As suggested by my examples above, there are many of us in the pews in the PCA who think differently than Mrs. French and who take exception to this movement of historical condemnation. We recognize that one can condemn slavery in general, and its attendant abominations like separating families in particular, without thereby wholly condemning those that lived in the Southern society that approved it, and without disapproving all else that they did.

What is a neo-Confederate, and why is their presence among us a problem? Such were my thoughts on reading Mrs. Nancy French’s statement to the Deseret Times that her family left their Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation because it was “brimming with neo-Confederates,” at least some of whom confronted her at communion. If she means by that (as I have read elsewhere), that people were harassing her for adopting an Ethiopian, then I say ‘shame on you’ to such people; and well might they ponder Numbers 12[1] and fear lest God’s wrath burn similarly against them.
But then if that is what is meant, where is the neo-Confederate angle? Why not simply say ‘racist?’ Hateful prejudice is by no means limited to neo-Confederates (whomever they are), and without an elaboration on who they are it is not clear why it should be regarded as an inherent trait of them at all, much less the essential one. (Then too, I should like to hear the perspective of the alleged ‘neo-Confederates,’ for fairness’ sake, and find myself very doubtful that a church would allow its members to cause a racist scene during communion without promptly imposing strict discipline.)
The Sunday after I read her remarks I worshipped at a PCA church with a Confederate flag above a gravestone in its churchyard, a church which is also working to establish closer relations with a nearby black church and which supports missions to the Cherokee. I have also worshipped at a church with parishioners who had the Confederate flag as their front license tag, and which has supported church plants among the local Latin population, as well as the first Indian-American plant in Fairfax Co., Virginia, and which has had interns from such places as Taiwan, China, and Brazil. At some points all of its interns have been foreigners or of non-European descent, and there are people there with adopted Ethiopian kids. I have had some interesting conversation about some of the writing of R. L. Dabney (a former Confederate officer) with one of the elders, and I know a man there who has portraits of the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on his walls, and with whom the phrase “unreconstructed Southerner” is the highest praise; yet when I watched the film Hidden Figures with him, he was appalled at the mistreatment the main characters received on account of racial hatred.
I’ll hazard that such people would qualify as ‘neo-Confederate’ to people like Mrs. French, if only because they retain reverence for their forebears who lived and fought in the Confederacy, and yet I know of no evidence of prejudice on their parts, and such evidence as exists points the other way. Racism is not an inherent part of honoring the Confederacy, for one can honor those who were part of it without approving all that they did. One can reverence one’s ancestors out of instinctual loyalty, simply because they are one’s forebears; and one can at the same time be critical of their behavior and distinguish between those deeds which are good and worthy of emulation, and those which are sinful and ought to be shunned.
Such an attitude of primal acceptance of the person with a critical position toward his deeds is thoroughly Christian. It is a commonplace of our faith that we distinguish between people and their behavior, that we love the sinner and hate the sin. It is on that point in regard to this matter of ‘neo-Confederates’ that one perceives one of the matters in which many common evangelicals have a radically different perspective than the influential set among us.
On this matter the perspective of our famous people is largely that of the influential people in American society at large. That is, the late Confederacy is regarded as a thing so heinous that all positive regard for it ought to be purged from the present. There is a prominent campaign at present to whitewash history of the Confederacy and the Old South, and to engage in damnatio memoriae against those individuals who were in any way involved with them by driving the honor of them from both church and society. In civil society monuments are removed from courthouse grounds, the names of army bases changed, and companies and entertainers drop all reference to the South because of its (now long past) association with slavery. In the church similar things happen: First Presbyterian Columbia, South Carolina removes James Henley Thornwell’s name from its library, the Gospel Coalition publishes articles saying “Why We Must Forget the Lost Cause,” and Mrs. French laments neo-Confederates among us, and in so doing tacitly assumes people will understand that tolerating such neo-Confederates is a moral fault so severe as to justify leaving one’s church on account of it.
