaced it with a prayer time, but they didn’t “cancel” Mr. French. A “cancellation,” in these latter days, means having your whole life destroyed, means losing your job and being publicly shamed, means being cast out of all good society. If Mr. French had been canceled he would not be writing in the New York Times every Sunday, liberally blaming Christians for the all that besets us in this decadent and wicked age. This, of course, is obvious to almost everyone but Mr. French, which is what makes it so silly and ridiculous.

I was originally invited to join three other panelists on the topic of “how to be supportive of your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year.” One of the reasons I was invited was precisely that I’ve been the target of intense attacks online and in real life. The instant my participation was announced, those attacks started up again. There were misleading essays, vicious tweets, letters and even a parody song directed at the denomination and at me. The message was clear: Get him off the stage. And that’s what the conference organizers chose to do. They didn’t just cancel me. They canceled the entire panel. But the reason was obvious: My presence would raise concerns about the peace and unity of the church.

I went along and clicked all those links and, well, I think Mr. French must not know how any of this works—or he does know and is gaslighting us, which is a real possibility. In the “vicious tweet” category, this is what he thinks is beyond the pale:

In the world of Twitter, you have to Person Up or you won’t be able to cope. If I was going to be weepy like this, I could provide the receipts of people who wish I was dead, who hate everything I believe. If you do any content production—for that is the business of the hour—some people are going to hate you. Most people—especially the male half—who enter into the fray agree to the rules of engagement, which is that you should hash it out over ideas of substance without calling everybody racist all the time. It is low-brow to take the behavior of wicked trolls and cast every disagreement as if it comes from the haters. Mr. Wolfe is not a troll. Here, in this tweet, he is pointing out where the lines of division are. Mr. French has, for at least four years now, but really more like eight, said that Christians who voted for Mr. Trump did so for wicked, racist, and nefarious reasons, despite over and over again being shown evidence of the actual reasons for which they voted for him.

Mr. French goes on, week after week, spewing all manner of bile at ordinary Christians but then when anyone points it out and wishes he would stop doing it, he collapses onto his computer and weeps over his supposed wounds.

This is no neutral act. Mr. French’s weekly screeds have had the effect of increasing hatred against Christians. He has helped to build an outclass, to otherize the very group to which he purports to belong. That is why Mr. Wolfe pointed out that you really do have to choose between Mr. French and actual Christianity. This is not to say that Mr. French is not a Christian. I don’t know his heart—only God can know that—but it is the case that he is attacking the church all the time which isn’t something Christians are invited to do.

I won’t go through every single line, but here is Mr. French’s introduction to his much-rehearsed ecclesial biography:

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.

Are you conservative theologically and politically tho? Because it really seems like you’re not. If you were, you would probably accept people who are theologically and politically conservative instead of blaming them for all the world’s problems. You wouldn’t defend the encroachment of progressive sexual ethics into our common social sphere under a benighted, nearly blind commitment to a crumbling and now decadent Enlightenment philosophical structure that is obviously more like the Titanic than a City on a Hill. Anyway, we carry on:

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.

And my gosh, didn’t everyone’s tiny minds explode. Mr. French’s in particular. Do we have to narrate the whole sorry saga yet again? When Mr. Trump became the President, obviously the entire Western World shook to its crumbling foundation. And a lot of us—I include myself in this—began a perilous and illuminating journey into intellectual lands lost in the mists of modernism, of trying to understand what was happening.

There are a lot of different explanations for why Mr. Trump exists as a political figure. One of those is Mr. French’s explanation, that everyone is wicked but him, that everyone who voted for Mr. Trump is a racist, and that only by accepting the verdict of the New York Times and Slate Magazine about what it means to be a Republican and a Christian can anyone be shriven of her sins. The other explanation is longer, much much more nuanced, takes some study and time to understand, and is also fascinating. I have enjoyed my eight years of amateur political inquiry very much and am starting to get my bearings in this new world. You don’t have to vote for Mr. Trump or even like him at all to appreciate the political significance of his Orangish Person. You don’t have to hate him either. You don’t have to have any particular feelings about him. You can educate yourself or even, as one might say, Do Better.

