DEI delivers the opposite of what it promises. It delivers not diversity but a narrow ideology. It delivers not equity but different advantages and disadvantages based on pre-judged hierarchical group identities. It delivers not inclusion but the systemic coercion and exclusion of those who dare question its methods.

On March 1, the University of Florida made a shockingly countercultural announcement. “The University of Florida” says the administrative memo, “has closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.”
The announcement brings the University into compliance with Florida Board of Governors rule 9.016, which prohibits expenditures of taxpayer dollars on “’Diversity, Equity or Inclusion’ or ‘DEI’ [which] is any program, campus activity or policy that classifies individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation and promotes differential or preferential treatment of individuals on the basis of such classification.”
Over the last decade far more universities and industries have followed the trajectory of University of California at Berkeley, whose DEI staff ballooned from 118 in 2014 to 190 in 2023, with a price tag north of $25 million per year. Under the Biden administration American taxpayers funded $16.3 million for diversity training for federal agencies.
Why should more organizations, academic or otherwise, follow the lead of the University of Florida rather than Berkeley?
Harvard professor Roland Fryer offers a straightforward reason: “Our intuition for how to decrease race and gender disparities in the workplace has failed us for decades. …”
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It is never pleasant to think about death. Yet death is real. It is not something we can afford to ignore, to wish away, to sentimentalize, or to trivialize. Scripture owns up to the reality of death and does so from its opening pages. Issues of “life and death” importance mark the first three chapters of the Bible.

We all have questions about death. What is death? Why do we die? Why do we all die? Why is death so scary? Why did Christ die? Why do Christians have to die? How can I face the death of someone I love? How can I prepare for death? How can I help others prepare for death? What happens after death?
To answer these questions, we need to go to the Scripture and see what God has to say to us there. The Bible is God’s Word and is completely reliable and true. If the Bible tells us something about death, then we can stake our lives on it.
We also have a lot of help. Our spiritual ancestors thought deeply and practically about death. Throughout the history of the church, pastors and teachers have sought to help God’s people face death in light of the riches of biblical truth. In the Protestant Reformation five centuries ago, the church recovered the gospel in its full biblical integrity. Martin Luther, John Calvin, the British Puritans, and their spiritual heirs have left us rich reflections on suffering, death, and heaven in light of the gospel.
But we don’t live in the halls of church history. We live in the twenty-first century. Every generation faces its own particular challenges in thinking seriously and biblically about death and dying. The challenges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not always our own. To begin, we need to think about where we are. Why does modern Western culture—and sadly, sometimes, even the church—make it so hard for us to think about death?
CHALLENGES FROM OUR CULTURE
What are some obstacles that our culture raises to thinking properly about death and dying? There are at least two. The first is that we live in a culture of distraction. Think about it. We have year-round access to sports—live and televised events; domestic and international; football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer. We have cable networks, talk shows, call-in shows—all devoted to sports. We have television and movie streaming—Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Apple TV+, for starters. In 2019, there were 532 original scripted television series broadcast in the United States; up from 495 in 2018 and 210 in 2009.1 And then there are the twenty-four-hour news channels. You couldn’t begin to watch all that’s offered. There is music streaming—Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. For a few dollars a month, you can stream or download hundreds or thousands of songs. And although social media is a relative newcomer, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok entice users to spend hours on their devices.
The point is not that sports, television, music, or social media are bad. They are not. I enjoy each of them. The problem is that our culture overwhelms us with entertainments and diversion. This multibillion-dollar industry keeps us from thinking about serious things—life, death, and eternity. Of course, diversion from serious things is not unique to our culture. It is part of our fallen bent as sinners to distract ourselves from the truth. Why do we do this? Blaise Pascal put it well nearly four hundred years ago: “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things”2 and “It is easier to bear death when one is not thinking about it than the idea of death when there is no danger.”3