The message is clear: slavery was a sin so enormous and corrosive as to taint all who came into contact with it so long as time endures, and to commend their condemnation by people today. It is a sort of social/historical version of the legal concept of attainder by ‘corruption of blood,’ that judgment in which the heirs of a criminal were forever denied their inheritance because of his crimes. Well might we call this contemporary phenomenon ‘social attainder of corruption of civil institution,’ wherein a society that allows a sinful thing thereby transfers all the guilt of it to all its citizens in perpetuity. There are some who have been caught in this movement of historical cleansing who do not go so far as that, but I have read people write as if there were no Christians in the South before the abolition of slavery, some small antislavery sects like Quakers and converted natives and slaves excepted. I have heard people argue that the theoretical approval of slavery ipso facto proves the individuals who did so are hypocrites,[2] and that anyone’s willing participation in a society that allowed it works a corruption by guilt of association that ought to make them persona non grata. Their sole standard for judging the sincerity of past believers is not any scriptural virtue like the presence of faith or good works, but where they stand viz. slavery or other questions of ‘racial justice.’
As suggested by my examples above, there are many of us in the pews in the PCA who think differently than Mrs. French and who take exception to this movement of historical condemnation. We recognize that one can condemn slavery in general, and its attendant abominations like separating families in particular, without thereby wholly condemning those that lived in the Southern society that approved it, and without disapproving all else that they did. I honor my Virginia ancestors of the 1860s because it is a natural, proper human impulse, and because I recognize that I would not exist without them. But in so doing I simultaneously regret their sins and think that losing the war was God’s just punishment on the South for its sins associated with slavery. This approach that recognizes that human sin means all people and societies have glaring faults and does not think in simple black-and-white terms of ‘reject or condemn’ on the basis of a single present litmus test is no doubt offensive to those that want to exult themselves cheaply by hating a class whom it is fashionable to hate. But it is the right approach, and the only one that allows us to actually to study and learn from history rather than merely engaging in a hamartiography that looks to the past only to find something to condemn in the present. And it is the only approach that prevents us being caught up in a spirit of social revolution that seeks to wholly divorce us from the past, the spirit of the French Revolution that says ‘the past was wholly bad, let’s start afresh with Year One.’[3]
There is another respect in which I find her disapproval of ‘neo-Confederates’ rather curious, and that is the cultural and historical disconnect that it betrays. The lady lives in Tennessee, which was a Confederate state, and which currently regards “Robert E. Lee Day,” “Confederate Decoration Day,”  and “Nathan Bedford Forrest Day” as official state “days of special observance” that are to be observed “with appropriate ceremonies expressive of the public sentiment befitting the anniversary of such dates” (Tennessee Code 15-2-101). The PCA itself is a direct descendant of the now-defunct Presbyterian Church in the United States, which first formed as the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America in 1861.
For the lady to express bewilderment that people in a church descended from the Confederate presbyterian church in a former Confederate state would retain some reverence for the Confederacy is curious indeed. It is as if she took up residence in New England and joined a congregationalist church that dated to the 1600s, only to remark one day that she was amazed at how blue-blooded, Yankee, and puritanical the people were there.[4] One feels that the locals might justly ask, ‘Pray tell, madam, what kind of people did you think you would find here?’
But all of this does not have the emotional disappointment that is inflicted when we consider that Mrs. French has publicly argued for more civility in these polarized times in which we live. Her recent book (co-written with Curtis Chang), The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics, is based on a curriculum produced by Chang, Russell Moore, and her husband David that “helps reframe our political identify away from the ‘what’ of political positions and towards the ‘how’ of being centered on Jesus.” I will not generally appraise that effort now, though Aaron Renn has some interesting thoughts on it here (spoiler: the project is bankrolled by leftist infidels).
I do however find it a bit much to swallow when someone argues for civility in some forums and then exposes fellow professing believers to public opprobrium in others—all the more where that argument for civility occurs as part of an alliance with people who wish to fundamentally alter (and thereby destroy) our faith, the unbelieving financiers Renn mentions. By opprobrium I do not mean criticism, but that dismissal with a word that appears in the Deseret Times. She takes it for granted that everyone knows that being ‘neo-Confederate’ is wrong and that such people can be summarily dismissed to a newspaper belonging to the Mormon communion, which communion is, on the view of orthodoxy, heretical. (Which fact Mrs. French acknowledges.)[5]
Being unfamiliar with the particulars, I do not discount that Mrs. French may have been mistreated at her PCA church;[6] if so, shame on those who did so, and they ought to repent. But I do think that casually dismissing such people before heretics[7] is the wrong response, especially where it occurs in an interview in which she is otherwise praised for being gracious to opponents and when she otherwise argues for respect in spite of disagreement. And in all this we see that division of perspective that appears between the influential set and the commoners, and which is so much troubling evangelical churches just now. I happen to agree with Mrs. French on certain points – I long ago sickened at ‘do you support Trump?’ being the litmus test of acceptability by both sides – and I am far from thinking that contemporary affairs can be fully understood in an ‘elites vs. the people’ framework or that either faction is wholly right or wrong. But they are definitely distinct groups with distinct and sometimes clashing perspectives, as is shown here, groups that ae sometimes unable or unwilling to understand each other. And while I understand why the elites disapprove certain trends in contemporary Christendom, I wish they would not respond by moving left into the territory of the inexplicable, the hobnobbing with enemies of righteousness and truth[8] and soliciting money from infidels; especially when this is done while claiming to be the true, unmoving guardians of conservative politics and Christian faith.[9]
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks/Simpsonville (Greenville Co.), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation. 
