Kevin DeYoung on PCA Sex Report, Race, Covid & Evangelical Future

Here’s my conversation with Kevin DeYoung, a prominent pastor, author and theologian who teaches at Reformed Theological Seminary and chairs the Gospel Coalition board.

DeYoung served on the Presbyterian Church in America study committee on same sex attraction whose report was released in May, which he discusses. He also reflects on his recent Gospel Coalition blogs thinking theologically about race. And finally he talks about American Christianity post-pandemic and about Evangelicalism’s future.

I really enjoyed this exchange, and I know you will too.

Kevin DeYoung Transcript

TOOLEY: Hello, this is Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, DC, and today I have the pleasure of talking to Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and theologian in North Carolina. He teaches at Reformed Theological Seminary and also chairs the board of The Gospel Coalition and is a distinguished writer in his own right. And I’m going to ask him a little bit about some of his thoughts on race and Christianity in America, and also about a study committee on which he served for the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) on same-sex attraction. And possibly, if we have time after those two questions, his thoughts on the overall state of evangelicalism in America and how America, or how Christianity in America, is surviving the coronavirus. So Kevin, thank you so much.

DEYOUNG: Yeah, great to be with you Mark. I’ve enjoyed following your ministry for a number of years, so it’s great to be talking to you face-to-face, or as much as we do face-to-face in coronavirus.

TOOLEY: Yes, it’s almost as good as meeting person to person.

DEYOUNG: Yes, almost.

TOOLEY: Well, first of all, of course you were ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America—although you came out of the Reformed church in America, if I recall correctly—and you served on this study committee for the PCA, whose report was released some months ago, on issues of same-sex attraction, if you could tell us a little bit about that?

DEYOUNG: Yeah there were seven of us on this committee. There were a number of overtures that bubbled up from the presbyteries, and then the general assembly through that, a couple of years ago. And sort of in the background—people may know this but—there was a Revoice Conference which included some PCA people and some PCA locations, and that stirred up a lot of controversy about, okay we agree that persons of the same sex should not be getting married or that that’s not even marriage, but after that there’s a lot of disagreement. So that’s in the background. We didn’t want to—we never mentioned the word Revoice; we didn’t want to make that the central theme, because then you get into, “Well, that’s not what we meant; that’s not what I heard,” but we really—

TOOLEY: Could you tell us what the Revoice is?

DEYOUNG: Yeah, so there was a conference that took place in 2018—and they’ve subsequently become more officially organized and have continuing conferences—that took place in St. Louis in 2018, and had a wide range of speakers, some from the PCA, some Roman Catholics, kind of everything in between. And all these people were agreed that to act upon same-sex sexual intimacy is wrong. So, that’s a lot to agree on, and praise God for that. And yet we’re raising a lot of other issues about what might this spiritual friendship thing look like? Can we have sort of contractual relationships with one another? What about the attraction itself? Is that sinful? What’s our posture towards those? Should we be using the language of gay Christians? So, this is all in the background and has been talked about a lot online and in evangelical circles, and certainly, in the PCA, it has been a really big deal. And so there are people on both sides of that, people who think what Revoice was doing was maybe a little off, but really raised some good points, and people who have a lot of concerns. So that’s in the background. And the study committee didn’t want to make it a commentary on Revoice as much as we wanted to use, and what we were really tasked to do was to give, a theological appraisal of many of these salient issues. And thankfully, as Presbyterians actually, the Westminster Confession and catechisms say a lot, not about these particular issues as they manifest themselves today, but about actual sin versus indwelling sin, and how we understand these motions of the heart. And so one of the, I think critical—I’d use maybe significant—demarcations of the report—and this is really just Reformed theology 101—is to make clear that even those affections, attractions, inclinations that may feel too well up within us unbidden—and we didn’t get up and consciously choose them, and perhaps we don’t even want them—that those are yet an expression of the fallen nature, and not just disordered, but in themselves sinful. And that is whether those sinful attractions are for persons of the opposite sex if it’s not your spouse, or for persons of the same sex. There’s moral space between those sort of sinful attractions and then acting upon them, so we do want to say that it’s not all equal ultimacy in a moral equivalency. But to put the right theological language really helps us with the right sort of pastoral care in those situations. That was an important part of the committee’s work.

TOOLEY: And how has that report been received by the PCA and by the public so far?

