Good Guys, Bad Guys, and a Missing Category
Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
The point of having confessions is to establish boundaries of what is acceptable teaching and preaching within a communion…the Standards are the Reformed theological framework within which the denomination and her ministers are to carry their service.
The largest NAPARC denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is in the throes of an identity crisis. Founded by Southern Presbyterians and emerging out of the old PCUS (the Southern version of the Presbyterian mainline) it has always been more more broadly evangelical than the other members of NAPARC. It became even more broadly evangelical when it merged with the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod (RPCES). It is in crisis just now because in part because of the relatively decentralized character of the PCA and a relatively lax approach to confessional subscription, which has developed over the last twenty years. In that time an influential and organized progressive movement has developed in the PCA. It has allowed them to adapt and adopt pragmatic church-growth principles, to take significant exceptions to confessional standards, turn a blind eye to the Federal Vision movement in the church courts, create functionally female deacons and elders, and to promote the so-called Side-B approach to homosexuality. When the progressive or perhaps better, latitudinarian wing of the PCA is challenged on these things the response has been consistent. See the PCA resource page below for the evidence. The rhetoric is remarkably consistent. It is, in effect, “when I joined the PCA it was predominantly influenced (insert list of good guys and heroes) but now the PCA is threatened by (anonymous) fundamentalists. We must resist this movement and return to the good old days.” David Cassidy’s essay of September 21, 2021 is the latest example in this genre.
The Contested History of the PCA
One of the difficulties in analyzing the PCA is that there is no agreed historical narrative. The wing of the PCA represented by Cassidy’s essay tells one story about the identity of the PCA and other wings have their own narratives.
The sociological reality of the PCA is that it is probably actually multiple denominations formally connected by presbyteries and general assembly but actually divided from one another by their varying approaches to the Westminster Standards, to worship, and to polity at the congregational level. The PCA in urban cities (e.g., New York and St Louis) is starkly different from the PCA in Greenville, SC and Jackson, MS.
In a confessional Presbyterian denomination, the churches would be united around the theology, piety, and practice confessed in an envisioned by the Westminster Standards. As much as I have been able to tell, the PCA has probably never been a confessional Presbyterian denomination thus defined. Parts of the PCA have always been socially and theologically conservative. It is probably the case that the PCA was more socially and theologically conservative and cohesive at its founding but the joining with and receiving of the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod moved the PCA in a more broadly evangelical direction theologically and practically. The adoption of “Good Faith Subscription” around the turn of the century was another watershed moment further pushing the PCA away from confessional Presbyterianism. There are as many ways to subscribe the Standards in the PCA as there are presbyteries. In some presbyteries. The adoption of the strategic plan (2010) was another watershed moment. The vote at General Assembly (2007) against the Federal Vision has turned out to be a largely symbolic but hollow victory. In practice, at presbytery, the PCA has been quite reluctant to discipline actual living and breathing Federal Visionists.
Since the adoption of the Strategic Plan, those who favor a more progressive and latitudinarian presbyterianism have carried the day in the PCA. In that light the Sturm und Drang communicated in the the laments by the reigning latitudinarians is puzzling. They have largely dominated the more conservative elements in the PCA. The confessionalist wing is a minority party in the PCA with some outstanding voices but probably relatively little actual influence.
The Missing Category
The bête noir of the latitudinarian party are the alleged “fundamentalists.” This passage in Cassidy’s essay is striking:
Looking back, men like Kennedy Smartt, Frank Barker, Francis Schaeffer, James Kennedy, David Nicholas, Cortez Cooper, RC Sproul, Steve Brown, and many others were not only deeply Reformed but also broadly evangelical, and resistant to fundamentalist impulses. They showed the way ahead on many critical issues while embracing authentic confessional integrity.
These are his good guys, those of the “majority…who favored a Good Faith approach [to confessional subscription]” as opposed the fundamentalists, whom he seems to regard as equivalent to those who favor “a more strict approach to the Confession…”. Francis Schaeffer certainly had deep roots in American fundamentalism. His early career was arguably fundamentalist as was his later career, when he returned to form to became something of a right-wing culture warrior. D. James Kennedy was hardly a model of progressive tolerance. In the same building that housed the seminary was a floor dedicated to taking back America for Christ. Coming out of the old PCUS, Kennedy was perhaps a little latitudinarian doctrinally but he did not agree with the National Partnership ethos regarding the Federal Vision, which he attacked from the pulpit quite forcefully. R. C. Sproul was hardly a doctrinal latitudinarian. Again, during the General Assembly of 2007, when the latitudinarians were calling for toleration of the Federal Vision, Sproul stood up and called the denomination to reject the FV categorically. So, this list would not seem to serve Cassidy’s argument very well.
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Cruelty Cloaked in Compassion
It is cruel to lock women behind bars with violent rapists. It is cruel to force teenage girls to change in front of young men in their locker rooms. It is cruel to force traumatized rape victims to sleep in dorms with men. And it is cruel to demand that women accept their own demotion and dehumanization, reduced to crude terminology to avoid offending the cross-dressers in charge. You can put a man in a dress, and he is still a man. And you can dress up cruelty in a cloak of compassion—but it is still cruelty, and we should say so.