[1] This chapter recounts how Moses’s brother and sister Aaron and Miriam “spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman” (v. 1), and were subsequently rebuked by God (v. 8), with Miriam also being stricken by leprosy in punishment (vv. 10-15). Cush is the historic term for Ethiopia in scripture, hence they were angry he had married an Ethiopian. I.e., God who punished them for their ethnic prejudice in their day is apt to do likewise with those who hold a similar attitude in our day regarding adoptees of Ethiopians.
[2] Hardly anything new. The songwriter “Stephen Foster enlivened abolitionist meetings by denouncing churches that did not censure slavery unequivocally as ‘combinations of thieves, robbers, adulterers, pirates, and murderers,’” saying “the Methodist Church was ‘more corrupt than any house of ill fame in New York.’” The Mind of the Master Class by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, p. 485
[3] Hence Herman Bavinck speaks of the sin of inconstancy being “manifested in the antihistorical sense—in the perpetual reconstruction of history that tears people from their own history, from tradition, from the inheritance of previous generations. The result is a loss of piety and a severing of the bonds of the past (revolution) in exchange for subjective, self-pleasing egocentricity and individualism” (Reformed Ethics, Vol. I, p. 126). The revolutionary ‘cleanse the past’ spirit is especially a mark of collectivist political parties like socialists and Communists, and so it seems as if this contradicts Bavinck’s talk of it ending in individualism. The answer (if I can anticipate Bavinck’s thought) is that the political/cultural effort to dispense with the past by collectivist parties ends in the individuals affected being deprived of a larger heritage and therefore, nature abhorring a vacuum, turning their interests inward to self-seeking (the section on inconstancy occurs in a larger section on “sins that take pleasure in form” beginning on p. 124). The observations of Dutch historian Groen van Prinsterer (an influence on Bavinck) on the nature of revolutionary ideas in his Unbelief and Revolution are immensely helpful on this point, and anyone wishing to make sense of contemporary trends is recommended to peruse them, as has been argued by others.
[4] Given the current state of New England society, I fear that in such a case this puritanical streak would be rather social than theological in nature, the zeal for certain leftist causes rather than that of Christ.
[5] In her book Ghosted, p. 123
[6] She mentions people writing her church saying she and Mr. French were closet Mormons for supporting Mitt Romney and asking the church to disciple them, though I cannot tell if this was while she was in the PCA. Ibid.
[7] It is noteworthy that one of the supporters of the After Party project is the Trinity Forum, in which David French and Russell Moore serve as fellows, and which has elsewhere presented Mormons as Christians, notably in its report “Christianity, Pluralism, and Public Life in the United States: Insights from Christian Leaders” (p. 52), something it extends to members of the Roman communion and the (alas) unfaithful Episcopal Church as well.
[8] Russell Moore and David French both appear in atheist Rob Reiner’s documentary God and Country.
[9] E.g. at about 2:40 here, where Joe Scarborough claims it was not for the most part Mrs. French who moved, but her critics, a point on which see largely agrees.
As suggested by my examples above, there are many of us in the pews in the PCA who think differently than Mrs. French and who take exception to this movement of historical condemnation. We recognize that one can condemn slavery in general, and its attendant abominations like separating families in particular, without thereby wholly condemning those that lived in the Southern society that approved it, and without disapproving all else that they did.

What is a neo-Confederate, and why is their presence among us a problem? Such were my thoughts on reading Mrs. Nancy French’s statement to the Deseret Times that her family left their Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation because it was “brimming with neo-Confederates,” at least some of whom confronted her at communion. If she means by that (as I have read elsewhere), that people were harassing her for adopting an Ethiopian, then I say ‘shame on you’ to such people; and well might they ponder Numbers 12[1] and fear lest God’s wrath burn similarly against them.
