Members of the National Partnership: plainly speaking, you shot yourselves in the foot. Your secrecy aroused all kinds of paranoid speculation. You were authors of your own worst critiques. Going forward, open communication will serve you well in defending unfair characterizations of yourselves. I do not believe the National Partnership as an organization needs to cease to exist; it merely needs to be public and honest about what it is doing. My immediate maternal instinct may be to knock some heads together, but I do not believe you all to be vicious. Please pursue reconciliation with your brethren humbly and with contrition.

I think while I clean. I know that most normal people come up with good ideas in the shower, or mentally process through problems with a strong cup of coffee or after a good run. Alternatively, I find I do my best deep thinking while cleaning grout or scrubbing baseboards, which means that this past week I have deep-cleaned window sills, wiped down walls, vacuumed behind washing machines, and inordinately terrified my dog with the steam mop. What has transpired over the last couple of weeks in my denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, has weighed down my spirit and occupied my scarce mental bandwidth. Why would elders in the church purposefully deceive one another? If there was no wrong-doing, why was there such secrecy? How did anyone think this was a good idea? Who leaked the information? Was it ethical to do so? Who, if anyone, is in the right? How am I supposed to submit to leadership which seems to have no moral compass? My heart was heavy as I pondered this convoluted mess. As a result, my house is now immaculate, my head hurts, and my dog has been hiding under the end table for three hours.
The recent e-mail dump containing nine years’ worth of confidential National Partnership business has been dubbed #PresbyLeaks, which hilariously sounds like a terrible geriatric condition. A very well-organized clandestine political wing of our denomination has been exposed for being exactly what it is, despite many of us having been assured time and time again that the National Partnership was merely an exclusive fellowship organization akin to a type of pastors’ support group. I have seen many men betrayed, slandered, lied to, and lash out in anger on both sides this week and last. The situation is a colossal dumpster fire. I certainly am not shocked, but I am disappointed and a bit confused. The same question keeps repeating in my head: “Brothers, are we not Presbyterian?”
Earlier this year, James Kessler wrote an article entitled, “A PCA Worth Having.” Mr. Kessler opened his argument by stating,
“As the founder of the National Partnership, I’ve been careful to avoid the sense that I was creating a tribe in the PCA.”
I wonder, did it start out rather innocuously? Was it a group of friends who got together to enjoy their own comradery over a drink, who attracted others until the group grew past the confines of a room? Conversation moved to online groups where excitement brimmed, plans were made, emails were launched, and the National Partnership was formed. More were added to their number, and slots on various committees were filled to the extent that they could refer to whole presbyteries as NP presbyteries.
But something started happening. Amidst the calls to action to steer the ship, Kessler started warning against playing two-party politics, keeping one’s tone gracious, and spending too much time on empty rhetoric battles at the mic. There were some exceedingly pastoral warnings given against characterizations of the other side, and Kessler tried to gently discourage the proclivity to enter the black hole that is the endless back and forth of blog posts, Facebook comment sections, or Assembly floor speech duels. And yet, something of a tribe mentality had already set in. Men frustrated with their more conservative brethren started referring to the other side as “the fundamentalists” and “the unhealthy wing of the denomination.” A few choice examples show the level of partisanship that had been formed:
“The PCA gets plenty of things wrong, but I’m increasingly convinced that if there’s a group most capable of getting it right, it’s this group.“
“Riding the wave of culture-war, fear has created a strong voting block that has not only stilted our voice as an Assembly but helped to repopulate some of our committees, like the SJC, with less healthy expressions of our denominational body.”
“The last four years the GRN has worked, in my opinion, to amplify the volume not of the most vulnerable in our society but the most vocal anxieties in our denomination.“
 “They will take every inch we give them and then keep coming at us and trying to push us out. Our good will has been used against us for years. This will not stop now. They have hammered us three years in a row, all while we try to play nice and meet in the middle.”
Even David Cassidy, while publicly responding to the National Partnership email leak, lumped a large majority of our denomination into a group he labeled, “that other side” – of whom he was deeply suspicious and assigned sinful motives rather freely:
“My colleague and friend who coordinated this email list of other friends was wounded by this betrayal – and make no mistake about it, a betrayal is exactly what took place. It was sinful. It was also unethical. It’s also, given what I’ve come to know about some of the men who are part of that ‘other side’, hardly unexpected.”
