David Ayer has written an insightful piece for the American Spectator about the demise of Presbyterianism in the United States. It seems that one of their ordained ministers preached that abortion was good, and that she had no regrets about her two abortions:
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Todd Peters, an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church-USA (PC-USA), recently treated a Unitarian Universalist congregation to a fiery sermon. Was it about heaven, hell, salvation, and the need to repent and believe the Gospel? . . . No. Instead, she thundered from the pulpit that abortion, all abortion, anytime up through birth, is essentially good, including her own two abortions, for which, she assured everyone, she “felt no guilt, no shame, no sin.”
Oh, my. I would have gotten up and left at that point, and that is what most Presbyterians have done over the course of the past six decades. The denomination in America has fallen from 4.1 million members in 1960 (2.5% of the population) to about 1.15 million members today (0.35% of the population).
Ayer notes that America was founded mostly by Presbyterians and Anglicans. The Presbyterians had an outsized role in the Revolutionary War, composing nearly half of the Continental Army:
Presbyterians gave us the only ordained minister and college president to sign the Declaration of Independence, namely Princeton’s John Witherspoon. Its adherents, many of them Scot and Scots-Irish, plus folk moving over from Puritan Congregationalism, were stubborn, even at times ferocious, in their convictions.
During the American Revolution, King George’s advisers often treated the rebellion as a religious war spurred on by Presbyterian ministers. One Hessian captain wrote, “This war … is nothing more nor less than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion.” This view was widely held by the British during this time, and for good reason. Jonathan Van Waren, writing for the Stream, noted that Horace Walpole, a member of the House of Commons, put it rather colorfully: “Cousin America has run off with the Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.” Van Waren also documents sound historical estimates that more than half of the Patriot army were Presbyterians and that, when Cornwallis surrendered, all but one of [George Washington’s] colonels were Presbyterian elders.
But, alas, Presbyterianism fell victim to liberalism:
Swept up in the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early 20th century, which modernists eventually won, sometimes driving out dissidents, the denominations that formed [the PC-USA] have long rejected Scriptural authority as a general standard, leaving room for seminary professors, clergy, elders, and deacons who reject miracles, the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, and a lot more. The church saw one accommodation to modernism after another. Still, many within those bodies that remained in mainline Presbyterianism thought, illogically and unwisely, that they could ditch all this embarrassing talk about total depravity, divine intervention, and the supernatural but still keep that helpful Christian morality and their public influence in promoting it.
But it doesn’t work that way. You cannot maintain Christian morality without a vibrant Christian faith, and once that is gone, the morality sooner or later goes out the window:
But ultimately, as conservative Presbyterians had long predicted, these moral standards went the same way as the virgin birth. I am reminded of a conversation I had with a PC-USA minister when I was researching the acceptance of cohabitation among professing Christians for an article in Christianity Today a few years ago. We discussed how he handled engaged couples who were living together. His answer was roughly along these lines, although I cannot recall the exact words: “Well, we accept same-sex marriage, so it is pretty hard to make a fuss about cohabitation.” I suppose we can say the same thing about tolerating leaders who celebrate abortion as an “act of love.”
It isn’t just the Presbyterians, of course but all of mainline Protestantism. On the page with Ayer’s article is a link to an earlier article about a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) having her congregation recite the “Sparkle Creed”:
I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural.
I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads, and who saw everyone as a sibling child of God.
I believe in the rainbow Spirit, who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.
I believe in the church of everyday saints, as numerous, creative, and resilient as patches on the AIDS quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in Wonder.
I believe in the calling to each of us, that love is love is love, so beloved, let us love.
I believe, glorious God, help my unbelief.
Amen.
Isn’t that just precious? It is not just morals that have suffered as a result of the mainline Protestant collapse. The whole culture is in trouble because of the lost stabilizing influence of mainline Protestantism:
The mainline Protestant denominations are spent as a powerful social and cultural force. They are dying. And things like this—the PC-USA tolerating and even supporting “clergy” like Peters—are the reasons why. Are there smaller, faithful, conservative Presbyterian denominations? Yes, but they do not command anything like the towering influence that the older Presbyterianism, centered in places like Princeton Seminary, once wielded. Are there still some good churches and people within the mainline denominations, including in the PC-USA, as there still were even a couple of decades ago? Yes, but fewer and fewer.
Too many of my conservative Protestant colleagues are ho-hum about the collapse of mainline Protestantism. . . . But its disintegration is nothing to be indifferent about. We have lost something majestic and replaced it with something pathetic, and the loss echoes across the landscape of American life.
In the autumn of 2020, I had premonition that something bad was going to happen in the upcoming election, and I had already formed the opinion that the culprit behind America’s collapse was the collapse of mainline Protestantism:
Many do not understand the connection between Protestantism and the ability to maintain a Republican form of government. It looks like Tal Bachman gets it. . . . Protestantism and functioning representative self-government go hand in hand. If you want to understand why our republic seems to be faltering, look no further than than collapse of mainline Protestantism in America.
The “seems to be faltering” part has been overtaken by events. The constitutional republic has fallen and cannot get up. We now live in a nightmare America in which elections are stolen at will, a radical Marxist party controls all the levers of power, is running the government through a badly demented sock-puppet, and has weaponized law enforcement to criminalize all organized political opposition. Meanwhile, a disgustingly corrupt and sickeningly inept “opposition party” is not opposing any of this. We are entering a dark age of indeterminate duration, and the reason for the coming dark age was, is, and ever will be the collapse of mainline Protestantism.