Many new PCAers are Evangelicals, coming to Calvinist churches in the heyday of the racial reconciliationist moment of the early 21st century. And there are bad actors in the internet. But therein lies the problem. Not every conversation can be, or should be, about race and antisemitism. And those controversies should not govern questions of political theology or religious engagement with political philosophy. If the committee is attempting to address those questions, those are most likely the purview of a church court and ecclesiastical censure, rather than questions of politics.

The Presbyterian Church in America’s Christian Nationalism committee has released a partial report. It is a momentous piece of writing. It is to my knowledge the only report like it being worked on by any denomination among the three magisterial Protestant traditions—Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed—in the United States, and is undoubtedly the most serious document on the subject written in the 21st century. 

There is much to commend in the report. Kevin DeYoung picked serious men from among the various tribes who sit together under the PCA tent. The fact that these men are being deliberative is attested to by their request to have another year to work on their report. This is not a hatchet job, nor is it the work of neoliberal Calvinist grand inquisitors looking to hound out post-liberals in the pews. It appears to be the work of churchmen, trying to address the serious question of how to parse out what is properly political and spiritual in an era when a political settlement that has lasted for the length of a long human lifetime is being revised, for better or worse. The last decade of cultural, political, and social change caught political and religious actors off-guard, and the committee is taking up the difficult task of what their church can do after being caught flat-footed by the rise of social media, the final collapse of Cold War politics, and the increasing power of the digital world.

With said changes to American society in the last decade has come a palpable and at times visceral fury, particularly among millennial and Gen-Z men. To their credit, the committee admits that perhaps these young men have a point. What the committee seems concerned about, with understandable reason, is racial division and exclusion within the church. As important an issue as that is, it is not, at all, synonymous with the question of the principle of exclusion in the state.

And perhaps that is a good place to offer what I hope will be received as good faith criticisms. There appears to be a reflexive conflation of the magistrate’s concern for piety in the civil realm as a civil and natural good into specific issues of establishmentarianism. It is a somewhat basic category error, and to be honest, one that is more likely to be made by a cleric rather than a layman.

The more worrisome provisions are those regarding the principle of the magistrate excluding certain groups from political rights. The specter of race and antisemitism continues to hang over the committee. This is understandable.

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