DEYOUNG: That’s a good question, isn’t it? It came out the week that all the George Floyd stuff was happening, when that was just getting the national attention. So, it had a lot of attention for a couple of days, and then it took a back seat. As you might imagine, there’s been some critics on both sides, both those who think, well maybe we weren’t hard enough or didn’t come down with enough vigor in a conservative direction, and those who think, “Oh, you were pastorally insensitive to people I know who struggle with same-sex attraction.” But, by-and-large, I think we’ve been very pleased—and the members of the committee have been pleased—that it seems like it’s had a unifying effect in the PCA—and not a unity that’s just, “Hey, let’s find the lowest common denominator so we can all agree on something.” I’ve gotten some personal remarks from people that I would say are both to the right of me and to the left of me. I would put myself sort of right of center in the PCA. And so I think we’ve been pleased that people were able to get the theology of it and appreciate the rigor we tried to express with the theology, but yet sensed a pastoral tone and sensitivity to real people who are on the other side of all these issues.

TOOLEY: And perhaps you all have been unique among American Protestant denominations in addressing this particular issue with such depth. Would that be accurate to say?

DEYOUNG: Well, we try to really plumb the depths of our own confessional tradition, and so there’s—The report is like a lot of reports; it has a lot of different parts to it and it’s thirty, forty pages long, but really there’s about five or six pages at the beginning, our twelve statements—if anyone wanted to go find it they can Google it or they can find it on the PCA website—and those twelve statements really form the heart of it. And you can see there we really tried to show our work in the footnotes. In the footnotes, there’s Bavinck, and Berkoff, and Calvin, and Owen and Turretin, and really trying to say, “What does the best of our Reformed tradition say about these issues of sin, and the will, and inclination?” And there’s a lot that’s out there. And so we wanted to try to get the best of our tradition, guarded and vetted through scripture of course, and then apply it to this situation. So hopefully, we did that in a way that is both digestible for elder boards and people who just want to read something in in fifteen minutes, and also shows people that we really tried to look at this in a robust way.

TOOLEY: Shifting to another—

DEYOUNG: —Another easy topic!

TOOLEY: —Controversy—easy topic—in terms of how Christianity in America is or is not addressing issues of race. And the great challenge there is to look at these issues, again, deeply and theologically, and not just as an echo chamber to the rest of the culture, which you’ve been trying to do in a series of blogs recently. So tell us a little bit about what you’ve been saying.

DEYOUNG: So I wrote, over the course of the last month, four or five different blog posts on thinking theologically about race and dealing with theology obviously, and cultural matters going on, but also looking at American history. And you’re absolutely right, I think—not to get to your last question—but there’s a lot that we can be discouraged about—I mean I think ‘echo chamber’ is a good phrase. I think Christians—and I think this falls on both sides of the political spectrum, I think Christians are reflecting political, cultural priorities and language, and ways of thinking, more than they are shaping them, at the moment. So I wrote these pieces, certainly not as an expert, but as someone who cares about them, as a pastor who has to deal with them, as someone who’s tried to think and read widely and deeply over the years about some of these things, and wanted to try to find a way to perhaps provide some other lanes, or avenues, or categories then just the simplistic, and I think unhelpful, categories that are out there sometimes, that put this into a binary: Are you are you woke? And if you’re not fully woke, then you’re a reactionary or you’re racist. And I wanted to say, “Look, look, we can do better than that as Christians.” And so, I wanted to try to really look at what the nature of racism is. If you’re white, are you automatically guilty of it? I tried to argue that you’re not. And yet at the same time, I want to be sensitive. I didn’t want the pieces to just be a pat on the back for people like me to say, “Nothing to see here, everything’s fine.” I wanted to say, “Look, there’s other avenues of the heart in loving our neighbor that do need to be expressed and explored, and there’s ways in which, on both sides, we’ve not been perhaps sensitive to think through this carefully. And my central contention in writing this was to say we have theological resources as Christians to try to address some of these issues. Now the Bible is not going to tell us the state of policing in America, and that’s where we need to have Christian freedom, and we need to have kindness towards one another. The Bible’s not going to tell you that. But the Bible says a lot about the nature of justice, and sin, and forgiveness, and culpability. And so let’s start with what the Bible says about this, and the best of our theological tradition, and then put these issues through that grid, rather than just gravitating toward all of the categories and letting privilege, fragility, cultural Marxism—whatever your buzzword is—letting those do all the heavy lifting. I think that’s a mistake.

TOOLEY: And could you discuss a little bit these concepts of corporate sin, institutional sin, and multi-generational sin?

