This week, leaders of the Presbyterian Church in America will gather in Richmond, Virginia, for their Annual General Meeting. The Presbyterian Church in America is a little, theologically conservative Christian denomination that was my family’s church for over 15 years.
This just canceled me out.
I am now considered too controversial to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith. I was supposed to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but was deemed too polarizing.
Originally, I was invited to join three other panelists on the topic of “how to support your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year.” One of the reasons I was invited was precisely because I had been the target of intense attacks online and in real life.
From the moment my participation was announced, these attacks resumed. There were mistakes testsvicious tweetsletters and even a parody song directed against the denomination and against me. The message was clear: get him off 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.
Our family joined the PCA denomination in 2004. We lived in Philadelphia and attended Tenth Presbyterian Church in Center City. At the time, the name suited us perfectly. I am conservative theologically and politically, and in 2004 I was still a partisan Republican. But at the same time, I perceived the confession as relatively apolitical. I never heard political messages from the pulpit and worshiped alongside Democratic friends.
When we moved to Tennessee in 2006, we chose our home in part because it was near a PCA church, and that church became the center of our lives. On Sundays we attended church services and from Monday to Friday our children attended the school founded and supported by our church.
We loved the people of this church and they loved us. When I was deployed to Iraq in 2007, the entire Church came together to support my family and the men I served with. They flooded our small forward operating base with care packages, and back home, church members helped my wife and children with meals, car repairs, and lots of love and fellowship in moments of anxiety.
However, two things happened that changed our lives and, looking back, they are related. First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.
I could not support Trump in any way. It wasn’t just his obvious lack of character that troubled me; it opened the door to a level of extremism and nastiness in Republican politics that I had never encountered before. Trump’s rise to power coincided with the rise of the alt-right.
At the time, I was a senior editor for the National Review, and when I wrote articles critical of Trump, members of the alt-right threw itself, and they attacked us through our daughter. They took pictures of her on 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 photos of dead and dying black victims of crime and war. We have also received direct threats.
The experience was shocking. Sometimes it was terrifying. So we did what we always do in difficult times: we turned to our church for support and comfort. Our pastors and close friends came to our aid, but the support was not universal. The Church as a whole did not respond as it did during my deployment. Instead, we began to encounter racism and hatred up close, from members of our church and our parish school.
The racism was grotesque. A church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway instead of Ethiopia. A teacher at school asked my son if we had bought his sister for a “loaf of bread”. We later learned that coaches and teachers were using 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 she couldn’t come play at our house because “my dad said black people are dangerous.”
There have been worrying political clashes. A church elder came up to my wife and me after a service to criticize our opposition to Trump and told me to “get your wife under control” after comparing his support for Trump with his opposition to Bill Clinton on the Monica Lewinsky affair. Another man confronted me at the communion table.
On several occasions, men approached my wife while I was out of town, challenging her to defend my writing and sometimes quoting a far-right pastor named Douglas Wilson. Wilson was a noted Christian nationalist and pro-slavery advocate who once wrote that abolitionists were “driven by a zealous hatred of the word of God» and that “Slavery produced in the South a true affection between the races which, we believe, never existed in any nation before the war or since.”
We also began to see the denomination itself with new eyes. To my shame, the racism and extremism within the faith 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 is underpinned by disturbing racial elements.
A member of the denomination wrote: “The arguments for Christian nationalism”, one of the most popular Christian nationalist books of the Trump era. He maintains that “no nation (properly conceived) is composed of two or more ethnic groups” and that “to exclude an external group is to recognize a universal good for man”.
I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. Our pastors and close friends continued to support 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 of the attacks we were facing.
But for us, church was no longer our home. We could stand up to online trolls. We could protect ourselves against physical threats. But it was difficult to live without respite, and targeting my children was a bridge too far. So off we went to a wonderful multi-ethnic church in Nashville. We have not abandoned Christianity; we left a church that hurt my family.
I still have many friends in the Presbyterian Church in America, people who are fighting the very forces that drove us from the Church. In March, one of these friends contacted me and asked if I would join a panel at this year’s General Assembly.
I agreed to come. The CPA officially invited me to join a panel with three church elders speak at a session preceding the main event. I knew the invitation would be controversial. Members of the denomination continued to attack me online. But that was part of the point of the panel. My experience was directly relevant to others who might find themselves in the crosshairs of extremists.
The anger at me didn’t just come from my opposition to Trump. This was directly linked 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 against me, for example, for defending the civil liberties of drag queens and LGBTQ families. A writer for The Federalist declaimed that giving me a platform was like “giving the wolf a brand new woolen coat and microphone and challenging the sheep to object”.
The composition of the panel was announced on May 9. On May 14, the denomination relented. He canceled the panel and, in his 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 force a family out of a church and then prevent the church from hearing one of its former members describe their experience. It is a false peace and unity if it is preserved by granting the most malicious members of the congregation a veto over Church events.
When I left the Republican Party, I believed that a common faith would preserve my faith home. But I was wrong. Race and politics have trumped truth and grace, and now I am no longer welcome in the Church I loved.