Therefore, our culture has not done something brand new in its pursuit of distraction. What is new is that we have taken distraction to new heights. The thought of death is so overwhelming that we would prefer not to think about it at all. Our modern industry of distraction helps us to do just that. We invest billions of dollars annually not to think about the unthinkable.
A second and related obstacle that our culture has raised to thinking seriously about death and dying is that we live in a culture of distancing and denial. We have all sorts of ways to try to keep death at arm’s length. Few young people, for instance, have had direct experience with death. They see dramatizations of death in TV and movies, often in shocking and gory detail.4 But many have never been to a funeral or memorial service, and even fewer have ever seen a dead body. It used to be that most people died at home. Now, most people die in institutions—hospitals and nursing homes, for instance.5 This is not a bad thing, of course, since these institutions are routinely staffed by skilled people who ensure that our friends and family members receive care and comfort in their last days. But this also means that families are often not with their loved ones in their last hours. Further, a routine experience of death in families has been mercifully stemmed: infant mortality. Parents, of course, continue to experience the tragic heartache of the loss of a child, but this is far less common than it used to be.6 The eighteenth-century Scottish pastor Thomas Boston, buried six children before they reached the age of two. The English Puritan John Owen had eleven children, but only one survived to adulthood. No one would want to return to the days when infant mortality was an expected, if not inevitable, part of family life. But that also means that fewer families today know what it is to experience death firsthand in the home.
We have also witnessed a revolution in the way that people mourn in our culture. Increasingly, funerals are called “celebrations of life.” This way of speaking serves to distance both the service and the mourners from the reality of death. One survey from 2019 found that the three most popular songs performed at funerals in the United Kingdom were Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” Andrea Boccelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye,” and Eva Cassidy’s recording of “Over the Rainbow.”7 It is revealing that these songs equip us to respond to death with sloppy sentimentality (“Time to Say Goodbye,” “Over the Rainbow”) or with bald defiance (“My Way”). The survey’s authors commented that “surprisingly no classical hymns made it on to the most popular top ten list.” Is this a surprise, though? Good hymns capture deep, substantive, biblical truths to bring gospel comfort to mourners. By and large, that is simply not what we want in the West today as we encounter death.
CHALLENGES FROM THE CHURCH
The culture is not the only place that we find obstacles to thinking seriously and substantively about death and dying. Sadly, the evangelical church has added its own set of obstacles. We may briefly reflect on three in particular. First, the church has embraced consumerism. The church too often treats attenders like customers, and these attenders too often act like customers. The church can present itself as selling a product in a competitive marketplace. Church attenders can demand to be kept satisfied or they will take their business elsewhere. If that model informs, even imperceptibly, our understanding of the church, then mortality and death will struggle to find a place in the teaching and songs of the church. If people are not made to feel positive and uplifted, the reasoning goes, they will leave and go elsewhere. There are incredible pressures to keep people coming and to attract more people to our services and programs. Why, then, would you put an unwelcome reality like death before them?
Second, the church has embraced an entertainment mentality. Often the buildings in which evangelical churches meet resemble stages with auditorium-style seating. A band is up front playing loud music (some churches even offer earplugs to attendees as they enter the building). Preaching reflects the influence of entertainment culture. Preaching is dedicated less to opening and applying a text of Scripture than to addressing the felt needs and concerns of contemporary hearers. It avoids being either serious or confrontational, and it is not particularly authoritative. Death and eternity, if they are handled at all, are handled sparingly and gingerly.
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“Number of Original Scripted TV Series in the United States from 2009 to 2019,” Statistica, January 2021, accessed January 19, 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/444870/scripted-primetime-tv-series-number-usa ↩︎
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), 66 (=Pensée 169). ↩︎
Pascal, Pensées, 72 (=Pensée 166). ↩︎
Timothy A. Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2017), 19. ↩︎
Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death, 19. ↩︎
Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death, 19. ↩︎
Georgina Hamilton, “The Most Played Songs at Funerals Revealed—and Some Choices Are Bizarre,” Smooth Radio 97-108, May 2, 2019, accessed January 19, 2021, https://www.smoothradio.com/news/quirky/most-popular-funeral-music-songs. ↩︎

