With American public space monopolized by furor over abortion and also about sexual abuse in the huge Southern Baptist Convention, it seems eccentric to mention small Protestant denominations. But sometimes these flocks produce news and highlight developing trends that may merit news attention.
Consider actions in recent days by the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and Christian Reformed Church (CRC). [Disclosure: The Religion Guy is a longtime CRC member though not directly involved in the matters at hand.] These two bodies, generally similar in terms of Calvinist theology, exercise influence in the wider American evangelical marketplace of ideas that far exceeds their modest numbers.
The CRC, founded in 1857, has declined to 205,000 members in the U.S. and Canada. The PCA, launched in a 1973 southern breakaway among Presbyterians has added northern go-getters to reach a U.S.-only membership of 378,000. More liberal “mainline” Presbyterians dropped from 4 million in 1970 to a current 1.2 million.
The CRC and PCA were the largest church bodies in the conservative North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council until 2002, when the council terminated CRC participation for allowing female pastors and lay officers.
Both denominations remained members of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) until last week, when the PCA quit the cooperative organization. Oddly, NAE President Walter Kim (contact: walter.kim@trinitycville.org), a Harvard Ph.D., is a PCA minister who led an important PCA church in Charlottesville, Va., and is now its “teacher in residence.”
Politics is involved in all of this, of course.
The PCA cited Presbyterians’ Westminster Confession of 1646, which declares that church bodies deal only with internal religious issues and “are not to intermeddle with civil affairs” except in “extraordinary” cases. The NAE indeed addresses many societal topics. The PCA lamented its policy statements on the environment, immigration, the death penalty and, especially, support of proposed “Fairness For All” legislation to acknowledge LGBTQ legal protections in return for religious-liberty guarantees.
Yet the PCA itself has issued statements on abortion, AIDS, alcohol, child protection, education, homosexuality, medical insurance, nuclear power, pornography and race relations. Does PCA separation from NAE-style evangelicals move it toward what we used to call cultural and religious “fundamentalism”?
The PCA bars partnered gay clergy, but last week also prohibited clergy who identify as gay or “same-sex attracted” Christians. Like other evangelicals, the CRC distinguishes between homosexual practice, regarded as sinful, versus persons of same-sex attraction who observe celibacy.
Which brings us to sexuality decisions by the CRC’s mid-June Synod. Delegates by 74% recommended a conservative 176-page sexuality report (.pdf here), as a “useful summary of biblical teaching" and reaffirmed the denomination’s 1973 stand against homosexual practice.
Then a 69% majority granted “confessional status” when specifying that the Heidelberg Catechism teaching against unchastity includes homosexual relationships. But by a four-vote margin delegates opposed a process to add a footnote on this to the Catechism text. Finally, the Synod directed a Grand Rapids congregation with a deacon openly living in a same-sex marriage to obey CRC teaching.
Some CRC members are upset not only with the decisions but some harsh remarks and the decision to hold key discussions in executive session. There’s almost certain to be ongoing trouble at the CRC’s Calvin University, which is under tighter church control than most Protestant colleges. See this recent GetReligion podcast and feature for more background on these tensions.
The media can keep up with these two denominations through the official news sites for the CRC (click here) and the PCA (click here).
Turning to an evangelical of note: When The New York Times wanted a conservative op-ed about the Supreme Court’s big abortion ruling, it turned to English literature scholar Karen Swallow Prior, who produced this op-ed: “I Prayed and Protested to End Roe. What Comes Next?”
She said each “prenatal child” is “self-organizing and unique, developing yet complete in itself,” so killings reflect radical American individualism that “dehumanizes — first the fetus, then the rest of us.” She also added:
Roe was an unjust ruling. I have always believed it would be overturned, as other unjust decisions by the court were, although I thought it would take longer. I rejoice that it did not. But of course it will take longer for abortion to become unthinkable, which is the real goal of the pro-life movement.
The day before, Prior posted another timely piece as a Religion News Service columnist: “Can the Southern Baptist Convention Be Saved?” She proposed that her denomination’s “immoral” past in slavery should foster the humility that’s necessary to overcome its sexual abuse scandals.
How to link these issues? She wrote:
The sex abuse report has indeed been a humbling circumstance for the Southern Baptist Convention. Of course, the greatest devastation has been borne by those who have endured the abuse, and understanding this, the messengers overwhelmingly approved the recommendations.
It was a momentous decision. Yet it was a decision years overdue and one that represents just one step in a long journey the denomination faces in better handling sexual abuse cases in its midst.
The SBC is not the only place, nor the only denomination, facing the #MeToo #ChurchToo problem, of course. Yet, the SBC plays an outsized role within the larger culture because of its present as the largest Protestant denomination in America and its past as a denomination founded on the defense of the evil institution of human slavery.
After 21 years at Liberty University, and some pithy and controversial laments about Trumpism while there, Prior in 2020 became a “Christianity and culture” professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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