As Christians, our outlook is simple: we will be like Jesus. That is our priority. It’s easy to be concerned about what we’re going to do tomorrow, where we’re going to be, who we’ll be with, and so on. All of these questions about our future are uncertain. But we may know this: that God’s eternal purpose is to conform us to the image of Jesus. And that ought to transform how we view all of life’s moments and decisions—from the mundane to the extraordinary.

At one time or another, every Christian confronts the question “What is God’s will for my life?” When it comes to the specifics, the answer will differ for each of us according to context and calling, and we must exercise wisdom as we prayerfully study God’s Word and apply it in our lives. Most Christians will never know with certainty what their next step will be—only that it must be in faith as we obey the Lord’s commands.
One thing is certain, however: whatever our unique paths through life may be, God’s purpose is to shape us into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ.
In the New Testament, there are three passages that especially point us to this reality. As we come to grips with them, we will begin to understand the purpose of our salvation and God’s plan for our lives, now and in eternity.
God’s Eternal Purpose
We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. (Rom. 8:28–29)
This well-loved passage from the apostle Paul reveals God’s eternal purpose. God has predestined His children “to be conformed to the likeness of his Son”—to be fashioned, shaped, molded in the way in which a potter molds clay. In the economy of God from all of eternity, He has made it His business to transform “those whom he foreknew.”
If we understand this reality in verse 29, we can then make sense of the oft-abused verse that precedes it: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” What is the “good” that He works for and guarantees? To conform us to the image and likeness of His Son! When we understand that, we will realize that even bad times may be for our good, for the ultimate good God is seeking is to ensure that we will become like His Son, Jesus.
Anyone who has been a maturing disciple for some time will have discovered that we make more spiritual progress along the pathway of failure and tears than along the pathway of success and laughter. Nevertheless, even maturing disciples are tempted to flee from trials that are clearly making them more like Jesus (James 1:2)—and in fleeing them, they miss their blessings. It is in the warp and woof of life, in the difficulties and in the disasters, that all of our rough parts are chipped away and we are fashioned into the image of Jesus.
When we read the Bible and look at the stories of those who have been saved, we can marvel at what God has done in their lives. Why should so great a witness as Stephen have been snuffed out so early on? Why should so faithful a man as Paul have endured all of those beatings and illnesses and shipwrecks? “Why, O Lord?” God’s answer is as profound as it is challenging: “I was making them like Jesus.”
God’s Ongoing Process
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:16–18)
This second passage from the apostle Paul reveals something about how our transformation takes place. If we know the Lord and therefore have God’s Spirit at work in us, then we “are being transformed into the same image”—a present-tense experience. In other words, the eternal purpose of God is the ongoing process of God in each of our lives.
In 2 Corinthians 3 broadly, Paul draws a contrast between the old covenant and the new.

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The reality is that Johnson’s comments – which are utterly normative for a traditional Christian – is merely evidence that he is just that – a Christian. Anyone who believes in the Bible believes that God punishes nations for sin; that same Bible defines sin very clearly. Ask any Bible-believing pastor if he believes that post-Christian nations will be punished for national sins, and he’ll agree. Indeed, one must be aggressively uninformed about the Christian history of the United States and the West more generally to be shocked by Johnson’s comments. The ignorance of the mainstream press about the Bible and Christianity in general is one aspect of this.

One aspect of the post-Christian era in the West is that ordinary Christian views held by ordinary Christian people are almost entirely unknown to a growing portion of our populations. It should not be news that Christians in public positions hold beliefs that virtually all Christians have held for thousands of years and yet, because of the monumental ignorance of the press and several successive generations cut off from their civilizational inheritance by a derelict and deformed public school system, many seem to treat these revelations with shock. 
It is difficult to overstate the extent of this ignorance. Thirty-nine percent of British millennials, for example, could not identify the baby in the Christmas story (that would be Jesus). During COVID, politicians and the public from California to Canada to the Netherlands appeared genuinely outraged that Christians believed worship to be more essential than theaters or sports games. Only 16% of Americans read the Bible daily (a number that has been dropping precipitously year over year); a decade ago, only 14 percent of Canadians even read the Bible once a month, a number that has since dropped to 11 percent (I suspect it is much lower).  
Thus, we are constantly being alerted by the press that Christians believing Christian things is scandalous, dangerous, and indicative of some terrifying new trend. A recent example I covered in this space was the media’s collective freakout over the “news” that U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and his family use the accountability software Covenant Eyes, which the leftist media had obviously never heard of (no surprise there). Since then, there has been more news. The Guardian reported on Johnson’s comment to Fox News that to find out what he believes “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it – that’s my worldview.”
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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.
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