Donald Trump says he’s a Presbyterian.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) says he’s not.
Who’s right?
Curiously, Donald Trump is not the one asking what it means to be Presbyterian, the PCUSA is having that internal conversation about its own identity.
The denomination’s online survey that is being used to discern the identity of the PCUSA, begins:
First, we are going to ask some questions about why you are a Presbyterian. From this, we hope to learn who we are as Presbyterians, what our shared identity is, and how we express it. In addition, we are going to ask you to give us some thoughts about the denomination and its functions and importance.
The first question then acknowledges that they’d really like to hear from PCUSA members, but there are other options listed and there is no indication that if you are not a member of the PCUSA your survey answers will be excluded.
Further along the survey asks people to self-identify on a social and theological spectrum from liberal to neutral to conservative. This seems curious in a denomination that has been calving off its theologically conservative members and churches since the 1920’s.
To further complicate the question, no definitions of social or theological liberalism nor conservatism are offered, so the participant is left to choose a point along a spectrum without reference to any fixed position.
- What does it mean to be theologically conservative in a denomination where it is considered equally faithful to believe or not believe, support or not support, same-sex marriage?
- What does it mean to be socially conservative in a denomination that advocates for causes that would be considered socially liberal in D.C. and at the U.N.?
Then there’s question 13. If I were to print it here I would be accused of unnecessarily inflaming the conversation. So, I will let you go see for yourself and then ask who has the identity issue, Donald Trump or the PCUSA?
Those who are seeking to have Donald Trump excommunicated from the PCUSA may well find themselves hoisted upon their own petard of full inclusion. Unless, that is, the PCUSA has become a denomination that welcomes everyone except those who don’t welcome everyone.
Maybe @realDonaldTrump could Tweet his ideas about what it means to be Presbyterian at #PCUSAidentity. In such an exchange, both might be revealed.
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OK, you polity geeks, I have a question for you.
It is my understanding that in the PCUSA there are three particular categories of members: (1) baptized, (2) active, and (3) inactive. Is that right?
If the Donald (pbuh) was baptized in a PCUSA or predecessor denomination, and if he went through a confirmation or communicants class and made a profession of faith at some point in his early years, then is he not still a member of the PCUSA, unless he formally moved his church membership somewhere else?
My sense of it is that while the Donald (pbuh) is most assuredly not a “active member” of the PCUSA, he would still be considered a baptized member or an inactive member of the denomination.
Am I wrong about this?
“The first question then acknowledges that they’d really like to hear from PCUSA members, but there are other options listed and there is no indication that if you are not a member of the PCUSA your survey answers will be excluded.”
Actually, if you answer that you are a member of a different Presbyterian denomination, you will be given the message, “Sorry, you do not qualify to take this survey,” and not given access to any of the other questions. Those who are conducting this survey really are not interested in considering the opinions of former PC(USA) members.
If his name has been culled from the membership rolls after a protracted absence from worship at the congregation where he was a member, he is no longer a member.
So, if his name was “culled” from the membership of the church, there should be a record of this in the session minutes and/or the official roll books of the particular church that did the culling. Is this right?
There should be.
My suspicion is that like untold hundreds of thousands of people over the years whose names have been moved to the inactive rolls of the churches they once attended, the Donald’s name is probably still on the inactive membership roll of his home church — but no one outside of the Donald himself is keen to acknowledge that a connection remains. Oh well.
Donald Trump has said that he was reared in the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, which was a Dutch Reformed Church, a Calvinist denomination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Collegiate_Church
It is now affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. The Reformed Church in America has a presbyterian polity and is governed by elders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Church_in_America#Polity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyterian_polity
Donald Trump, then, may safely claim to be presbyterian. But he has never been a member of the PCUSA.
We need to remember that the PCUSA does not have any right to the exclusive use of the word “presbyterian”.
On July 10, 2011 the PC(USA)’s new Form of Government went into affect. According to G-3.0204a, local congregations no longer maintain an “Inactive Roll.”
Inactive Rolls are past history and no longer a legit PCUSA polity term. Our Session maintains an electronic Roll book and we went back and changed every entry from “moved to the inactive roll,” to “removed from roll.”
Names, even when “removed” remain as part of the official record. So unless the PC in Queens physically removed Trump’s name, there should be a record of his being baptized, confirmed, etc.
Thanks, TE Robert. That’s what I was wanting to know.
Thank you for the reminder, George. The PCUSA certainly does not have any special claim to the word Presbyterian, although it continues to act as if it did. And, as it becomes more and more functionally hierarchical in its polity, one cannot help but question whether Presbyterian is even a good descriptive word for the PCUSA. It certainly retains the external structures of historic Presbyterianism (at least in vestigial form), but its internal operational dynamic has become something else entirely. Increasingly, I have taken to referring the the PCUSA simply as the PCUSA, since I am not altogether sure that at the General Assembly level it fully qualifies for either the P or the C.
it is common for those in the R.C.A. to say “presbyterian” when not in Dutch areas to those who don’t know or when the option of “Reformed” is not available (e.g., desired chaplain on a medical form).
about 1970 there was a full-page ad in a West Palm Beach (FL) paper by conservatives in the P.c.U.S. warning that if the union with U.P.C.U.S.A. went through, there would be a top-down command structure with bishops supervising the churches. I was a youngster then and the ad was not retained. NOte that was close to a decade before the U.P.C.U.S.A. changed their structure.
Let’s see if Trump shows up at Marble Collegiate Church for Christmas sevices, he says he’s a Christmas-Easter kind of guy.