But then if that is what is meant, where is the neo-Confederate angle? Why not simply say ‘racist?’ Hateful prejudice is by no means limited to neo-Confederates (whomever they are), and without an elaboration on who they are it is not clear why it should be regarded as an inherent trait of them at all, much less the essential one. (Then too, I should like to hear the perspective of the alleged ‘neo-Confederates,’ for fairness’ sake, and find myself very doubtful that a church would allow its members to cause a racist scene during communion without promptly imposing strict discipline.)
The Sunday after I read her remarks I worshipped at a PCA church with a Confederate flag above a gravestone in its churchyard, a church which is also working to establish closer relations with a nearby black church and which supports missions to the Cherokee. I have also worshipped at a church with parishioners who had the Confederate flag as their front license tag, and which has supported church plants among the local Latin population, as well as the first Indian-American plant in Fairfax Co., Virginia, and which has had interns from such places as Taiwan, China, and Brazil. At some points all of its interns have been foreigners or of non-European descent, and there are people there with adopted Ethiopian kids. I have had some interesting conversation about some of the writing of R. L. Dabney (a former Confederate officer) with one of the elders, and I know a man there who has portraits of the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on his walls, and with whom the phrase “unreconstructed Southerner” is the highest praise; yet when I watched the film Hidden Figures with him, he was appalled at the mistreatment the main characters received on account of racial hatred.
I’ll hazard that such people would qualify as ‘neo-Confederate’ to people like Mrs. French, if only because they retain reverence for their forebears who lived and fought in the Confederacy, and yet I know of no evidence of prejudice on their parts, and such evidence as exists points the other way. Racism is not an inherent part of honoring the Confederacy, for one can honor those who were part of it without approving all that they did. One can reverence one’s ancestors out of instinctual loyalty, simply because they are one’s forebears; and one can at the same time be critical of their behavior and distinguish between those deeds which are good and worthy of emulation, and those which are sinful and ought to be shunned.
Such an attitude of primal acceptance of the person with a critical position toward his deeds is thoroughly Christian. It is a commonplace of our faith that we distinguish between people and their behavior, that we love the sinner and hate the sin. It is on that point in regard to this matter of ‘neo-Confederates’ that one perceives one of the matters in which many common evangelicals have a radically different perspective than the influential set among us.
On this matter the perspective of our famous people is largely that of the influential people in American society at large. That is, the late Confederacy is regarded as a thing so heinous that all positive regard for it ought to be purged from the present. There is a prominent campaign at present to whitewash history of the Confederacy and the Old South, and to engage in damnatio memoriae against those individuals who were in any way involved with them by driving the honor of them from both church and society. In civil society monuments are removed from courthouse grounds, the names of army bases changed, and companies and entertainers drop all reference to the South because of its (now long past) association with slavery. In the church similar things happen: First Presbyterian Columbia, South Carolina removes James Henley Thornwell’s name from its library, the Gospel Coalition publishes articles saying “Why We Must Forget the Lost Cause,” and Mrs. French laments neo-Confederates among us, and in so doing tacitly assumes people will understand that tolerating such neo-Confederates is a moral fault so severe as to justify leaving one’s church on account of it.
The message is clear: slavery was a sin so enormous and corrosive as to taint all who came into contact with it so long as time endures, and to commend their condemnation by people today. It is a sort of social/historical version of the legal concept of attainder by ‘corruption of blood,’ that judgment in which the heirs of a criminal were forever denied their inheritance because of his crimes. Well might we call this contemporary phenomenon ‘social attainder of corruption of civil institution,’ wherein a society that allows a sinful thing thereby transfers all the guilt of it to all its citizens in perpetuity. There are some who have been caught in this movement of historical cleansing who do not go so far as that, but I have read people write as if there were no Christians in the South before the abolition of slavery, some small antislavery sects like Quakers and converted natives and slaves excepted. I have heard people argue that the theoretical approval of slavery ipso facto proves the individuals who did so are hypocrites,[2] and that anyone’s willing participation in a society that allowed it works a corruption by guilt of association that ought to make them persona non grata. Their sole standard for judging the sincerity of past believers is not any scriptural virtue like the presence of faith or good works, but where they stand viz. slavery or other questions of ‘racial justice.’