DEYOUNG: Yeah, I mean that is one of the biggest issues, and I think I’ll answer in two ways. First, biblically, theologically, I try to make the case that while there is a certain corporate identity and a corporate nature to sin at times in the bible, it’s not the ways in which it’s being used today. So that is, Israel as a covenant people, in a covenant relationship with God, may express corporate repentance for their sin. Or a king, or a prophet, may express with a ‘we,’ and ‘us,’ and ‘our,’ their corporate sin. Those moments come when the sin is either continuing in a pervasive way, the one who’s confessing it is himself expressing some complicity in it, whereas that corporateness and accountability doesn’t stretch across all time, all people, all places. So just one quick example I try to flesh out, is look at the book of Acts and how the apostles at first address the Jews in Jerusalem. And they’ll say, “You crucified Jesus.” You, meaning within weeks, it was people like you, the Jewish leaders, you actually were the ones who cast the vote to hand him over to the Romans that he might be crucified. So, they can—even though they didn’t nail the nails—corporately, the Jews in Jerusalem, they could say, “You did this.” But it’s striking, through the rest of the book of Acts, when Paul or Peter are somewhere else in the empire, they don’t tell the Jews in Pisidian Antioch, “You crucified Jesus.” Or when Paul comes back to Jerusalem years later, he doesn’t speak in that same way. So just the fact that you were a Jew in some other part of the country, or some other time and space, didn’t mean that they spoke in the same way. And I think that’s instructive for us.

And then second, real quickly, I think whenever we talk about corporate responsibility, we’re talking not just about a theological, biblical question, but a kind of existential question. And I found Shelby Steele really helpful in some of his works on white guilt—The Content of Our Character, first book writing about this. And he makes the point that on both sides—white and black—it’s often—the way we talk to each other says, “guilty, guilty, guilty.” So, okay, you don’t think you’re a racist, and your parents weren’t a racist, but you have privilege, and if you don’t think you have privilege, then that’s just white fragility, and if you don’t think that then you don’t really understand what happened in 1619, and every step of the way, you cannot get out from being guilty. And then whites often fire back with, “Well what about the abortion rate in black communities? What about the number of blacks who were just killed in Chicago over the weekend? What about the out of wedlock birth rate in black communities?” And that’s a way of saying, “No, no, no we’re not guilty. You’re guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty.” All of those things we need to talk about and can be relevant, but I think there’s an existential personal issue when many of us come to this, that we’re not just talking in a vacuum about exegesis and theology, we’re feeling something defensively in our own hearts.

TOOLEY: And then finally, Kevin, as hopefully we’re starting to emerge—hopefully—from the coronavirus, how do you assess the state of Christianity in America post-pandemic? And more specifically, how is American evangelicalism doing?

DEYOUNG: Well, I want to give a real upbeat answer. So, let me try to end with some positive. But there’s a lot of things that are concerning. I think there’s a splintering—that’s always the case in an amorphous, broad movement like evangelicalism—what does it even mean to be an evangelical? But I just think of, in my own Reformed-ish, conservative, evangelical kind of world, I see groups, and people, and networks that were more aligned five or ten years ago, splintering into factions or fractions. It’s social justice issues, it’s racial issues, it’s basic political posture, it’s whether you can vote for Trump or not, and now it’s whether you wear masks or whether you should be meeting or not. So, there’s lots to be discouraged about. And I see Christians dividing over things that I think they shouldn’t be dividing over. And I see people not always leading with the sort of courage or kindness that I would like to see.

The positive side is, while I think post coronavirus, churches are going to lose some people—I think sadly, we will see some people who say, “You know what, the live stream has been good; I can do that over breakfast; I didn’t miss church all that much,” I think the positive is, those who have really been walking with the Lord, those who have really been committed to the church, are going to come back and be eager to do so, and say, “You know what, thank you for doing the live stream, but I miss real life people; I miss hugs, and I miss singing, and I miss being with the church body. I miss seeing my pastor, I miss preaching to real people. And we’re ready to give, and to serve, and to give it all we have. And hopefully there will be a renewed sense of gratitude. You never know how wonderful boring normalcy is until it’s gone. So I hope that there are some things, some lessons that we don’t forget through the midst of this. We tend to be very forgetful with those good lessons, but hopefully on the other side of it, we’ve come to a renewed appreciation for rest, for beauty, for real people, [inaudible], all that that means, and there’s an eagerness to worship and to do work for the sake of Christ and his kingdom.

TOOLEY: Kevin DeYoung, pastor and theologian, thank you so much for all of your insights.

DEYOUNG: Keep up the good work, great to be with you.