Written by Frank J. Smith |
Monday, September 4, 2023
Dr. David C. Lachman (27 October, 1939 – 27 August, 2023) went to be with the Lord at the age of 83, after a period of slow decline beginning in 2018. He died peacefully in his own bed at his home of 41 years in Wyncote, PA, surrounded by his wife and three children. He is survived by his wife of 51 years, three children, and 12 grandchildren, his sister and brother, and relatives.

David was a gentleman in so many ways—polite, respectful, calm, quiet, peaceful, unflappable, and indeed gentle.  At an early age—when he was six years old—he had been conquered by God’s grace, and the resulting Christian character shone through for more than seven decades.  His care for those in need was demonstrated when he was a caseworker, walking without fear on streets in dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
David was also an eminent scholar.  He earned five academic degrees from four institutions: B.A. (Houghton College), M.A. (University of Pennsylvania), B.D. and Th.M. (Westminster Theological Seminary), and Ph.D. (University of St. Andrews in Scotland).  His dissertation on the Marrow Controversy was published by the Rutherford House.  He was one of the general editors of the Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology.  And he co-edited Worship in the Presence of God: A Collection of Essays on the Nature, Elements, and Historic Views and Practice of Worship, published in 1992.
Producing that 400-page book took a decade, taken up with recruiting authors, cajoling them into turning in their chapters, and a painstaking, word-by-word and comma-by-comma reviewing of their submissions.  I was the other co-editor of that volume.  It was my brainchild, but without David’s careful editing work and patient dealing with other authors, coupled with the intellectual respect he commanded, it would never have come to fruition.  This book was the first one in the twentieth century that promoted not just certain elements of worship (such as Psalmody) but the whole doctrine of worship from the perspective of the Westminster Confession of Faith.  Perhaps the best way to illustrate the work’s significance is the fact that a noted writer who has vehemently rejected the regulative principle of worship felt compelled to write a whole book attacking Worship in the Presence of God.
In addition to this collection of essays, David’s other major contribution to the literature of the doctrine of worship was a 2005 article he co-authored for The Confessional Presbyterian, “Reframing Presbyterian Worship: A Critical Survey of the Worship Views of John M. Frame and R. J. Gore.”
David’s academic prowess was put to good use in the classroom, as he taught courses at Westminster Theological Seminary and Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.  But his church history expertise also came in handily in his chosen profession, which was that of antiquarian bookdealer.  For almost half a century, he transported treasures of the British Isles to America, importing tons of tomes—duty free, he would gleefully note, as antiquarian collectibles are not subject to tariffs.  What made him particularly successful was his virtually encyclopedic knowledge of books and Bibles.
Another aspect of his scholarship was his writing introductions to various reprint editions of old books.  Examples include two works by James Durham, The Dying Man’s Testament to the Church of Scotland, or, A Treatise Concerning Scandal; and A Commentary upon Revelation; a book by Thomas Murphy, Pastoral Theology: The Pastor in the Various Duties of His Office; and a magisterial volume by George Gillespie, Aaron’s Rod Blossoming; or, the Divine Ordinance of Church Government Vindicated.  He wrote three entries for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and contributed a chapter to The Doctrine of the Church, an audiobook featuring Westminster Seminary faculty members.
David became one of the key suppliers of rare Bibles to multiple prominent displays, private and public.  Again, another example of his scholarship being put to practical use.
And there was another dimension where his scholarly ways served a public good, which was his life as a churchman.  Ordained as a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), he took his churchly duties seriously.  He often attended presbytery and General Assembly meetings.  He served as a parliamentarian of Philadelphia Presbytery, and also on the Assembly’s Committee on Constitutional Business.
And he was not afraid to engage in ecclesiastical battle, when such became necessary.  Like the founder of Westminster Seminary, J. Gresham Machen, a minister who was known as “Mr. Valiant-for-Truth,” and an academic who was no ivory-tower theologian, David was willing to fight for what he believed.  As acknowledged by everyone, he was principled, and not hesitant to do what he thought was right, no matter the cost.
David employed his intellectual and writing talents in ecclesiastical journalism.  For several years, as part of a reform movement within the PCA, he edited a magazine called The Presbyterian Advocate.  In a way reminiscent of the efforts of the Presbyterian Journal, which had exposed doctrinal decline in the Southern Presbyterian Church, The Presbyterian Advocate tirelessly targeted bureaucratic gibberish.  Consideration of his journalistic efforts leads me to note that though he was respected, he was not always loved—in point of fact, many times, he was feared by churchmen, not because he was mean-spirited, but because they instinctively understood that he had a better grasp of the principles at stake.
His going on the offensive theologically speaking should not be viewed as being contradictory to his general genteel nature.  David was like a Medieval noble knight who respects women, is kind to children, and can even be compassionate toward his opponents.  At the same time, with lance-like accuracy, David punctured pomposity and skewered inconsistency.  One memorable editorial, which pointed out the nonsense in a particular denominational publication, ended with words from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”
That last anecdote illustrates another side to David, which was his sense of humor.  He enjoyed a good joke—and he could laugh at himself, too.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that in addition to everything else, David was a friend.  I knew him for four decades.  He often lent a sympathetic ear to me as I wrestled with various struggles, whether personal or in the ministry.  Many a time during the period when we were putting together that book on worship, and even after we had completed it, I would call him at, oh, around midnight, and talk into the wee hours of the morning.  I thereupon was anointed by the Lachman children of having attained, along with others, the honorable status of being one of the “lunatic fringe.”
David C. Lachman was a good man and a great man.  He may not be known as widely as some of today’s PCA superstars, but his contributions to church history will be celebrated in generations to come.  At times, it takes the fog of war to dissipate before we can see clearly who the true heroes and the truly significant figures are.  I can think of at least three ways that his work will be seen by historians as impactful.
One, he set a pattern of faithfulness—of commitment to principle—which can encourage others to follow.
Two, he was fundamentally correct on the principles for which he contended.
Three, his actions demonstrate both tactical and strategic positioning.  For example, David’s journalistic endeavor was a harbinger of today’s bloggers—largely laymen—who are active in the current reform efforts in the PCA.  Also, his writings on worship helped lay the foundation for a rediscovery of historic Presbyterian worship.
A gentleman and a scholar.  A churchman and a friend.  Dr. David C. Lachman lived a full life.  I will miss him.  I already miss not being able to pick up the phone and give him a call (even if, in recent years, doing so was at more reasonable hours!).  But I look forward to seeing him again, robed with the Redeemer’s righteousness, and engaging with him in perfect worship that will be pure and entire, throughout all eternity.
Sometimes, in reflecting on heaven, David would say that he didn’t know exactly what it would be like, except that it would be far more wonderful than we could imagine.  Indeed.  May God give all of us that childlike, wonder-filled faith and hope on our pilgrimage toward the Celestial City.
Frank J. Smith is Pastor of Atlanta Reformed Presbyterian Church.

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