As suggested by my examples above, there are many of us in the pews in the PCA who think differently than Mrs. French and who take exception to this movement of historical condemnation. We recognize that one can condemn slavery in general, and its attendant abominations like separating families in particular, without thereby wholly condemning those that lived in the Southern society that approved it, and without disapproving all else that they did. I honor my Virginia ancestors of the 1860s because it is a natural, proper human impulse, and because I recognize that I would not exist without them. But in so doing I simultaneously regret their sins and think that losing the war was God’s just punishment on the South for its sins associated with slavery. This approach that recognizes that human sin means all people and societies have glaring faults and does not think in simple black-and-white terms of ‘reject or condemn’ on the basis of a single present litmus test is no doubt offensive to those that want to exult themselves cheaply by hating a class whom it is fashionable to hate. But it is the right approach, and the only one that allows us to actually to study and learn from history rather than merely engaging in a hamartiography that looks to the past only to find something to condemn in the present. And it is the only approach that prevents us being caught up in a spirit of social revolution that seeks to wholly divorce us from the past, the spirit of the French Revolution that says ‘the past was wholly bad, let’s start afresh with Year One.’[3]
There is another respect in which I find her disapproval of ‘neo-Confederates’ rather curious, and that is the cultural and historical disconnect that it betrays. The lady lives in Tennessee, which was a Confederate state, and which currently regards “Robert E. Lee Day,” “Confederate Decoration Day,”  and “Nathan Bedford Forrest Day” as official state “days of special observance” that are to be observed “with appropriate ceremonies expressive of the public sentiment befitting the anniversary of such dates” (Tennessee Code 15-2-101). The PCA itself is a direct descendant of the now-defunct Presbyterian Church in the United States, which first formed as the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America in 1861.
For the lady to express bewilderment that people in a church descended from the Confederate presbyterian church in a former Confederate state would retain some reverence for the Confederacy is curious indeed. It is as if she took up residence in New England and joined a congregationalist church that dated to the 1600s, only to remark one day that she was amazed at how blue-blooded, Yankee, and puritanical the people were there.[4] One feels that the locals might justly ask, ‘Pray tell, madam, what kind of people did you think you would find here?’
But all of this does not have the emotional disappointment that is inflicted when we consider that Mrs. French has publicly argued for more civility in these polarized times in which we live. Her recent book (co-written with Curtis Chang), The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics, is based on a curriculum produced by Chang, Russell Moore, and her husband David that “helps reframe our political identify away from the ‘what’ of political positions and towards the ‘how’ of being centered on Jesus.” I will not generally appraise that effort now, though Aaron Renn has some interesting thoughts on it here (spoiler: the project is bankrolled by leftist infidels).
I do however find it a bit much to swallow when someone argues for civility in some forums and then exposes fellow professing believers to public opprobrium in others—all the more where that argument for civility occurs as part of an alliance with people who wish to fundamentally alter (and thereby destroy) our faith, the unbelieving financiers Renn mentions. By opprobrium I do not mean criticism, but that dismissal with a word that appears in the Deseret Times. She takes it for granted that everyone knows that being ‘neo-Confederate’ is wrong and that such people can be summarily dismissed to a newspaper belonging to the Mormon communion, which communion is, on the view of orthodoxy, heretical. (Which fact Mrs. French acknowledges.)[5]
Being unfamiliar with the particulars, I do not discount that Mrs. French may have been mistreated at her PCA church;[6] if so, shame on those who did so, and they ought to repent. But I do think that casually dismissing such people before heretics[7] is the wrong response, especially where it occurs in an interview in which she is otherwise praised for being gracious to opponents and when she otherwise argues for respect in spite of disagreement. And in all this we see that division of perspective that appears between the influential set and the commoners, and which is so much troubling evangelical churches just now. I happen to agree with Mrs. French on certain points – I long ago sickened at ‘do you support Trump?’ being the litmus test of acceptability by both sides – and I am far from thinking that contemporary affairs can be fully understood in an ‘elites vs. the people’ framework or that either faction is wholly right or wrong. But they are definitely distinct groups with distinct and sometimes clashing perspectives, as is shown here, groups that ae sometimes unable or unwilling to understand each other. And while I understand why the elites disapprove certain trends in contemporary Christendom, I wish they would not respond by moving left into the territory of the inexplicable, the hobnobbing with enemies of righteousness and truth[8] and soliciting money from infidels; especially when this is done while claiming to be the true, unmoving guardians of conservative politics and Christian faith.[9]
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks/Simpsonville (Greenville Co.), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation. 

