David French lays out the facts of how his family was attacked by other PCA members – Baptist News Global

New York Times Columnist David French laid out the story of how his family was disenrolled from their Presbyterian church in an explosive June 9 opinion piece published in the Sunday News.

The conservative columnist quoted at length how he, his wife and their adopted daughter from Ethiopia became the focus of criticism from members of their Nashville-based congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America, a conservative breakaway from the larger Presbyterian Church (USA).

Nancy and David French

PCA leaders are meeting this week in Richmond, Virginia, for their annual general meeting. French had been invited to speak on a panel there about “how to support your pastor and church leaders in a politically polarized year,” he said. But the uproar against his attendance was so fierce and so swift that not only was he canceled, but the entire panel was canceled.

“I am now seen as too divisive to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith,” he wrote. “I was supposed to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but I was seen as too polarizing.”

He knows this topic very well – not only because he is a journalist, but also because his family already faced severe criticism when he and his wife, the writer Nancy French, refused to support Donald Trump as the Republican presidential candidate.

The Frenches attended a PCA church in Philadelphia beginning in 2004 and then chose to live near a PCA church when they moved to Nashville in 2006. He considered himself a “partisan Republican” but considered his church to be “relatively apolitical.”

“Two things happened that changed “However, our lives are very closely intertwined, and in hindsight they are connected,” he wrote. “First, we adopted a two-year-old girl from Ethiopia in 2010. And second, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015.

“However, two things happened that changed our lives and, in retrospect, they are related.”

“There was no way I could support Trump. It wasn’t just his obvious character flaw that worried me; he opened the door to a level of extremism and viciousness in Republican politics that I had never seen before. Trump’s rise coincided with the rise of the alt-right.”

At that time, David French was senior writer for National reviewa well-known conservative political magazine. But when he wrote critical articles about Trump, “the alt-right attacked us through our daughter,” he said. “They pulled pictures of her from social media and Photoshopped them into gas chambers and lynchings. Trolls found my wife’s blog on a religious website called Patheos and filled the comments section with gruesome images of dead and dying black victims of crime and war. We also received direct threats.”

This kind of unfiltered racism was “grotesque,” he said. “A church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway instead of Ethiopia. A teacher at the (church) school asked my son if we had bought his sister for a ‘loaf of bread.’ We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who called the few black students at the school racist epithets. There were horrific cases of peer racism, including one student who told my daughter that slavery was good for blacks because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her she couldn’t come to our house to play because ‘my father said blacks were dangerous.'”

A church elder told David French – in church – he needed to “get his wife under control.”

The French family

Other men in the church confronted Nancy French with the teachings of Doug Wilson, a right-wing extremist pastor from Idaho who extolled the value of slavery in America.

“We also began to see the denomination itself with new eyes,” wrote David French. “To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination was 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 underpinned disturbing racist elements.”

But when a friend asked if he French agreed to participate in a panel discussion at the General Assembly.

“I knew the invitation would be controversial,” he said. “Members of the faith community continued to attack me online. But that was part of the panel’s purpose. My experience was of direct relevance to others who might be targeted by extremists.”

But the negative reaction exceeded even his expectations.

“I was sacrificed on the altar of peace and unity. But it is a false peace and unity when extremists can push a family out of the church and then prevent the church from hearing one of its former members’ accounts of his experiences,” he concluded. “It is a false peace and unity when they are preserved by giving the most vicious members of the congregation a veto over church events.”

Related articles:

PCA cancels panel discussion after David French uproar

Nancy French seeks redress for the culture war of the past Ghostly

Fundamentalism is more a state of mind than a theology, says David French