An Obadiah Slope column
How can you tell? “The PCA is not racist” is how US Anglican writer Anne Kennedy signs off a strong rebuke of David French, New York Times columnist who Obadiah is as sure as you can be is a Christian. Kennedy is not sure. And the PCA in her piece is the Presbyterian Church in America not our local pressies.
Summary for those late to this imbroglio. French was invited to be on a panel on polarisation at the PCA General Assembly – their big conference but the whole panel was cancelled because French was thought too polarising. Irony, yes?
Anne Kennedy and her husband Matthew are heroes in conservative Anglicanism because they were driven out from a liberal diocese (region) in the US Episcopalians and had their church buildings sold to Muslims.
French is a conservative classical Liberal, believing in freedom of religion but freedom for others. Kennedy and many other Christians adopt a form of conservatism that in some cases, as with the writer preacher Douglas Wilson wants the Us to be officially Christian. So French does not want to ban gay marriage but Kennedy it appears does. And for French to put his point of view in Kennedy’s eyes is an attack on Christians and ” you really do have to choose between Mr. French and actual Christianity.”
(French’s anti Trump stance is a big part of the disagreement, too.)
But let’s focus on that final line “The PCA is not racist”. It echoes the question raised by comments by my fellow cadet journalist (four decades ago!) Laura Tingle that “Australia is a racist country.”
Obadiah’s question is “how can you tell?”
Which takes us to David’ French’s piece about being cancelled by the PCA.
He writes of his church in Tennessee. “We loved the people in that church, and they loved us. When I deployed to Iraq in 2007, the entire church rallied to support my family and to support the men I served with. They flooded our small forward operating base with care packages, and back home, members of the church helped my wife and children with meals, car repairs and plenty of love and companionship in anxious times.”
But then two things changed things: French and his wife Nancy adopted a young girl from Ethiopia, and Donald Trump became the Presidential nominee for the Republican Party.
French writing for National Review – a decidedly conservative magazine could not support Trump. But it went beyond political disagreement.
“The church as a whole did not respond the way it did when I deployed. Instead, we began encountering racism and hatred up close, from people in our church and in our church school.
“The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.” We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her that she couldn’t come to our house to play because ‘my dad said Black people are dangerous.’”
Well, we all know that the original sin of America is racism, and just maybe inn our nation too.
Just like the French’s daughter, Obadiah and his twin copped racial abuse, particularly in high school. I never did find out whether the kid that threw a stone at me aimed it because of my race or my Christians for Peace badge.
So did French cause the PCA of being racist? Wel,l no. This is what he actually wrote: “We also began to see the denomination itself with new eyes. To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination were invisible to us before our own ordeal. But there is a faction of explicitly authoritarian Christian nationalists in the church, and some of that Christian nationalism has disturbing racial elements underpinning it.”
Is the PCA racist? Is Australia racist? The best answer Obadiah can give, speaking of Australia is that there are many racists here, and a lot of institutional racism – that is unequal treatment. Take the health system and the unequal outcomes for First Nations people as a starting point.
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Should I feel guilty? The Louisiana Governor has signed into law a requirement that every public school classroom up to university level m governor must display a poster of the Ten Commandments the BBC reports. “The state law requires that a poster include the sacred text in ‘large, easily readable font’ on a poster that is 11 inches by 14 inches (28cm by 35.5cm) and that the commandments are ‘the central focus’ of the display.” Should I feel guilty that my church does not have the commandments up on the wall or that it’s Louisiana that’s gone a bit far?
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The old rugged Corten steel cross: “Firstly, did you know that 200kms west of Alice Springs, at the summit of Memory Mountain, is a 20-metre tall wooden cross?” asks Karl Faase the peripatetic Baptist documentary maker. It’s part of a message that he is back on Aussie soil after extensive travels and extensive interviews for the forcoming Encounter! documentary series. Obadiah is sure it will be a great series.
Faase has been filming at the cross in Haasts Bluff (Ikuntji), 230 kilometres west of Alice Springs, before wrapping his interviews for Encounter. As Obadiah just said it is bound to be good. Obadiah is looks forward to it. But Karl, you should have looked more carefully at the 20m cross you videoed. It’s not “Wooden”. It’s made of steel. Corten Steel. That’s what gives it that rusted colour!
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Survivor: As the well-documneted decline of older denominations in the UK continues, the Spectators Dan Hitchens identifies the ones that are doing well reproducing themselves with a “r” rate above one: (remember “r”? it was a measure used during covid to identify if cases were up or down.)
“The more charismatic and evangelical churches, such as Elim, Newfrontiers and the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, have a healthy R rate,” Hitchens writes. “Everyone else is below the line.”
The first English denomination to vanish is likely the United Reform Church, with a “dead”-line of 2038 if the decline continues in a straight line. The Church of England would cease to exist if straight-line decline continued in the 2060s. But mergers and reserves – or even an intervention by God means some form of continuation is likely beyond those dates.