Ouch.
So how did we get here? The short answer is simple: Presbyterians rarely like to act like Presbyterians. But the fact that we are Presbyterians generally means that we prefer long answers, so let’s get to it, shall we?
The first item which desperately needs to be addressed is the ethical nightmare of the entire situation. This is where I will likely have the charming experience of making all parties equally enraged. All emails were subject to a confidentiality agreement. One could quibble about the lack of legal efficacy if the receiving parties had not signed a non-disclosure agreement, but we are speaking about pastors here, and ethics should not have to be litigated to exist.
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When Genesis 5 traces the line from Adam to ­Noah, the refrain “and he died” is a reminder of the curse of death—but that each man had a son is a reminder of the promise that comes through birth (Gen. 3:15). The God who has put eternity into our hearts (­Eccl. 3:11) also means to put children into the womb (Mal. 2:15). When we grasp one, we will grasp the other.

The most significant thing happening in the world may very well be a thing that is not happening: Men and women are not having children. The biblical logic has been reversed, and the barren womb has said “Enough!” (Prov. 30:16). The paradigmatic affliction of the Old Testament is now the great desire of nations. If ­Rachel wanted children more than life itself (Gen. 30:1), our generation seems to have concluded that nothing gets in the way of life more than children.
True, human beings are reproducing—but in most countries, not fast enough to replace themselves. Measuring total fertility rate (TFR) is not an exact science, so the numbers vary from source to source, but the trends are undeniable. Outside of Africa, which is home to forty-one of the fifty most fertile nations, the planet faces a bleak demographic future. Many major European nations—such as Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and Spain—have a TFR of 1.50 births per woman or lower, disastrously below the replacement rate of 2.1. Italy’s future is especially grim, as that country has one of the lowest TFRs in the world, just 1.22. Virtually every country in Europe—including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and Denmark—has a TFR below 1.8. Only France, with a TFR of 2.03, comes close to the replacement rate. Decline is on its way. The Russian population is already contracting. Germany’s population is on pace to shrink from 83 million to around 70 million over the next thirty years. If trends do not reverse, Europe’s population will plummet from 750 million today to less than 500 million by the end of the century.
The numbers for East Asia are even worse. Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan each have a TFR around 1.0; South Korea’s is 0.81. These countries make aging and shrinking Japan, with its TFR of 1.37, look almost vibrant. And whatever military and economic power resides in China, increasingly children do not. Despite the replacement of the notorious one-child policy by a two-child policy in 2016 and then a three-child policy in 2021, China’s birthrate has continued to tumble. As recently as 2019, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted that China’s population would peak in 2029. But the decline has already started. This year, for the first time since the Great Famine (1959–61), China’s population has shrunk, by just over 1 percent since 2021, according to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
For many years, the United States appeared to be an exception to the rule of declining birthrates in the industrialized world. In 2007 the United States had a TFR of 2.1, whereas the figure for the European Union was below 1.6. But since then, the U.S. birthrate has fallen by 20 percent, to as low as 1.73 according to some estimates. What looked like American exceptionalism less than a generation ago now looks like mere delay.
At no time in history have people been having fewer children. In most countries the number of births per woman is well below the replacement rate, and even in countries with a high TFR, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa, the rate is dropping. The human race seems to have grown tired of itself.