A November 3 post on X (formerly Twitter) from J.K. Rowling caught my eye recently. It was her comment on the decision of an Australian court to mandate that the ‘preferred pronouns’ of people identifying as transgender be used as a “matter of respect” to ensure “public confidence in the proper administration of justice.” As Rowling noted: “Asking a woman to refer to her male rapist or violent assaulter as ‘she’ in court is a form of state-sanctioned abuse. Female victims of male violence are further traumatised by being forced to speak a lie.” Indeed, forcing a woman to refer to the man who abused and raped her as ‘she’ seems a particularly grotesque form of gaslighting.
Rowling’s comment gets to the heart of something that is not commented on often enough: the manifest cruelty of the transgender movement. I’m not referring here to the mobs of trans-identified men that so often threaten violence towards women who dare to speak out—or, as in the case of Posie Parker’s visit to New Zealand earlier this year, actually perpetrate it. Nor am I speaking of the torrent of vile threats of rape that women like Rowling face from these vicious men in dresses. I mean the cruelty of the practices and policies imposed by those in power on women and girls in the name of the transgender movement, which have swept virtually every Western country in under a decade.
“Sad, Powerless, and Confused”
Many manifestations of this cultural shift have a sinister, totalitarian air about them. Scenes of men like Dylan Mulvaney winning female awards—Virgin Atlantic’s “Woman of the Year” is the latest—while being applauded wildly by men and women in the audience remind me of the crowds forced to give minutes-long standing ovations to dictators for fear of being recognized as dissidents. The cultural overlords are watching, and you’d better think this is fair and good and a bold step forward for ‘transwomen’ if you know what’s good for you. Mulvaney isn’t a one-off example, either—as of March, nine men have won ‘Women of the Year’ awards.
Then there are the high school males winning prizes like Homecoming ‘Queen,’ once reserved for those Walker Percy memorably described as “football girls in the fall with faces like flowers.” Now we are treated to photographs of pretty girls clustered around a jut-jawed gangly young man in long hair and a dress—it seems sadistic, somehow. The girls must smile; must affirm that this young man—who is so obviously a man—is a pretty girl, prettier than they are, a flower among flowers. The press and the LGBT movement and the idiots who chose him, of course, are wild with celebration—and there is more than a little warning in their cheers. Say he’s beautiful. Say it like you mean it. If you don’t, we’ll make you a national news story.
Of course, that only happens after the girls have been forced to share changing rooms and bathrooms with these young men. Girls have risked urinary tract infections rather than use the bathroom with boys. Girls have pled with adults to keep the boys out of their changing rooms, but even their tears do not shake the idealogues in charge.
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C. S. Lewis on Politics
With history repeating itself today with the rise of the collectivist state over against the individual (all in the name of keeping us safe), the wisdom and insights of Lewis—and others—are needed now more than ever. To repeat, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
When one thinks about the incomparable C. S. Lewis one normally thinks about the great Christian apologist that he was, or the author of famous children’s books, or the celebrated professor of English literature. One does not usually think of him as one who spoke or wrote much about political matters.
But he did. Scattered throughout his writings are various discussions about political matters, democracy, freedom, equality, law and justice, tyranny and the like. From talks he had given, or essays he had written, political matters quite often appear in the Lewis corpus.
And they are fully relevant for the times we now live in, especially as we see Statism on the rise, and the suppression of individual liberties. Here then are just a few of his writings on politics to whet your appetite for more. I urge you to try to read the whole context of each quote.
In a 1943 piece for the Spectator titled “Equality” (republished in Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis), he says this:I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people—all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.
But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. And that is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values: offers food to some need which we have starved.
In his 1945 essay “Membership” (found for example in Transposition and Other Addresses) he made similar points, including:I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.
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Middle Schoolers are Now Using AI to Create ‘Deepfake’ Pornography of Their Classmates
The pornography crisis is being exacerbated further by AI, once again highlighting the unfortunate truth of a joke in tech circles: first we create new technology, then we figure out how to watch porn on it. The porn industry has ruined an untold number of lives. AI porn is taking that to the next level. We should be prepared for it.
A recent news story out of Alabama should be getting far more attention than it is, because it is a glimpse into the future. Middle school students are using artificial intelligence (AI) to create pornographic images of their female classmates:
A group of mothers in Demopolis say their daughters’ pictures were used with artificial intelligence to create pornographic images of their daughters. Tiffany Cannon, Elizabeth Smith, Holston Drinkard, and Heidi Nettles said they all learned on Dec. 4 that two of their daughters’ male classmates created and shared explicit photos of their daughters. Smith said since last Monday, it has been a rollercoaster of emotions.
‘They’re scared, they’re angry, they’re embarrassed. They really feel like why did this happen to them,’ said Smith. The group of mothers said there is an active investigation with Demopolis Police. However, they wish for the school district to take action. They believe this is an instance of cyberbullying and there are state laws and policies to protect their girls.
‘We have laws in place through the Safe School’s law and the Student Bullying Prevention Act, which says that cyberbullying will not be tolerated either on or off campus,’ said Smith. ‘It takes a lot for these girls to come forward, and they did. They need to be supported for that. Not just from their parents, but from their school and their community,’ said Nettles.
The school hasn’t given many details yet, with the Demopolis City Schools Superintendent Tony Willis saying in a statement that there is little they can do: “The school can only address things that happen at school events, school campus on school time. Outside of this, it becomes a parent and police matter. We sympathize with parents and never want wrongful actions to go without consequences –”
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