The Opinions - David French on Being Canceled by His Former Church

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

A few months ago, the Opinion columnist David French and his family were canceled by their former church. In response, French wrote about the painful experience of being abandoned by his faith community. The column led to an outpouring from readers sharing their own thoughts and similar experiences. In this audio essay, French sits down with his editor, Aaron Retica, to discuss the fallout and listen to some of the responses he received from readers.Thoughts? Questions? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Aaron Redica. I am an editor in the Opinion section of the Times, and I work with a number of our columnists and contributing writers, mostly on American politics. We're thinking constantly in opinion about the divisions in the country, and one of our columnists and someone I work closely with who is really exploring. this deeply is David French. He is in a unique position because he was once a fierce partisan, as he says himself, a Romney delegate in 2012. But for the apostasy of not wanting Donald Trump

to be president, he was cast out of a number of Republican institutions, but not only Republican institutions, also from his church in the end. And a few months ago, David, wrote a column about being canceled by his church. And so we decided to sit down and talk about what exactly happened and how his readers reacted to the essay. David, let me ask you to tell the story in the first place. Could you just tell us a little bit about the church, why you were attracted to it, and then the sequence of events that led to you being canceled? The story really begins in 2004. I had just uprooted my family from Kentucky where we were living and moved to Center City, Philly. And moving from the south to Philadelphia is very different from a church

standpoint. And where I came from, there were churches on every street corner. So we looked for churches, found one relatively close to where we lived, called 10th Presbyterian. And when we arrived at that church, it fit us like a glove. The people in the church were incredible. incredibly kind. And so we fell in love of that church and began to appreciate the denomination it was part of, the Presbyterian Church in America. And then when we moved from Philly back to Tennessee, we immediately went to a PCA church. In fact, we chose our house in part because it was close to a PCA church. And for many years, we had a wonderful experience in that church, just wonderful. But then in hindsight, there were two things that really changed our lives in our church.

One was we adopted a little girl from Ethiopia. And there were a number of really gross racial incidents where people at the church or the school would say terrible things to my wife, to my kids. For example, one church member asked my wife, why couldn't you adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia, a teacher told one of my kids, what did you do? Did you purchase your sister for a loaf of bread? And then five years after that, again, this was something I did not know would change my life considerably in church. Donald Trump comes down the escalator, begins to capture sort of the evangelical hearts and minds. And I said no to Donald Trump. I ultimately said no to

the Republican Party. Didn't say no to being a conservative, but said no. to being a Republican. And when we made that decision, we knew there would be blowback. We knew that. We had no idea at all what was really in store for us when we made that decision.

When I first began to write, I was working at that time for a conservative magazine called National Review. When I first began to write against Trump, the threats and harassment and intimidation that came just flooding into us

and against our fans, was overwhelming. And what was deeply discouraging, though, was that when we turned to our church families for support, we didn't find it as uniformly, say, as when I deployed to Iraq in 07, when my church really, really rallied around me. The bottom line was we got to this point where when we were going to church, we could not be sure that we weren't going to be harassed by somebody. It became a difficult place to go because it didn't feel like home anymore. Okay. So you left the church and found another one in Nashville that you like much better. And nonetheless, you still retained all kinds of ties to people in the church. And that's, of course, how you got

invited to the panel that's actually the subject of the column. So maybe just tell us what happened there. Yeah. So I maintain close friendships. And one of them who works for the PCA, and asked if I'd be willing to participate in a panel about helping pastors deal with very polarized times. And they wanted me to share the stage with three other people to help people navigate what it's like to be a polarizing figure. And we knew there would be a backlash. The announcement came. The backlash arrived. I didn't think much about it. It was pretty ferocious, though. It was very ferocious. I mean, somebody even wrote a parody song. It was absurd. It was also very malicious and dishonest. But I was fine. I mean, it's sad to say, Aaron, I've been through this many times before. But it was fine. And then I began to hear that the PCA was reacting to this like somebody who's been shocked with a cattle prod.

They were reacting with extreme alarm. I learned that they were considering disinviting me. They asked me if I'd voluntarily step away. And I said, nope, I don't. I don't give in to trolls. I don't give in to bullies. But about a day or two later, the PCA didn't just cancel the panel, Aaron. They put out a statement blaming me.

And the statement was referring to, you know, a PCA official was, had I known about some of David's prior writings or the way people had received them? When, wait a minute, had he known, it's not like I'd put these words in some sort of private list serve. Yes, had we known about the thoughts published in numerous periodicals all over the United States by this man. Yes. So they canceled the panel. You wrote the column, and we got an absolute outpouring of response. You talked a little bit before about being inured to the attacks. But when you got all these letters and emails directly, you were very moved by them.

Yes, yes. So, you know, as I came home from church on Sunday after the column posted, and I do what I normally did, I went to my computer and I opened up my inbox to see what kind of response I'm getting. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. And it absolutely blew me away. And then I opened the first email, and I thought, wow, this is different. And then the next one, and then the next one. And then it actually began to be a sacred obligation to my recent. to read these, that if they're going to honor me with their stories, if they're going to honor me by telling maybe stories, and some of them said, I've never said this before, then I wanted to read, I wanted to understand them, and then to as many people as I could, I at least wanted to indicate that I read it, I see them, I read their story. It's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen. I want to talk a little bit about our readers' responses in different categories and kind of get your reaction to that. I'm actually going to play three recordings for you to listen to you.