The reasons for declining fertility are no doubt many and varied. Surely, some couples want to have more children but are unable to do so. Others struggle with economic pressures or health limitations. But fertility does not plummet worldwide without deeper issues at play, especially when people around the world are objectively richer, healthier, and afforded more conveniences than at any time in human history. Though individuals make their choices for many reasons, as a species we are suffering from a profound spiritual sickness—a metaphysical malaise in which children seem a burden on our time and a drag on our pursuit of happiness. Our malady is a lack of faith, and nowhere is the disbelief more startling than in the countries that once made up Christendom. “I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven,” God promised a delighted Abraham (Gen. 26:4). Today, in the lands of Abraham’s offspring, that blessing strikes most as a curse.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted worldwide famine and a “race to oblivion” in his book The Population Bomb. Fifty years later, the bomb has not detonated. Today, we must fear population bust rather than boom. The list of Very Bad Things—as Jonathan Last calls the consequences of declining fertility in his 2013 book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting—is long and depressing: an aging population, a shrinking workforce, a declining tax base, a decrease in technological and ­industrial dynamism, difficulty in finding a spouse, empty buildings and crumbling infrastructure, unfunded entitlements, and a general disquiet as more and more people get older and sicker with fewer people to care for them. Some future president might be forced to coin the campaign slogan, “It’s midnight in America.”
Last emphasizes economic and national concerns, the sort of developments that get the attention of presidents and parliaments. But the problems with declining fertility, and the accompanying collapse of the family, go much deeper. Whittaker Chambers was led to reject atheism by studying the miracle of his infant daughter’s ear. As he watched his daughter eat in her high chair, an “involuntary and unwanted” thought entered his mind: “Those intricate perfect ears” could have been “created only by immense design.” Faith can give us a heart for children, but children can also give us the eyes of faith.
When family formation fails, so does the inculcation of faith. This is Mary Eberstadt’s argument in How the West Really Lost God: Family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline; it is also a cause of it. Religious people are more inclined toward family life, but it is also the case that something about family life inclines people toward religion. There is no need to prioritize chicken or egg. It is the indissoluble connection that matters: The fortunes of faith and family rise and fall together.
There are many plausible reasons for this connection. The Christian story is set within the matrix of family—from the expectation of Eve’s Snake-Crusher, to the Promised Seed of the ­patriarchs, to great David’s Greater Son, to the birth of the Christ Child to Mary with Joseph at her side. The presence of children often drives parents to church, whether for help in raising them or because the experience of creating children helps us apprehend our Creator. The sacrifices required in parenting are the same kinds of sacrifices required in a life of Christian discipleship.
The connection between faith and family cuts in the opposite direction as well. As Eberstadt observes: “In an age when many people live lives that contradict the traditional Christian moral code, the mere existence of that code becomes a lightning rod for criticism and vituperation—which further drives some people away from church” (emphasis original). In other words, if your parents were divorced, or you grew up with two mommies, or you are currently sleeping with your girlfriend, or you are not particularly enamored of the thought of monogamy and raising children, the Christian faith—which has always been a scandal to sinners—carries an additional offense, which previous generations did not have to overcome. “People do not like to be told they are wrong,” Eberstadt notes, “or that those whom they love have done wrong. But Christianity cannot help sending that message.” No doubt, secularization has undermined family formation. Just as surely, though, the collapse of the married, intact, childrearing family has made the Christian faith harder to swallow. The biggest plausibility structure for faith is not intellectual but familial.
Carle C. Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization (1947) is remembered as a book about family types, but it is fundamentally a book about fertility. Borrowing from Augustine and Aquinas, Zimmerman argues that marriage has historically had three functions: proles, fides, and sacramentum. That is to say, the good of marriage (and of family life more broadly) depends on childbearing, sexual fidelity, and the permanence of the marriage bond (whether one holds to a Catholic view of the sacraments or not). ­Peter Lombard ordered the marital goods somewhat differently, placing fidelity before childbearing. But ­Zimmerman observes that the ordering of ­Augustine and Aquinas emphasizes childbearing—or ­prior to marriage, the intention of it—as the first and determinative step in the development of marital fidelity and permanence. Without children (or an openness to children), the other two commitments lose their moral and logical coherence.
Already in 1947, Zimmerman saw that the atomistic family—the family based on individualistic assumptions about happiness and the role of marriage—would lead to rapid and groundless divorce; that looser family structures would be proffered as solutions to family problems, only to make those problems worse; that the stigmas inhibiting adultery would deteriorate; that fertility would decrease; and that sexual perversion would be normalized. He also predicted that the decline of fertility among intellectuals would embolden them to challenge the validity of marriage itself; that it would take two generations (slowed by ­immigration) for family decay to become ­evident; and that the Christian Church would be the ­only cultural institution capable of encouraging a view of family grounded in something more than ­personal fulfillment.
