The Fall and Fall of David French
His Journey Toward the Left Reaches a New Low
The meme has become reality: David French announced in his Sunday New York Times column that he is voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in November. To “save conservatism”—in reality, the sclerotic ideology that failed to stop the Left’s rolling revolution—French will be siding with the most pro-abortion, pro-trans, pro-open border, pro-riot, pro-Deep State, and pro-DEI presidential ticket in American history. If you’re wondering what the apotheosis of Principled Conservatism™ looks like, here it is: handing the keys of the country over to the Left as MSNBC hosts congratulate you for your “courageous” stand against the powerless hicks in flyover country.
Don’t let the list of his conservative bona fides near the top of the column fool you: French has fully embraced the ruling class creed that props up the current regime in Washington. He is the poster child of a tight-knit circle of evangelical elites whose anabaptist-for-thee rhetoric and theology of “Christian witness” has effectually recast the leading concerns of the regime into “Gospel issues,” making it safe for Christians to vote for Democrats.
One reason French says he will vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is because they “will stand against Vladimir Putin.” (It’s curious that Walz wanting a far closer relationship with the regime in China is not disqualifying for French.) Putin is supposedly the Hitler of the twenty-first century and must be stopped at all costs. But if Putin is as dangerous as French claims, what lengths is he willing to go to stop him? The U.S. declaring war on Russia? Dropping nuclear bombs on the country? It’s curious how little concern the most moralistic evangelicals seem to have with open-ended conflicts, wars of choice, and mass civilian casualties and deaths.
Another reason French will mark his ballot for the far-left Harris/Walz ticket is because Donald Trump is a violent authoritarian who will end our democracy. But Trump critics almost seem to forget that he had a first term in office, which, for good or for ill, is likely a preview of a possible second Trump administration. (My hope is that if Trump is elected, he will act far more in line with Richard Nixon’s envisioned second term prior to Watergate upending his presidency.) This is the same “authoritarian” Trump who abided by the decisions of federal courts after they overturned large swaths of his policy initiatives, especially involving his attempts to pare back the administrative state. It’s been a while since I studied the Weimar Republic, but I don’t remember Hitler simply acceding to the wishes of Paul von Hindenburg.
While Christians may decide they won’t vote for Trump, they don’t have the option of voting for candidates who stand squarely against the very moral order that God created. Vote for a third party. Decline to vote. But Christians cannot support the Democratic Party in its current form.
Take abortion. Yes, the Republican Party platform on life was altered prior to the RNC in ways that angered many evangelicals. But is French correct in calling it “functionally pro-choice”? The Republican Party platform “proudly stand[s] for families and life” and believes that “the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.” The platform also opposes late-term abortion.
Compare that language to the Democratic Party platform on this same question, which is put under the euphemistic subhead “Securing Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice.” The Democrats “believe unequivocally, like the majority of Americans, that every woman should be able to access high-quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion.” Furthermore, the Democrats pledge to “overturn federal and state laws that create barriers to reproductive health and rights” and “repeal the Hyde Amendment, and protect and codify the right to reproductive freedom.” Finally, “Democrats oppose restrictions on medication abortion care that are inconsistent with the most recent medical and scientific evidence and that do not protect public health.”
The contrast couldn’t be clearer. The Democrats want every American to shout the goodness of abortion. There’s no neutrality about this. There’s no sitting on the sidelines. You must scream from the rooftops that abortion is very good.
Even if French is correct that Republicans abandoned their principles on the question of life and became “a fundamentally different party,” this does not give him a right to vote for a party that is radically pro-abortion to its very core. This is logic 101. There is no right to do a wrong. There is no right to violate the natural law. And though French rightly points out the pro-life movement’s many failures in the post-Dobbs era, neither does this give Christians an opening to vote for Democrats.
What happened to the David French who harangued conservative Trump voters in column after column, week after week, for supposedly sacrificing their principles on the altar of power? But the man who hung Trump’s immorality around the neck of his evangelical voters is now fine with voting for the morally compromised Kamala Harris, who had an affair with then-married Willie Brown in the mid-1990s.
However, I don’t want to settle for the easy charge of hypocrisy. French has discovered that one must make trade-offs in politics—which is a good step. The problem lies, however, in his morally ludicrous judgement of the good that each of the candidates would do should they ascend to the White House.
At its core, a vote is about making a proper assessment of which candidate will better achieve the common good of the civil order. But the common good does not equate to supporting abortion on demand, LGBTQ insanity, erasing our Southern border, and the looting and burning down of our cities. French’s political judgment has seemingly been warped beyond all recognition by a deep-seated disdain toward his chief political enemies: Donald Trump and his large band of evangelical voters.
What would the past iterations of David French—the man who defended keeping the Confederate battle flag at public Confederate memorials and denounced critical race theory as “racial poison”—think of David French now? But the far more interesting question is, What presuppositions did French hold then that helped turn him into a Harris voter? And how did the Big Eva machine grease the skids of his transformation from conservative movement lawyer to mouthpiece for the Left? After all, by constantly giving French a platform, evangelical elites have been tacitly instructing evangelicals for well over a decade that French is an example to which every Christian should aspire to in public life.
But for French, his good friend Russell Moore, and others in the Big Eva orbit, the slippery slope remains undefeated. A perspicacious commentator on X even asked in 2019 when French would be endorsing Kamala Harris after French pointed out that her abuse of “executive authority” was “a key part of her platform.” The general course of too many public theologians, well-known pastors, and institutional evangelicals has been to downplay the sins of the Left while excoriating the sins of the Right, which clearly has helped many in their own journeys toward the Left.
Summing up French, there’s his adamantine shell of Never Trumpism that cannot be breached. There’s his submission to woke platitudes that nearly every member of the evangelical industrial complex voiced during the summer of 2020, as Megan Basham recounts in her book Shepherds for Sale. There’s French’s open praise of drag queen story hour (the American founders, by contrast, had the moral character not to confuse liberty and licentiousness). There are the bad biblical interpretations that prop up French’s twenty-first century morality. And there’s his gleeful consuming of the rot our culture keeps churning out on every streaming platform.
The PCA’s decision to rescind French’s invitation at their recent General Assembly looks even better in retrospect. They rightly refused to platform a man who would have attempted to make it safe for those in the audience to vote for the most leftist presidential candidate in our nation’s history. As Proverbs 14:7 teaches, “Stay away from a fool, for you will not find knowledge on their lips.”
After that dust up, American Reformer Contributing Editor Ben Dunson wrote at First Things, “Courage to do the right thing in the face of unrelenting cultural pressure is contagious. And such contagious courage is sorely needed today.” Pastors and evangelical institutions must have the courage to combat the gross moral errors of individuals like David French and groups like Evangelicals for Harris who are guiding Christians down a terrible road, strewn with the bones of the dead. The theologically inept Christianized politics that many evangelical institutions have advanced over the past few decades has produced leaders who waffle when adversity comes and then capitulate—all the while gaslighting everyone else that they are the only ones displaying moral clarity.
Christians must forcefully reject this trajectory. They must help mold and publicly platform Christians who combine a serious understanding of politics with the fortitude and moral character to safeguard and strengthen the pillars of a decent civil order. There is much work to be done. But if the very early stages of a renaissance that looks to be happening in some Christians circles is any indication, the foundations are being poured right now that will support future success.
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