Skipping a bit, because the long narration of all the bad things that have been said to Mr. French is so tedious:

On several occasions, men approached my wife when I was out of town, challenging her to defend my writing and sometimes quoting a far-right pastor named Douglas Wilson. Wilson is a notorious Christian nationalist and slavery apologist who once wrote that abolitionists were “driven by a zealous hatred of the word of God” and that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the war or since.”

Oh the humanity. This is exactly the sort of propaganda so many New York Times readers relish the most, and therefore, exactly why it is wicked of Mr. French to name-drop Pastor Wilson. Pastor Wilson is not in the PCA,* but isn’t it convenient to use him as a way to bash all Christians everywhere? Do you think someone who reads articles like this and enjoys them is going to wonder to herself which Christians are good and which are bad? Of course not, she is going to google “Doug Wilson,” come up with an article like this, and be confirmed in her already entrenched idea that all Christians want all women to be shamefully treated all the time.

And honestly, Mr. French, if you don’t like Pastor Wilson—just to employ some of the language of the left—at least have the decency to respect the dignity of every human person. Why don’t you thoughtfully and without slanderous and hysterical emotional breakdowns engage with what he writes instead of treating him like a demon. The best way to get people to engage with you about your ideas is to engage with them about theirs. The reason Christian people don’t give you the time of day anymore and have you removed for panels about political polarization is because this sort of rhetorical effort is so cheap and mean.

Anyway, once Mr. French started seeing the racism, he couldn’t stop seeing it:

We also began to see the denomination itself with new eyes. To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination were invisible to us before our own ordeal. But there is a faction of explicitly authoritarian Christian nationalists in the church, and some of that Christian nationalism has disturbing racial elements underpinning it. A member of the denomination wrote “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” one of the most popular Christian nationalist books of the Trump era. It argues that “no nation (properly conceived) is composed of two or more ethnicities” and that “to exclude an out-group is to recognize a universal good for man.”

I haven’t read The Case for Christian Nationalism, but my federal head (that’s just a funny little joke) has and what Mr. French says here is not true. The way Mr. Wolfe (not the same Mr. Wolfe of the tweet above) defines the word “ethnicity” is perhaps confusing for Mr. French, who already knows everything anyway, but it is not a racial term, for Mr. Wolfe. Also, let us remind ourselves, for those on the far left, every Christian who believes that God created the earth and therefore deserves worship and obedience is a Christian Nationalist. It’s not a term I would use to describe myself, but I’m certainly not going to become unhinged because some people who already hate me are hating me even harder by trying to turn me into a racist.

Now we come to my favorite part:

I do not want to paint with too broad a brush….

Then Don’t. Why not do unto others the way you would have them do unto you?

…Our pastors and close friends continued to stand with us. Our church disciplined the man who confronted me about Trump during communion. And most church members didn’t follow politics closely and had no idea about any of the attacks we faced.

Of course, now we all know, every week we know. This is like a child who always wants to show you his owie. Or me when I have to do leg day twice in one week. Or any person who hasn’t discovered that the way to deal in life is to move on. But, of course, it is necessary for Mr. French, who is, as you know, a white man and therefore at the very bottom of the victim hierarchy, to protect himself from actual cancellation by finding a way to always be a victim.

But for us, church no longer felt like home. We could withstand the trolls online. We could guard against physical threats. But it was hard to live without any respite, and the targeting of my children was a bridge too far. So we left for a wonderful multiethnic church in Nashville. We didn’t leave Christianity; we left a church that inflicted harm on my family.

You know—“harm.” Harm is where you get your feelings hurt and then go on blaming the people forever instead of behaving like a member of the Kingdom of God.

Recently, in the middle of some Morning Prayer lections that were washing over me as I lifted horrible weights, it occurred to me that the way God is so angry about idolatry in the Old Testament—going on and on about it with dire warnings and then letting his own people fall into the hands of their enemies who carry them away into exile—is rather like, in tone, the way the Lord Jesus warns against unforgiveness.