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As fallible humans we all sometimes succumb to haste, emotion, and the influence of others, especially the media, whose sole occupation lies in seeking to get us to believe its narratives and to think and act along its preferred lines. Add in the rigors and tedium of pastoral and publishing work and mistakes are apt to happen sometimes, even large ones. In such cases a little public or private contradiction that seeks to set one right is justified, provided it is moved by charity and expressed courteously.

On April 24th, byFaith, the official magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), published an article titled “Prayer and Work in the Face of Violence,” in which it was claimed that “gun violence” is “the leading cause of death among children in this nation.” I published an article showing that was false on the basis of mortality statistics provided by the CDC (available here). Others also took umbrage to the April 24th article, and I dispatched a personal message to byFaith requesting a removal of the article and a full retraction. That has not occurred, and as of May 24th the article is still available at byFaith, unamended and unaccompanied by any editorial clarifications.
Mistaken claims are rather common in the world of the published word. The careful observer will note, for instance, that I misnamed David Cassidy’s church in the first sentence of my first Aquila Report article, accidentally referring to it as Spanish River Presbyterian rather than Spanish River Church due to an editing error. Are Dominic Aquila and I to then be regarded as wholly unreliable in our claims? Hardly. But the answer in all such cases is to correct the mistake when it is brought to one’s attention and to be more careful in future, hence why I have mentioned my fault here and why I have checked with a former professional proofreader to ensure my pronoun usage is correct in the phrase above about the proprietor of this site and me. (And in fairness, I reversed them the first time around.)
It is a rather more serious fault, however, to make a claim as large and consequential as that gun violence is the leading cause of death of children in this nation when it is easily verified that it is not. And it is significant as well that this claim seems to be that of a certain political faction in our nation, as evidenced by the fact that I passed by a waiting room the other day and found a pair of activists making the claim verbatim on a major news outlet. The PCA’s magazine should not be parroting the false claims of the political left. Nor should it be repeating the claims of any other political faction, unless they involve questions in which the church has a vital interest or unambiguous questions of public morality, such as matters of liberty of conscience, the free exercise of our faith, abortion, euthanasia, and the like; and even in those questions I think the church’s involvement should be as an independent witness of right and wrong, and that she should never allow herself to become a de facto organ of any political party.
But even granting that it is a more serious offense, we need not assume the worst as to its reasons. As fallible humans we all sometimes succumb to haste, emotion, and the influence of others, especially the media, whose sole occupation lies in seeking to get us to believe its narratives and to think and act along its preferred lines. Add in the rigors and tedium of pastoral and publishing work and mistakes are apt to happen sometimes, even large ones. In such cases a little public or private contradiction that seeks to set one right is justified, provided it is moved by charity and expressed courteously.
What I am suggesting, then, is that we provide a collective remonstrance against byFaith’s error of fact. If you are reading this and are a member of the PCA I ask you, dear reader, to take a moment to drop byFaith a line here or via email at [email protected], and to tell them that you are disappointed that the public news outlet of our church has done poorly by its departure from its proper mission, and that it needs to retract its errors by removing the source of offense in question and offering a public acknowledgment and correction of its published errors of fact. The reason I suggest this is simple: byFaith is an official agency of the PCA, paid for by her funds and subordinate to her government. Our magazine should not be publishing false claims which venture into the territory of the purely political and have no direct relation to the church or her duties of disciple making.
I believe, moreover, that any PCA member should be able to do this in good conscience, regardless of his or her beliefs about criminal justice policy. For while we may differ as to our beliefs about civil or political questions, yet the proper focus of the church is a matter which we should all respect, and upon which we should all insist. Christ’s “kingdom is not of this world” (Jn. 18:36), and when the people of Israel were about to make him king he withdrew from them (Jn. 6:15), lest their mistaken popular enthusiasm should distract from his true mission of redeeming his elect. The PCA (including her agencies like byFaith), being a manifestation of Christ’s body, the church, ought to take heed and beware lest in her concern with the things of this life she diverts people’s attention from things above (Col. 3:1-2; comp. Matt. 16:23).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), 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.
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