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(OPINION) The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is a small Christian denomination with about 390,000 members. That makes it about 1/20th the size of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination.

But the PCA always punched above its weight, in part because the denomination is home to some of the most high-profile pastors and churches in the country. Tim Keller and New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church are the best known, but they are by no means alone. D. James Kennedy and his Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, which had a major radio and television presence until Kennedy’s death in 2007, were a part of the PCA.

WORLD Magazine founder Joel Belz and its longtime editor Marvin Olasky are both PCA elders. Many of the leaders of the influential Gospel Coalition (including Keller) are members of the PCA.

The conservative, reformed theology of the PCA also had an outsized influence on other evangelicals, including many influential leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and many large nondenominational churches. One might say that the reformed theology championed by the PCA has become the theology of a large swath of modern evangelicalism.

Each year, the PCA’s leaders gather for what it calls a General Assembly. This year’s assembly, which begins June 10 in Richmond, has gotten a lot of unwanted attention because it scheduled New York Times columnist David French on an opening panel to discuss “how to be supportive of your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year.”

Following an outcry that spilled over into the mainstream media (“David French” and “PCA” trended nationally on X for days), the panel was canceled. However, that doesn’t mean the story is over, or that it doesn’t have some lessons to teach.

Lessons learned

The first lesson to learn is that this panel, or one like it, is necessary: Some tone-deaf pundits argued that PCA doesn’t need to discuss this topic at all — as if the controversy itself isn’t a compelling argument that perhaps it does. Such criticism also ignores a mountain of data suggesting that the current environment of political polarization is having a negative impact on our churches and on the mental health of our pastors. This panel was a good idea, and I hope the PCA and other denominations resurrect it in another form.

A second lesson (which reinforces the first, demonstrating the polarization) is to note how quickly the ad hominem attacks against French and his wife Nancy came out: They were accused of everything from heresy to treason. But these attacks and assertions lacked anything resembling a real argument. Anyone who was looking for facts and a nuanced position should look to columnist David Bahnsen (who, like me, considers French a friend). He wrote what I consider to be a wise “take” on the Frenches and their character: “They are Godly people who exhibit a personal character that the online world doesn’t know about. I know about it, and I’m telling you — you want friends like them. I am not wrong about them.” I know them. He’s not wrong about the Frenches.

Bahnsen goes on to say, “He and his family were perhaps the most mistreated people in America by the far alt right/MAassembly extremes, and it was disgusting and inexcusable.”

But Bahnsen also said, “I do not disagree with everything David has written the last few years, but I disagree with a lot of it — sometimes theologically, sometimes politically, and often just in tone or emphasis. He has shifted ideologically.”

And that’s the third lesson here: French has shifted ideologically: I’ve known David French for more than a decade, and I’ve been with him in settings public and private. There’s very little he’s saying today that he wasn’t saying then, when he worked for Alliance Defending Freedom as one of its fiercest First Amendment defenders. David French is what we used to call a “classical liberal.” He believes in ordered liberty and the rule of law. That was true then. It’s true now. And that’s not a bad thing. But he is now defending positions he would not have 10 years ago, even in the interest of “ordered liberty” and the “rule of law,” which French knows better than most has its limits. Certain behaviors are disordered. We should not hesitate to say so. People who engage in these behaviors should have the protections of law, but they should not enjoy moral approval.

The fourth lesson here is that Bahnsen is also right when he says French’s tone has shifted: He has become more shrill. One need look no farther than his column in last week’s New York Times to find an example. French opposes the Antisemitism Awareness Act, but his position puts him in an uncomfortable spot because it’s one he shares with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, among other loyalists. So to distance himself from them, he pours vitriol on them, even though he agrees with them that this is a bad bill.

This kind of posturing has become hard for some of French’s longtime friends — many of whom I talked to for this piece, but none of whom wanted to speak for attribution. I talked to a prominent evangelical leader who knows and agrees with French on many issues. Nonetheless, he said, “I’m tired of being lectured by David.”

The net result is that French has become, in the words of Kylie Griswold, writing for The Federalist, a “professional polarizer.” All of which is to say that his selection for a panel about how to defuse polarization is (at a minimum) ironic. Griswold and The Federalist have “tone” problems of their own, but in this case Griswold is not wrong.

What about the PCA?

All of this made French a puzzling choice for such a panel. The choice became even more puzzling when you consider that the Frenches are not a part of the PCA and that Nancy French went public with her reasons. She described to the Deseret News her family’s departure from the PCA in favor of a local Baptist church. “After 15 years, I was just like, I can’t do that anymore. The last time a neo-Confederate confronted me, I thought, ‘I’ll go to Strong Tower.’ No church is perfect, but I doubt they’re brimming with neo-Confederates.”

Insiders of the PCA often say the initials really stand for “Process Church of America.” And in that it has much in common with French’s way of thinking. “Come let us reason together,” as Scripture teaches. That posture is often a good way to proceed through controversy. But in this case, the leadership of the PCA demonstrated itself to be ignorant, tone-deaf, or indifferent to the outcry that almost everyone else could see was inevitable.

And that’s the final lesson here: The PCA is not innocent in this meltdown of civic comity. One might argue that the PCA’s intentions were honorable, and that it’s a shame that we live in a world in which such polarization exists. I would offer no rebuttal to that argument. But the PCA’s decision to include David French on this panel was a bad one, and they should have known it.

The beginning of the PCA’s General Assembly is still a few weeks away. But it seems unlikely that the controversy will die. It probably shouldn’t. All parties clearly have a lot of soul-searching to do. Maybe this moment is the opportunity to get that done.

That might be the best outcome we can hope for.

This article was originally published at MinistryWatch.

Warren Cole Smith is the editor in chief of Ministry Watch and previously served as Vice President of WORLD News Group, publisher of WORLD Magazine and has more than 30 years of experience as a writer, editor, marketing professional, and entrepreneur. Before launching a career in Christian journalism 20 years ago, Smith spent more than seven years as the Marketing Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers.