Last Sunday, David French, former darling of conservatives, did what he now does best. Using dishonesty and demagoguery, he takes aim at Christian conservatives while playing the victim.
He begins his “poor, poor pitiful me” song and dance/op-ed by appealing to the growing opposition to “cancel culture.” He accuses his former denomination—the one he voluntarily exited about the time he began his leftward scramble—of canceling him.
A friend of French’s who, French asserts, is “fighting the very forces that drove” French from his former denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), invited the toxically polarizing French to be part of a panel discussion on the “challenges of dealing with toxic polarization” at its annual General Assembly. When word of French’s invitation spread among PCA members, opposition grew, and he was wisely disinvited.
In his op-ed, French implies that “intense attacks” on him “online and in real life” justify his inclusion on the panel, and he whines that his invitation impelled more “attacks” in the form of “misleading essays, vicious tweets, letters and even a parody song.” A parody song? Horror of horrors!
The allegedly misleading essay to which French linked is by Federalist Editorial Director Kylee Griswold. While alleging Griswold’s essay is “misleading,” French neglected to say specifically to what he is referring, so there’s no way to determine who is being misleading: Griswold or French.
The allegedly “vicious” tweet to which French linked is this from William E. Wolfe:
The SBC and PCA have a real choice before them. They can choose David French Christianity or faithful Christianity. But they can’t have both.”
That’s what French calls “vicious.” I kid you not.
But let’s concede that French could dig up some vicious tweets in the vast dirty sands of the twitterdome. Do vicious tweets make him the best person to speak on the topic of “how to be supportive of your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year”? After all, French is not a pastor, and he is a polarizer.
Conversely, does criticism–via either vicious tweets or rational arguments–of French’s polarizing rhetoric necessarily render his disinvitation wrong or misguided?
His op-ed rests on his attempt to hoist conservatives with their own petard—that is, their criticism of cancel culture—so, let’s spend a few seconds on that topic.
Do conservatives criticize all speaker cancellations? Are speaker cancellations ever justified?
First, conservatives do not now nor ever have criticized all cancellations, because some speaker cancellations are justified. Apparently, even French believes so. In a piece he wrote for National Review in 2016 about the repugnant abuse he and his family endured from strangers because of his criticism of Trump, French had nothing critical to say about a cancellation of Trump:
Erick Erickson experienced his own ordeal more than a month before we did. After Erickson dis-invited Trump from his Red State gathering, angry Trump supporters showed up at his house.
As with many decisions, context is king in deciding when a speaker cancellation is warranted. Who is hosting the event? What is the purpose of the event? Who is paying for the event? Who is the audience? What is the reason for the cancellation? Who specifically approved the invitation?
If a public elementary school invited a sex worker to speak to students on career day, cancellation due to community outrage would be warranted. But if members of the Federalist Society invited a conservative law professor to speak at one of their events, cancellation due to leftist student outrage would be unjustified.
If a Unitarian Universalist church committee invited a pro-life speaker to speak at an event, and many—perhaps most—church members opposed her ideas, then cancellation would be justified.
And if a PCA committee invited a polarizing speaker to their private event to discuss polarization, and many—perhaps most—members of that church body opposed his ideas, then cancellation is justified.
French spends a lot of time recounting the abuse he and his family have experienced as a result, he alleges, primarily of his criticism of Trump and his adoption of a black daughter. And it is this abuse that in French’s view makes him the ideal PCA General Assembly speaker.
In Sunday’s op-ed, French points to “alt-right” supporters of Trump as the perpetrators of racist maltreatment:
There was no way I could support Trump. It wasn’t just his obvious lack of character that troubled me; he was opening the door to a level of extremism and malice in Republican politics that I’d never encountered. Trump’s rise coincided with the rise of the alt-right.
I was a senior writer for National Review at the time, and when I wrote pieces critical of Trump, members of the alt-right pounced, and they attacked us through our daughter. …
Our pastors and close friends came to our aid, but support was hardly universal. … Instead, we began encountering racism and hatred up close, from people in our church and in our church school. The racism was grotesque.
(As an aside, someone needs to ask French about Biden’s character in light of his influence-peddling, showering with his 12-year-old daughter, and sexual integration of women’s private spaces and sports.)
As evidence for the racism and hatred that allegedly permeated his former church, French offered six specific anecdotes, and in one of those cases, French admitted that the man was disciplined by the church.
As everyone knows, those who work in the public eye—from celebrities to political writers to lawmakers to Supreme Court Justices—are commonly recipients of vile abuse. And the vile abuse doesn’t just come from the “alt-right” as French suggests. It comes too from homosexual activists, “trans”-cultists, and BLM members.
French claims he does “not want to paint with too broad a brush,” but out of the left side of his mouth, he says,
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.
…
[C]hurch no longer felt like home. … So we left for a wonderful multiethnic church in Nashville. We didn’t leave Christianity; we left a church that inflicted harm on my family.
I have no idea how French defines “Christian nationalism,” but it sounds ominous. What I do know is that French should work on the whole not-painting-with- too-broad-a-brush goal because he failed miserably in his op-ed.
At the conclusion of his polarizing criticism of the PCA for cancelling his invitation to speak on polarization, he slops ugly paint all over the entire denomination. Amazing.
At least as amazing, French takes umbrage at Christians who criticize him for “defending the civil liberties of drag queens and L.G.B.T.Q. families.” To be clear, French defends the purported civil rights of drag queens to read stories to toddlers in public libraries. The PCA may have problems with both French’s polarizing broad-brush painting and his polarizing views of sexuality.