One month from today, Presbyterian leaders will gather in Richmond, Virginia, for the Presbyterian Church in America’s annual General Assembly to discuss and debate church issues and decide on matters of importance. One attendee, nay speaker, however, is decidedly not Presbyterian.
That little ray of sunshine is David French — the Army JAG (in case you didn’t know)-turned-religious liberty litigator-turned-writer whose brain has been so corrupted by Trump derangement that he sold out to The New York Times and The Atlantic, where his columns are indistinguishable from the dishonest drivel of the legacy press’s anti-religious religion reporters. In a phrase, he’s a regular accuser of the brethren.
French makes political polarization his personal brand, so it’s curious that the PCA has invited him to be a panelist at an assembly-wide seminar called “How to Be Supportive of Your Pastor and Church Leaders in a Polarized Political Year.” Is the denomination unaware that French’s family publicly left the PCA because it’s a “hostile” congregation of “neo-Confederates“?
If the PCA knew this and invited him anyway, shame on them. And if they somehow didn’t know because their heads are buried that far in the sand — unlikely, especially considering the PCA’s leftward decline, but I repeat myself — double shame.
So I emailed the PCA General Assembly and its Administrative Committee’s head Bryan Chapell that very question and received no response. An email obtained by The Federalist that was apparently sent to many people who complained about the French pick, however, said the PCA is “currently seeking to discern the accuracy of concerns that have been expressed to this office since the [French] announcement,” and a PCA spokesman has “asked those who have expressed concerns about Mr. French taking unbiblical positions to provide documentation.”
If it’s documentation they want, allow me.
Long before French became a willing participant in atheist Rob Reiner’s anti-Trump “documentary” “God & Country” earlier this year, he was invoking white guilt to toss a cohort of Christians who vote differently than he does into the “Christian nationalism” basket. Evangelicals (specifically white ones) who were hesitant about getting the rushed and mandated Covid jab were actually “reluctant to consider the health of their community” and had a “spiritual problem.”
Less than two weeks after radical pro-abortion and pro-transgender candidate Joe Biden became the presumptive Democrat nominee in 2020, French said those who favored Trump were of low character and competence — even though, as Nathaniel Blake wrote in these pages, French was previously “behind ‘Evangelicals for Mitt’ and spent years arguing that our political leaders need not be avatars for our beliefs.”
Then there’s French’s evolution on so-called “gay marriage” in federal law. He says his views on traditional, biblical marriage have not changed. But during the fight over the misnamed Respect for Marriage Act — which requires every state and the federal government to recognize homosexual “marriages” and was signed into law by French-endorsed President Biden — French claimed:
Religious belief is not the same thing as declaring civil law. … I don’t want the law to discriminate against those Americans who sincerely hold different views of sexual morality, sexuality, and marriage and organize their lives and their institutions accordingly.
As Megan Basham wrote in The Federalist at the time, “In other words, he makes the same argument about marriage that Catholics Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have about abortion — he has personal views based on his faith but does not want those views, however endorsed they may be by the Creator of the universe, to be reflected in U.S. statute.”
He didn’t stop there, though. French thinks now that the institution has been legally desecrated, it should stay that way forever: “It would be profoundly disruptive and unjust to rip out the legal superstructure around which [gay Americans] ordered their lives.”
While David French was a senior editor of The Dispatch, the NeverTrump publication performed a dishonest “independent fact-check” of pre-2020 election advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, which exposed Biden and Kamala Harris’ support for abortion until birth. Facebook then used that fake fact-check to censor the pro-life ads.
There’s plenty more where that came from. From launching character assassinations, to going after the weak, to defending the taxpayer-funded indoctrination of children with divisive racial politics, and more — the David “Winsome” French well never runs dry.
But the Pharisaical metanarrative is a familiar one: a self-righteous religious leader who sets his own rules, measures his opponents by them, morphs those rules when it suits him, and then boisterously gives thanks that he’s not like the unpalatable white Trump voters over there.
French is not so much a regime handmaiden as he is a court eunuch who became so by choice and nonetheless thinks he is in a position to lecture others on masculinity. He’s a turncoat who scolds others about loyalty, a liar convinced he’s the last honest man on Earth, and a party apparatchik whose vaunted principles always seem to align with his paychecks.
In recent years, he’s made a name for himself using Sunday — the traditional Christian day of rest and worship — to smear the faithful for the unpardonable sin of believing God’s law is superior to man’s law.
So it’s a shame the Presbyterian Church in America saw fit to grant French a pulpit from which to slime the faithful.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” the gospel of Matthew warns. The PCA isn’t just ignoring that warning. They’re giving the wolf a brand new wool coat and microphone and daring the sheep to object.