The first is from Sue Ann. My story parallels that of David French. My parents were founding members of a Presbyterian PCA congregation. My best friends growing up were the children of the other founding members. We attended church activities together and were part of each other's families. When I attended Wheaton College rather than our denominational school, it was considered somewhat suspicious. I'm married in that church, and one of these friends, now an elder, said that some elements in my wedding ceremony were practically heretical, but they let it go because my parents were members.

I have lived away now for 30 years, but it is a constant ache in my heart that I can no longer share myself freely with these friends to whom I was so connected. Like Mr. French, I adopted international child. I took her back on a visit, hoping she could be baptized in the church her grandparents helped found. The church elders cited bylaws as a reason for not allowing a baptism, but didn't offer a dedication or even a prayer. As this split widens in America, I wish to understand how our actions and shared understandings have strayed so far from the beatitudes that we can freely use rejection and hateful words again. against each other, and then blithely quote the gospel, saying, love one another. How do you react to what happened to her?

Yeah. So the first thing I want to say is that email is, and that message is not atypical. What you're seeing is throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody's a fundamentalist and you say, I'm not voting for Trump, they often don't look at that as a debatable point for which Christians and goodwill can disagree. They will look at this and say, it is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump. And so what's happening is that

these individuals who are being rejected from churches and telling stories like that, what they're encountering is this deeply intolerant strain of fundamentalism that views any disagreement it with them as apostasy. And so what that does is it raises the stakes to this eternal level. And what ends up happening is they just sweep aside all of these scriptures about loving your enemies, being kind to those, blessing those who persecute you. All of that is just swept aside in favor of the burning certainty and ferocity of the culture war. So obviously not all the responses were personal stories, right? People talked a lot about their own frustration with polarization. They talked a lot about what's happening in

society as a whole, but they also wanted to push back against you a little bit. We're going to give two examples of pushback now, one from Sherry Irvine and another from a man named Claude. My question to you, Mr. French, is, why do Republicans only see bad behavior when it happens to them. I have witnessed white churches discriminate against people of color, LBGT folks, and women ever since I became an adult. Did you not notice these unchristian traits in your church until they affected you? The only thing that surprises me about the story is how willfully blind French seems to have been to the racism, homophobia, and cult-like behavior of his church and political party. which should have at least prepared him for their rejection of him.

It seems that only when those racists and homophobes targeted him did he come to a realization of what his co-religionists have been up to for a very long time. Yeah, those are really good questions. So let me answer it, and there's a number of aspects to the answer. So one of them is just mea culpa, there's a lot of this stuff I should have seen. And so to my shame, a lot of this I just didn't see. And some of it I saw, but wrongly categorized it as extremely exceptionally bad behavior, as opposed to as common as I've come to understand that it is. So first, full stop, Mea Culpa, there are things I did not see that I should have seen.

Now, the second thing is the church culture writ large has gone to great lengths. to bury, to cover up, to conceal misconduct and scandal within the church. So it becomes literally difficult to see it because a lot of it is covered up by non-disclosure agreements. A lot of it is covered up by confidential closed-door church proceedings. And that kind of tries to preserve amongst people in the church the sense that we're good people, we're good people, where our community is good. But the last thing I would say is when you're talking about the conflicts over American religion and spirituality, it is not persuasive to me to say, well, you uphold various traditional Christian teachings, therefore you're part of the problem.

When people are attacking the church by attacking the actual sort of fundamental biblical elements of evangelical Christianity, that is not persuasive to people because it's essentially saying your religion is false. But if you go in and you say, wait a minute, under your own faith, you're supposed to, as I said, act justly, love kindness and walk humbly. That is a much more compelling critique. One of the reasons why this was painful to me is it's a, in many ways, I am theoretically still at home in large parts of the PCA. And so to say, well, it's just rotten, you know, because of its confessions and creeds, et cetera, no, no. No, that is not the case. What we're talking about here or what I'm talking about is the malice, the cruelty, the hypocrisy. Every Christian should understand the need to respond to that. So you've changed a lot. Honestly, than most people change in their lives. And part of the ardor against you is coming from in part, right, that you did share the confessions in the creeds. You were in the trenches on. the other side. Is that part of what you think is driving the animus? What have you learned being to different types of people? Yeah, there are definitely ways in which I've changed, but there are also

definitely ways in which the community I was a part of changed. And so these two things were happening at the same time. And for me, many of the changes in my community triggered changes in me. And so let's just take, for example, I spent my career as a free speech attorney. And if you look at my record, I worked both for secular and religious organizations. But at every turn, I defended people regardless of whether they agreed with me or not. And for a while, that was a priority in the Republican Party. That was at least a professed priority. Along comes the age of Trump. And the party takes this very authoritarian. turn, which contradicted all of my previous legal work, quite frankly. But at the same time, that move, that GOP move vindicated a lot of critiques of the GOP that I had previously dismissed. And it made me realize that I had not been seeing my own community as clearly as I needed to. I mean, my blinders were so big, Aaron, that when Trump came down the escalator, I just dismissed him. I thought there's just no way.

There's no way my community will embrace this guy. And then it was my community that put that guy in the Oval Office. And so it made me need to see things more clearly. I think we'll end there. David, I know it's painful to talk about all of this. So thank you very much for taking the time. Well, thanks so much, Aaron. This was a great conversation.