2 comments

1. I’ve been seeing this racist and anti-Semitic stuff growing for quite some time.

   Conservative Christians who are politically active need to stand up and rebuke it, or we’re going to be accused of being deliberately silent.

   Many mainstream conservatives didn’t see its rise — not because they had an agenda to defend it or cover it up, but because they honestly didn’t see it coming — and were claiming that these Christian defenses of racial bigotry, some of them in Reformed circles, didn’t exist and were a creation of the Left to discredit Christian conservatives. Others admitted they existed in the fever swamps of the far right, but considered them irrelevant.

   Without personalizing this too much, let’s just say that when people have an interracial marriage, as I do, they see and experience things that white conservatives who move in mainstream Reformed circles don’t necessarily see. While I certainly do NOT agree with the direction in which David French has gone in his politics, I know from direct personal experience that the racist garbage thrown at him and his wife for the adoption of a non-white child is not unique to him. I’ve seen it firsthand, I’ve seen it for years, long before he was getting those attacks, and it’s not pretty.

   I saw this stuff in some Reformed circles as far back as the 1980s and 1990s. I used to think it was dying out and would be gone in a generation or two, dead and buried, read about mostly in history books. I was wrong. It’s roaring back with a vengeance.

   The old “Southern White Pride” Klansmen may be white-haired oldsters on the edge of the grave, but they are being succeeded by far too many advocates of awful things who are young, online, and aggressively using social media to promote their views.

   Rod Dreher sounded a warning call when he said huge numbers of Republican staffers on Capitol Hill are listing to influencers like Nick Fuentes whose version of Catholic integralism is extreme, and correctly rejected by most Catholic integralists. That would be fine if people were listening to him to learn why he’s wrong, and some are doing that.

   The problem is too many people who listening to Fuentes, and men who have a greater following in Reformed circles like Corey Mahler, Joel Webbon and Brian Sauvé, are saying to themselves, “We don’t agree with everything they say, but they have a point.”

   That runs a very real risk of “moving the Overton window” and making unthinkable things thinkable.

   In Reformed circles, we taker church discipline seriously. The actions of conservative denominations like the RPCNA and ARP to formally discipline people who advocate such views need to be taken at face value.

   This stuff needs to be driven of the Reformed world, and unlike many in American evangelical circles, we actually have the formal tools to do it.

   An excommunicated racist barred from communion by a confessionally Reformed denomination is NOT to be treated as a brother until such time as he formally repents and his repentance is accepted by either by the body that excommunicated him or by a valid church court/church assembly of a confessionally Reformed body that has done the necessary legwork with the group that excommunicated him to avoid receiving a fugitive from discipline.

   This isn’t new and it isn’t liberal or “woke.” It’s basic Reformed church government.

   Deposition and excommunication carry consequences. Reformed churches and Reformed believers have an obligation to respect the discipline of churches of like faith and practice.

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   • Sorry, I hit the “send” button on my comment without proper proofreading.

     * “In Reformed circles, we taker church discipline seriously.” Should be TAKE OUR, not “TAKER.”

     * “This stuff needs to be driven OUT of the Reformed world.” Add “OUT,” which is missing from the original.

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