Pulpit and Politics: Clergy in American Politics at the Advent of the Millennium

11. Presbyterian Church in America

The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is neither large nor old, but it is increasingly visible among American evangelical churches. The denomination began in 1973 with 260 churches and 40,000 members concentrated primarily in the states of the Old South. It now includes more than 1,300 congregations comprising more than 300,000 members located in 47 states. Such strong growth has come primarily through well-organized church planting that has dotted the rural southern landscape with PCA churches and has, more importantly, changed the face of evangelicalism in southern urban centers such as Atlanta, Georgia (through the large network of Perimeter churches); Dallas, Texas; and Miami, Florida. Moreover, Mission to North America, the church-planting arm of the PCA, has increasingly targeted nonsouthern cities including New York, Chicago, and Salt Lake City. Some PCA pastors and congregants have assumed fairly visible political roles, such as Dr. D. James Kennedy, a Florida PCA pastor, who is a prominent televangelist and author of the widely used program Evangelism Explosion. Kennedy is also known as a spiritual advisor to presidents and a conservative political activist. As for political office holders, seven recent or current members of the United States House of Chapter 11 Presbyterian Church in America Brent F. Nelsen and Beverly A. Gaddy 141 142 Presbyterian Church in America Representatives are affiliated with the PCA. Additionally, three Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee during the Clinton impeachment debate—Ed Bryant, Charles Canady, and Bob Inglis—were PCA members. And while South Carolina’s Bob Inglis left the House in 1998 because of a term-limit pledge, he was replaced by Jim DeMint, a PCA elder. Scholars who study evangelical churches in America have largely ignored the PCA thus far. The increasing prominence of the denomination in American religious and political life, however, merits increased scholarly attention. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The Presbyterian Church of America was born out of theological and social conflicts that ravaged the Presbyterian Church in the United States—commonly known as the Southern Presbyterian church—during the 1960s. Beginning in the 1950s a growing number of conservative church leaders were disturbed by the theological liberalism creeping into the denomination. Seminary professors and clergy were openly questioning the inerrancy and authority of the Bible and arguing for a loosening of traditional Presbyterian adherence to the doctrinal standards of the Reformed faith as set down in the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. In the view of most conservatives, this new liberalism led to a raft of unholy practices: a failure to address heresy in the church courts; support for the liberal ecumenism of the World Council of Churches; the development of new forms of worship that employed modern music, dance, and drama; approval of women’s ordination; and the teaching of evolution (Smith 1999). Furthermore, theological liberalism led to social and political liberalism . As early as the 1930s, the church had begun to speak out on national issues, thus abandoning its doctrine of the “spirituality of the church”— first articulated during the slavery controversies of the early nineteenth century—that prohibited the church from taking positions on public affairs (Hudson 1981; Sweet 1939). The denomination’s emphasis on the social gospel in missions, opposition to the Vietnam War, and support for abortion rights angered many clergy and parishioners (Smith 1999). Moreover, the church’s action on behalf of the civil-rights movement clearly dissatisfied many conservatives, though the exact role played by race in the dispute is still a matter of debate (Alvis 1994). Brent F. Nelsen and Beverly A. Gaddy 143 The conservative-versus-liberal struggle finally came to a head in the early 1970s, with conservatives forming a Continuing Presbyterian Church movement in 1971. Members of this movement eventually broke with the Southern Presbyterian Church in 1973, and the new denomination took the name Presbyterian Church in America in 1974. The young denomination stood wholly unified against liberalism and in favor of the infallibility of Scripture and Reformed theology as outlined in the Westminster Standards. Independence, however, revealed a difficult truth: the PCA, for all its talk of unity, was a marriage of convenience . Two groups of Reformed Protestants had joined forces to resist liberalism in the South. One group had its roots deep in southern Old School Presbyterianism with its adherence to a “strict subscription” to the Westminster Standards (Smith 1999). These Old School traditionalists , in the relatively sheltered confines of the rural South...