[1] This chapter recounts how Moses’s brother and sister Aaron and Miriam “spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman” (v. 1), and were subsequently rebuked by God (v. 8), with Miriam also being stricken by leprosy in punishment (vv. 10-15). Cush is the historic term for Ethiopia in scripture, hence they were angry he had married an Ethiopian. I.e., God who punished them for their ethnic prejudice in their day is apt to do likewise with those who hold a similar attitude in our day regarding adoptees of Ethiopians.
[2] Hardly anything new. The songwriter “Stephen Foster enlivened abolitionist meetings by denouncing churches that did not censure slavery unequivocally as ‘combinations of thieves, robbers, adulterers, pirates, and murderers,’” saying “the Methodist Church was ‘more corrupt than any house of ill fame in New York.’” The Mind of the Master Class by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, p. 485
[3] Hence Herman Bavinck speaks of the sin of inconstancy being “manifested in the antihistorical sense—in the perpetual reconstruction of history that tears people from their own history, from tradition, from the inheritance of previous generations. The result is a loss of piety and a severing of the bonds of the past (revolution) in exchange for subjective, self-pleasing egocentricity and individualism” (Reformed Ethics, Vol. I, p. 126). The revolutionary ‘cleanse the past’ spirit is especially a mark of collectivist political parties like socialists and Communists, and so it seems as if this contradicts Bavinck’s talk of it ending in individualism. The answer (if I can anticipate Bavinck’s thought) is that the political/cultural effort to dispense with the past by collectivist parties ends in the individuals affected being deprived of a larger heritage and therefore, nature abhorring a vacuum, turning their interests inward to self-seeking (the section on inconstancy occurs in a larger section on “sins that take pleasure in form” beginning on p. 124). The observations of Dutch historian Groen van Prinsterer (an influence on Bavinck) on the nature of revolutionary ideas in his Unbelief and Revolution are immensely helpful on this point, and anyone wishing to make sense of contemporary trends is recommended to peruse them, as has been argued by others.
[4] Given the current state of New England society, I fear that in such a case this puritanical streak would be rather social than theological in nature, the zeal for certain leftist causes rather than that of Christ.
[5] In her book Ghosted, p. 123
[6] She mentions people writing her church saying she and Mr. French were closet Mormons for supporting Mitt Romney and asking the church to disciple them, though I cannot tell if this was while she was in the PCA. Ibid.
[7] It is noteworthy that one of the supporters of the After Party project is the Trinity Forum, in which David French and Russell Moore serve as fellows, and which has elsewhere presented Mormons as Christians, notably in its report “Christianity, Pluralism, and Public Life in the United States: Insights from Christian Leaders” (p. 52), something it extends to members of the Roman communion and the (alas) unfaithful Episcopal Church as well.
[8] Russell Moore and David French both appear in atheist Rob Reiner’s documentary God and Country.
[9] E.g. at about 2:40 here, where Joe Scarborough claims it was not for the most part Mrs. French who moved, but her critics, a point on which see largely agrees.
Related Posts:

We do not live in a perfect world. Every household will make decisions based on their life circumstances, and Christians should avoid being overly prescriptive about matters that are truly secondary. God is honored when Christians prayerfully consider how to best pursue their God given priorities. Even though motherhood is diminished in the world, the church can uphold its glory and dignity.

Motherhood is Life
I recently rewatched “Saving Private Ryan” for what must have been the 10th time. Saving Private Ryan tells the story of a young man whose three brothers were killed in combat in WWII. Private Ryan was the only brother to survive D Day. When military officials realized this, they dispatched a special regiment of eight soldiers to track him down, somewhere in France, to retrieve him and bring him home.
Saving Private Ryan is a masculine movie. It’s all about brotherhood, war, duty, honor. But when I watched the movie this time, however, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before—mothers. Many of these young men, who were fighting for their lives on another continent, were thinking about their mothers back home. In a particularly disturbing scene, a soldier lies on a beach in Normandy, clutching his bloody stomach that had been blown open, crying out “mama!” while he died.
