My husband was a teaching elder, a pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, PCA. He’d been in the PCA for many years. It’s all he’s ever been as an adult since college. He was in ministry for a long time. He was an InterVarsity campus minister, and ended up getting involved in a PCA church. He became a ruling elder and had helped plant that church and then he went to seminary in the PCA, attending the official seminary, Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis. After we met and married, we were called to help two churches here in Virginia, in Hopewell, for a few years, and then we were called to church planting in Montana.
I’m giving you all this information because what you have to understand -what I want people to understand- about our story is that while it may seem now that we are so anti-PCA, I want you to understand that my husband has been nothing but PCA and supportive of it, working within the PCA as a denomination for nearly 30 years. And he has believed in the PCA even though he always knew that he was swimming upstream and left-ish leaning. You know, if you wanna put it in those terms, which I don’t. I’ve never loved those terms: left and right, liberal, progressive, conservative. It’s all directional, right? It depends on where you are. “Stand in the place where you live/ now face north.”
And so, my husband’s always known this. A good friend of ours said at one point, “You’ve always been a square peg in a round hole, right?” And I said to that, that it’s fine if the round hole is big enough. If the round hole is big enough to contain in the square, then you’re okay. It’s when the hole starts getting smaller that you start feeling the pressure to trim parts of yourself off to fit in.
The alarms go off, right? The alarms start going off because you find yourself in this place where you’re not sure if you’re going to survive.
It was in January of 2023 when my husband one morning, I’ll never forget it… I was sitting on the couch, drinking my coffee, reading like I often do and he came over. He took my coffee cup and my phone and he put them down on the table and he took my hands in his and he sat down next to me. Then he said, “I am sorry that it took me this long to really understand what it’s been like for you.” He said it out loud… as a woman, as a woman of color, as someone who has struggled with gender and sexuality, as someone who has been trying to work within the confines of this system that has just abused you.
We both cried together and it was this moment of such pure clarity for both of us. We had to leave. We had to get out. We were just drowning. We could no longer swim upstream. And it was that moment that my husband really articulated what we had both been feeling for years.
We were done with this system that bases itself on the hierarchy that it does and the commitment to complementarian theology and what we both struggled to put into words.
We had definitely referred to ourselves as “soft complementarians” in the past, but we still didn’t love that. It still left something to be desired. We weren’t quite at a point where we could say everything’s equal. There’s still that struggle in me as a woman who has fought hard to be a woman and understand what all of that meant for me.
I didn’t get married until I was 39, so I wasn’t a wife until I was 39. And I didn’t have children until I was 40, so I hadn’t become a mom until I was 40 years old. And so I had spent all this time trying to understand who I was as a woman without those two major factors, right? Those two major identities that women have in society, right? I mean, those are huge, right? Wife and Mother. And trying to unpack what that meant for me as a single childless woman, and especially in complementarian circles, was very difficult. It was very difficult for me for many years. I struggled. I just really tried to understand all the arguments.
I’ve never been one who wants to base anything solely on my personal experience and anecdotal evidence. Like those are important. Don’t get me wrong. Please don’t get me wrong. It’s absolutely important for all of us to understand personal experience, and that the more we talk about it, the more it adds up, right? The more that I say certain things about my experiences, the more people come out and say, yes, that’s been my experience too. And so you get the affirmation and the data; you collect the evidence. You collect all of that evidence. Collectively, we come together and we say there is something about this system. The system itself is the problem. It’s crushing us.
What is that system based on?
What is it that creates this hierarchy within any local group of people, a local church. The local church body itself has a hierarchy that cannot be denied or ignored or underestimated, and when so many of these little hierarchies make the same errors, you have to ask yourself “Is it the system itself?”
And that’s where my husband Rob Wootton landed that day. We have to leave the system.
We tried for so long to make excuses for the system, to blame shift, saying, no it’s not the system itself. It’s the people in the system. It’s user error, right? And at that point in January of 2023, my husband came to the conclusion. No, it’s not those things. It’s the system itself. And so we had to leave.
And, you know, there’s a long story to all of that and how that came about. And that wasn’t the only reason; complementarian theology itself was not the sole reason that we left the PCA, but it was a big one because it impacts everything else. It impacts all that we saw in abuse advocacy cases. Every time that we tried to address abuse in the church, complementarian theology absolutely put its foot down when it comes to abuse advocacy. We saw it over and over and over again when the system itself bolsters abusive people, and so often men. The system itself kept coming down hard on women and not the men and, again, it’s not just anecdotal evidence. It’s hard data. It’s looking at the data, looking at the numbers, looking at the cases, specific cases, even just the ones I knew about personally, over and over and over again. Where did the courts of the church land? They landed hard on the women and not on the men.
And so, our abuse advocacy was a huge part of our realization of the system itself being broken.
And Christian nationalism is in lockstep with this system. Make no mistake.
