In my last post I summarized what happened to Overture 13 (O-13) at the PCA General Assembly last week: the motion to allow atheists (or, more technically, those who don’t believe in God/Heaven/Hell) to testify in church trials was rejected twice over (both in its original and revised forms) in a vote by the men gathered. I highlighted the irony of a Christian denomination working in any way to obfuscate the truth—because truth is truth no matter who tells it—when multiple Hollywood outfits over the past year have dumped significant sums, time, and effort into helping numerous survivors across a spectrum of faith (including none at all!) to tell the truth about what happened to them.
In particular, I noted how censoring the voices of non-believers in matters of communal justice is a natural extension of censuring the private convictions of individuals—that is, serving as thought police, an appointment taken up by many in conservative Christian circles (I proudly volunteered in my time) with nary a need for Divinity to sign off on it. The PCA seems to me to have traditionally embraced this role in society (in the relatively brief 50 years it’s had to establish a tradition for itself, anyway). It’s fine if you disagree; I don’t have anything empirical to point you toward for this; it’s just a personal, anecdotal belief. One that people will probably censor me for.
But, if you’ll allow me to embrace the 100th sheep status repeatedly bestowed upon me for a moment, I’d like to share with you not one but two incidents where this implicit-made-explicit policy has impacted my life—and I’d like to argue that even if it’s just my life where this has caused harm, it still matters.
Back in 2021 I was hired by a private Christian school to teach an upper level writing/speaking class. About a week after my hiring, the school administration—that is, my direct boss and the headmaster of the school, both members in two different PCA churches, one of them an elder—fielded a complaint from a concerned parent about me. The complaint contained six spurious concerns/accusations regarding my character based entirely upon what the parent could find by Googling me—none of which I’m ashamed about, though some of those old Facebook pictures from high school are pretty silly, I grant you. But that wasn’t what was bothering this parent, nor was it what bothered my superiors when they caught wind of it: suddenly these religious men (the unnamed parent was, I was told, a pastor in the community) were very upset over two personal convictions I had aired publicly the year prior.
One was a handful of Facebook posts decrying Doug Wilson, lead pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and author of a novel about a sex robot.
The other was a sentence at the end of a long article I wrote that referred to the Holy Spirit with a feminine pronoun.
Mind you—I had included the article in question on my resume during the interview process, and I had also expressed my extreme distaste of Doug Wilson during the interview itself. And both received a pass! Indeed, it was only because of these green lights that I continued with the interview process and went on to accept an offer.
Yet now the objection had suddenly become this: if I believed such things about 1. a religious figure the school headmaster revered and 2. God, I was unfit to teach young adults how to write and speak well.
Despite the fact that neither of these personal beliefs of mine had any bearing on what I would teach in the classroom, nor did I have any intent to share the details of my personal faith life with my students on the grounds that doing so would be inappropriate.
So, I was brought in to be grilled by my boss and the headmaster on a Saturday during summer break. Satisfied that I would not change my personal convictions to placate them (or their patrons), they called me a few days later to fire me.
Plenty of other nasty stuff happened in the aftermath, which I have documented ad nauseam elsewhere, but I think this short summary suffices to illustrate the point of this post:
The PCA Thought Police are alive and well, and they maintain a high-control environment at that school to this day. With PCA members like this well established in communities at both the local and national level (the school’s headmaster carries a great deal of clout at the ACCS, a nationwide scholastic organization), it really shouldn’t surprise us that they’ve set a precedent that was brought to bear on O-13.
The second area where PCA thought policing affects me is not as implicit as the first: in fact, it has been made explicit precisely because of the General Assembly’s rejection of O-13—their refusal to accept the testimony of a non-believer in court.
The key players in the Christian school firing incident also colluded to withhold my wages from the time I worked there—an illegal maneuver, as my lawyer advised me upon reviewing all the documentation, and nothing short of financial abuse. It so happens that one of the colluders is also a teaching elder at the PCA church I attended at the time. Had I been a member—which I had at one point considered becoming—I could have filed a suit against him in PCA court.
But I knew that had every likelihood of going badly, regardless what evidence I presented, because the man in question is influential, well liked, and well revered. I didn’t need the recent Christianity Today article regarding abuse in the PCA to validate my gut on this point, although that was nice.
So I didn’t become a member, and I didn’t file a suit in either the church or civil court, because all I really care about is people knowing the truth, not getting the money that was stolen from me. I put an indescribable amount of effort into documenting the truth as best I could, put it up on my personal website for people to read, and left the rest to the consciences of the people in those church and school communities.
But if I had become a PCA member.
And I had filed a suit.
And if I had called upon my husband, who got a front row seat to everything that happened to me at the hands of that corrupt school administration, to testify as a witness in PCA court—
Do you know what would have happened?
They wouldn’t have admitted him, because my husband can no longer swear he believes in God.
I will draw the curtain over my personal life there for now and leave you to ponder any other ready implications of O-13 on your own.
Let me just say, given how much interest PCA leaders have shown in controlling not only my thoughts, but the thoughts of those who would care justly for me—the thoughts of those who might dare actually speak the truth in a community where almost none1 have on my behalf, to this day—
Well. O-13 is just the tip of the iceberg.
Almost. Precious few have, and if you’re reading this, thank you.
In every age of the world there have been those who suffer for speaking truth to power. Religious leaders are fond of evoking the images of the martyrs to frame themselves as victims, making it all the more egregious when they themselves use their authority to quash those who challenge them with honest words. “Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof […] Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
It may be small comfort, but I hope you can take reassurance from standing with those holy people who valued truth above all else.
I attended a pca church for three years back in 2010-13. In fact, it was one where one of the men you mention attends, and he and i are friends. I believe you have been done a disservice, and it grieves me seeing how deep these problems can cut, to where even a man I respect and care for can have feet of clay that does such damage.
I did not continue pursuing a ministry in the pca when we moved for some of the underlying reasons you point out. The narrowness and ideological inflexibility of conservative reformed denominations was not at all attractive to me, and I knew I couldn’t flourish in a tradition that was so rigid and with such an undealt with history of control and obfuscation. And the pca is the “liberal” one of the NAPARC churches. As time has gone in I have also seen that keeping women from positions of public ministry and authority had actually been quite damaging to several traditions.
The issue you’re outlining above is just another sign of the insularity of so many churches. Not allowing an unbeliever to bear witness is alarming. It’s almost a tacit rejection of their image-bearing status. I imagine it comes out of kuyperian, wilsonion, van Tillian theonomy theology that says unbelievers can’t be witnesses because they don’t see “with the eyes of faith,” and unfortunately if that is the case than it is a sign of the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the pca, as well as, as you say, a move to maintain tight control over any narrative. And that is awful, whether done by a government, a spouse, or a church body.
Thanks for your commentary on this, I didn’t know it was happening but am...not happy, but glad to know I suppose?