The mission to save Private Ryan was deemed urgent because the military command wanted to spare his mother the overwhelming grief of losing her last remaining son. One scene depicts the awful moment just before she learned the news that she’d lost her other three sons. She is standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes as she notices a military vehicle approach. A man dressed in a military uniform exits the front passenger side of the vehicle, turns toward the back door of the car and opens it. A chaplain steps out. She knew immediately. She falls to her knees in grief, knowing that she’d lost one of her sons. Surely her mind is racing with questions. “Which son? How did he die?” But the audience knows the situation is much worse. She’d lost three of her sons in one day, and the fourth was still missing.
Scenes like this show the power of motherhood. When strong, young men in war are in the throes of death, their hearts are naturally drawn to the safety, comfort, and love of home. They long for the woman who gave them life. Mothers embody everything they hope for in dangerous times. War is death. Motherhood is life.
The World’s View of Motherhood
Many young women feel the need to suppress their maternal instincts because they’ve been culturally conditioned to devalue motherhood. They’ve grown up watching shows and hearing stories celebrating how “girls can do anything boys can do.” A friend once noticed a poster in a school highlighting girl’s potential in a series of pictures associated with different careers. One was a doctor, another was a business executive, a third was an astronaut. Of all these images inspiring young girls about what they could become in life, none of them depicted mothers.
During a small group discussion with some Christian friends, one young woman sheepishly admitted that what she most wanted out of life was to be a wife and a mother. She was hesitant to acknowledge this, because she felt that this was somehow aiming below her potential, wasting her gifts, and settling for second best. All her life, she’d heard about how exciting a career can be, but she’d heard relatively little celebrating the fact that she can create and nurture new life. In pop culture, pregnancy is depicted as a hurdle to overcome. But the testimony of scripture is that children are a blessing and motherhood is a glorious vocation (Ps 127:3-5). This is not to say that women should not get an education or have a job. For our purposes here, it’s simply a matter of priority. Motherhood is highly valued in Scripture but devalued in modern culture.
Motherhood has never been an easy calling ever since it came under the curse of sin (Gen 3:16). Nevertheless, throughout history, societies have always valued motherhood as a social good to preserve and nurture civilization. As the industrial revolution radically changed the household, some feminist thinkers began arguing that the traditional household was outdated, oppressive to women, and needed to be changed. It was holding women back, enslaving them to their husbands and children. But women could be liberated from this bondage by seeking careers outside the home the way men did. They assumed that women could be more free, more fulfilled, and more valued in the marketplace than in the home.
Even though most Christian women would quickly recognize the error of this thinking, the basic assumptions and desires of feminism can nevertheless seep into our unconscious minds, training us to devalue the vocation of motherhood. Women are being subtly conditioned to believe that the marketplace is immanently desirable—where true happiness and fulfillment can be found. Motherhood is a secondary endeavor if a woman chooses to succumb to her own biology. Homemaking should rarely be the top vocational choice, unless she’s going for a trendy, boutique, trad wife flex. This thinking is ungodly. Nevertheless, the feminine nature has a way of asserting itself. It cannot be so easily denied. Women are naturally and instinctively inclined to make homes.
The Feminine Design
I have pastored many women through infertility struggles and have personally seen how devastating this trial can be. For these women, their missing motherhood can feel like a personal failure. Why is missing motherhood such an emotional weight for so many women? Because it’s their design. Motherhood is the goal (or telos) of the feminine design. Women are physiologically oriented towards it. A woman’s menstrual cycle is a monthly reminder that her womb was designed to bear life, and her breasts were designed to feed and nurture life. This astoundingly powerful ability to create life should be affirmed and celebrated, not minimized or dismissed.
The Scriptures present motherhood as one of the greatest blessings a woman could receive. Similarly, a barren womb was one of the greatest trials she could endure. Womanhood cannot be properly understood apart from her potential for motherhood. It is the unique design of her body. When God created Eve, he was not merely solving a loneliness problem, but a reproduction problem. She was God’s answer to man’s inability to fill the earth on his own. This is why Adam named her “Eve, because she was the mother of all living” (Gen 3:20). God gave him much more than a wife. He gave him a potential mother.