If you really wanted to get to the emotional heart of the gospel, you would have to deal with the fact that “harm” is not an excuse that Jesus would accept to cut off other Christians, to reject them as you feel they have rejected you. That’s not a choice that’s on the table. And that is one of the reasons, I think, that the “Christianity” of Mr. French is at odds with orthodox faith. What he says he does here is not a Christian action. If people in his church sinned against him, he needed to go to them, show them their fault, and try to win them over. Then, if they didn’t listen, he should have gone to get another brother and try again. And again. And then, if those people didn’t repent, they would be the ones to be put out of the church. The fact that this didn’t happen, that Mr. French apparently disobeyed the very basic command of our Lord, Jesus, and took his harm and his family to a church that suited his sense of himself and what kind of person he would like to appear to be, leads me to think that either he is lying about all the “harm” or he doesn’t love Jesus that much. If you love me, said the Lord Christ, you will keep my commandments. You will also love the Bride enough to want her not to fall into such egregious error, like the sin of racism. Or is it also possible that Mr. French does not believe that racism is that bad? That he wants to accuse people of it, without caring very much about those people.

This part is also ridiculous:

The anger against me wasn’t simply over my opposition to Trump. It was directly related to the authoritarian turn in white evangelical politics. My commitment to individual liberty and pluralism means that I defend the civil liberties of all Americans, including people with whom I have substantial disagreements. A number of Republican evangelicals are furious at me, for example, for defending the civil liberties of drag queens and L.G.B.T.Q. families. A writer for The Federalist ranted that granting me a platform was akin to “giving the wolf a brand-new wool coat and microphone and daring the sheep to object.”

“Families?” Mr. French—LGBTQ families?? I know we’re not allowed to countenance the likes of Pastor Wilson, but the best thing he ever did was invent the phrase “Gay Mirage” for gay marriage. For shame. Also, did you not know, Mr. French, that the “civil liberties” of drag queens were not being threatened—ever. That there is no reason for over-sexualized men to dress up in lewd costumes and read stories to children. Saying that they may not do that is not an attack on anyone’s civil liberties, except for the children who have to endure it. That, if we are looking for harm, is harmful and the people who try to do it should, by the law, be prevented. This is so basic. Imagine blowing up all your credibility over something so basic. It is astonishing, when you think about it.

But, you know, Mr. French is basically Jesus:

The panel was announced on May 9. On May 14, the denomination caved. It canceled the panel, and in its public statement, I was to blame. I was sacrificed on the altar of peace and unity. But it is a false peace and a false unity if extremists can bully a family out of a church and then block the church from hearing one of its former members describe his experience. It is a false peace and a false unity if it is preserved by granting the most malicious members of the congregation veto power over church events.

I mean, haven’t we all had to listen to Mr. French “describe his experience” often enough? I feel like it’s been sufficient for the day. No one needs to constantly describe his experience. That is so boring. Why not write and speak about ideas, about interesting books, about art and music and literature, and best of all—Jesus.

Imagine having a weekly column in the New York Times, having been invited there for some reason, and not using it to every week talk about the Lord Jesus. You could write about how much he loves us, how he laid himself down on the altar—both the Victim and the Priest—for our salvation, how he bought true peace with God by his shed blood.

Or, in the Mr. French version of affairs, you talk about yourself over and over and over again until everyone just runs away screaming.

When I left the Republican Party, I thought a shared faith would preserve my denominational home. But I was wrong. Race and politics trumped truth and grace, and now I’m no longer welcome in the church I loved.

You just said you didn’t love it. You just said they were all racists and you can’t be with them because they probably all voted for Mr. Trump. You Just Said That. In the usual way, Mr. French is blaming everyone else for what he himself is doing. He has let race and politics trump truth and grace. He fled a denomination instead of obeying the commands of the Lord to be reconciled. He chose to champion the wicked and the godless over the Bride whom Christ died to join to himself.

So anyway, have a nice day!

*The PCA is not racist.