New York Times columnist David French laid out the story of how his family got canceled by their Presbyterian church in an explosive June 9 opinion piece published in the Sunday Times.
The conservative columnist cited chapter and verse for the ways he, his wife and their adopted daughter from Ethiopia became flashpoints for critique from fellow members of their Presbyterian Church in America congregation in Nashville. The PCA is a conservative breakaway from the larger Presbyterian Church (USA).
Nancy and David French
PCA leaders are gathering in Richmond, Va., this week for their annual General Assembly. French had been invited to speak on a panel there about “how to be supportive of your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year,” he said. But the uproar against his presence was so virulent, so quickly, that not only did he get canceled but the entire panel was canceled.
“I am now deemed too divisive to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith,” he wrote. “I was scheduled to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but I was considered too polarizing.”
That’s a topic he knows quite a bit about, not just because he’s a journalist but because his family already had experienced a heavy dose of rebuke when he and his wife, writer Nancy French, refused to endorse Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president.
The Frenches previously attended a PCA church in Philadelphia beginning in 2004 and then chose to live near a PCA church when they relocated to Nashville in 2006. He considered himself a “partisan Republican” but saw his church as “relatively apolitical.”
“Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related,” he wrote. “First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.
“Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related.”
“There was no way I could support Trump. It wasn’t just his obvious lack of character that troubled me; he was opening the door to a level of extremism and malice in Republican politics that I’d never encountered before. Trump’s rise coincided with the rise of the alt-right.”
At that time, David French was a senior writer for National Review, a well-known conservative political journal. Yet when he wrote pieces critical of Trump, the alt-right “attacked us through our daughter,” he said. “They pulled pictures of her from 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 pictures of dead and dying Black victims of crime and war. We also received direct threats.”
This kind of unfiltered racism was “grotesque,” he said. “One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the (church) school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a ‘loaf of bread.’ We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used 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 that she couldn’t come to our house to play because ‘my dad said Black people are dangerous.’”
One church elder told David French — at church — he needed to “get your wife under control.”
The French family
Other men in the church confronted Nancy French with the teachings of Doug Wilson, a far-right extremist pastor from Idaho who has praised the value of slavery in America.
“We also began to see the denomination itself with new eyes,” David French wrote. “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 disturbing racial elements underpinning it.”
Yet when a friend asked if he would participate on a panel at the General Assembly, French agreed.
“I knew the invitation would be controversial,” he said. “Members of the denomination have 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 cross hairs of extremists.”
Yet the negative reaction was more than even he could have imagined.
“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,” he concluded. “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.”
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