A common word Scripture uses to describe motherhood is “fruitfulness” (Gen 1:28). This word appears in the Bible over 200 times, covering a range of interrelated meanings from gardening to sexuality. Fruitfulness is multiplication. Just as the Garden of Eden was meant to grow, expand, and multiply to cover the earth, Eve was meant to be fruitful and grow, like a garden. Women are uniquely equipped to multiply and amplify things. A woman’s body can take a single sperm from a man and knit together a new human being from it. Just as her name suggests, Eve truly did become the mother of all living, giving birth to the whole human race. This feminine ability goes beyond physical childbearing. Femininity represents the ability to expand what is received. As author Rebekah Merkle put it, “When God gave Eve to Adam, he was handing Adam an amplifier… Adam is the single acorn sitting on the driveway which, no matter how hard he tries, remains an acorn. Eve is the fertile soil which takes all the potential that resides in that acorn and turns it into a tree, which produces millions more acorns and millions more trees.”
The Vocation of Motherhood
Women are natural homemakers. Marriage is all about making a home, and wives will naturally devote themselves to it. The question is not whether she’ll do it, but to what degree she’ll prioritize it. Every household will need its cabinets stocked with groceries, meals prepared, and laundry washed. Beyond this, the children will need to be fed, nurtured, clothed, disciplined, and educated. Typically, the mother takes the lead in handling these chores. She may do them all herself, or she may outsource some or all of them to others. For example, a well-trained and qualified nanny can be hired to come into the home and perform all these tasks. A nanny may be a better cook, better housekeeper, and better teacher of the kids. This being the case, why not hire them to do as much as possible? Some families see this as the wisest option, since, after all, the nanny is the professional. She’s the expert. But homes need more than domestic expertise; they need a mother’s presence.
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In recent theological scholarship there is a move to combine typology and allegory under the heading of figural reading.[1] Many Theological Interpretation of Scripture (TIS) advocates view typology and allegory as lying on a continuum, or posit that both belong to the same family of reading strategies. Much of this is driven by the push for theological retrieval, with TIS proponents arguing that distinguishing typology and allegory in the early church writings is impossible. Further, they argue that the patristic writers rightly applied literal and spiritual senses because the biblical texts carry deeper meanings that point beyond itself.

In some quarters of past evangelical scholarship, typology and allegory were distinguished in a simplistic or reductionistic manner. When one says that typology involves history and thus is acceptable while allegory is non-historical and to be rejected, this is an overly simplified attempt of distinguishing them. Further, while some evangelical scholars have appealed to church history to categorize typology as the approach of the Antiochene school (a notable figure being John Chrysostom) and allegory as the method of the Alexandrian school (influenced by Origen) in the fourth century, but this has been shown to be misguided.[2] Nevertheless, careful Bible readers must distinguish typology and allegory in order to avoid confusion and interpretative mistakes. Another critically important distinction is to separate biblical typology and allegory from typological or allegorical interpretation. This article seeks to address both issues in what follows.

Typology Is Not Allegory

Allegory and typology have literary characteristics that differ in the Bible. Just as there are many figures of speech and nonliteral language—metaphors, hyperboles, synecdoche, and metonymy—so there are also parables, symbols, analogies, prophecies, allegories, and typologies in Scripture as well. At a most basic level, an allegory is “to mean something other than what one says.”[3] Allegory as a literary form is an extended metaphor or a trope that illustrates a story or conveys a truth by personifying abstract concepts.[4] In an allegory, meaning is extended in terms of parallels or analogies between two or more ideas. A common example of an allegory is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. But allegory is also found in Scripture; examples include Ezekiel 17:1–10, Ecclesiastes 12:3–7, Psalm 80:8–15, John 10:1–16, Ephesians 6:1–11, and arguably Matthew 22:1–14. In each of these passages there are literary features of extended metaphors or figures that represent or symbolize certain truths or concepts. In sum, an allegory describes a larger narrative episode that has features laden with symbols.

On the other hand, typology in Scripture is a special and unique phenomenon of special revelation. Biblical types are particular Old Testament persons, events, actions, and institutions that God has providentially intended and invested to correspond to, foreshadow, and prefigure escalated and intensified New Testament realities (antitypes).[5] There are many examples of types, such as Adam, the flood, the exodus, Melchizedek, the sacrificial system, the temple, and so on. Allegory features an episode with many elements of metaphor and imagery to convey a truth or idea. However, typological patterns in Scripture are more discrete as real phenomena—persons and events—correspond and anticipate future fulfillment in similar, yet different persons and events—primarily Jesus Christ and the redemption he accomplishes. Typology generally involves a heavenly prototype or archetype which corresponds to an Old Testament copy or shadow (the type), which in turn points to and is fulfilled in the New Testament antitype.