The PCA as a denomination is one of the most influential denominations in the USA that you’ve never heard of.
We’ve been trying for the better part of the past 10 years to make these connections for people. Listen, the PCA as a denomination is one of the most influential denominations in the USA that you’ve never heard of. The average American person has never heard of the PCA, but trust me they have their hands in every pot. They have PCA people on the inside of every power organization that there is. They are influencers and have made a huge impact on where we are currently as a country, and it’s amazing to me that it’s downplayed as much as it is. The Southern Baptists get a lot of attention because they’re so huge. And everybody knows the Southern Baptists and everyone associates Southern Baptists with a lot of the political agenda and hoopla, right? But I’m telling you that the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA ever since it left, the PCUS in 1973, they have been wielding power behind the scenes in ways most people don’t even know about and don’t even think about. It won’t matter to many people when they can play some version of respectability politics the way they do.
One of the ways they do this in public is to pitch themselves as “above the fray.” Oh, we’re not being political. No, they love being the Big Tent, Broad Middle. They’re both sides. Remember the AND campaign? The PCA loved the AND campaign, this third wayism, right? Tim Keller, of course, is the crown prince of the third way. And everybody wanted to embrace the idea that we can be this neutral, above the fray organization as a whole.
But it’s absolutely untrue and it’s reductive and they want you to believe that because it’s easy. It’s the easiest, most comfortable place for them to be.
And when my husband and I tried to connect some dots to some of the things that were happening within the PCA, we got all kinds of rebuke from lots of different directions, saying that we were just stirring the pot or we were being divisive or overreacting or that’s not really what’s happening, et cetera, et cetera. Because that’s that’s how the PCA operates. “We’re above that. We’re not engaging in any of that. That’s not what’s happening here.” It makes me think of that meme with the actor Leslie Nelson standing in front of a huge explosion behind him saying “There’s nothing to see here!” It’s nothing to see here. You guys are overreacting.
It’s always the canaries in the coal mines. The canaries flip out and then die. That’s supposed to indicate something to people.
When it comes to the ideology and the theology of my former denomination and the way that I see it bolstering- whether it admits that it’s doing that or not doesn’t matter- the arguments of Christian Nationalism. They will attempt to say they are not Christian Nationalists all day long and twice on Sundays that they’re not, but they actually, in reality, align a lot more with Christian nationalism than they may ever admit. The stated values and ideologies of gender, sexuality, education, religious freedoms, and all the mountainous mandates they uphold are in lockstep with each other almost entirely.
Quickly, about the PCA study committee … there was just this past summer in June at General Assembly a vote was approved to do a study committee and they’d have this big report created. Personally, I don’t expect them to make any bold statements. I don’t expect them to rebuke or condemn. I don’t see them condemning anything. They’re going to lay out a very thorough research paper. Well, if they’re thorough, they’re going to mention Doug Wilson and their affiliation with him in the past. They probably won’t. I’m not going to make any bets cause I’m not a betting man, but my gut tells me that they’re not going to mention Doug. And my gut tells me that, at the end of the day, they’re going to commit again to this “let’s stay above the fray” type of value system where they more value people who don’t talk about politics at all than those of us who try to engage in politics in a way that we believe is faithful to the actual cause of Christ and the actual cause of the kingdom of heaven on earth. They’ll give some AND campaign type of commitments that will again just appeal to everyone to stay out of the specifics and that God is still in control and Jesus is on his throne. That’s what we’ll get. I hope I’m wrong. I do.
I hope they won’t just distance themselves from it all, like the Benedict option. Have you heard of that? It’s the commitment to just remove ourselves. In my experience, that’s essentially what tends to happen in PCA circles. It’s like taking the perpetual Benedict Option, saying, no, we’re actually gonna not press in and not try to combat the ideals and the values and the belief systems that say they’re Christian, but aren’t.
We’ll see if that is the direction that the PCA takes. I’m definitely not someone who will hold my breath for that. You know that the place where I started, complementarianism, and how it bolsters Christian Nationalism are the ways in which, in the home, women are relegated to home life and being a wife and mother, as their primary identities. And then, that needs to influence the way that women engage in politics. I mean that’s where we start. And if that were true, I wouldn’t be allowed to write any of this unless my hub said it was ok.
That’s where complementarian theology and Christian Nationalism meet in the middle; there’s a marriage and it’s a rock solid marriage. We’re going to see it. We’re going to see it more in churches that hold to the gender roles. We’re going to see it more in education, public education, and higher ed. Women and children are going to be sacrificed to these ideals, that women as females of the species are just second class. They’re second class citizens. And we’re going to see it unfold if we’re not fighting back. I for one don’t want to see it happen and I’m doing what I can. I’m doing what I can to sound the alarm to be the canary and to anybody who stays in the mine, well… that’s your choice. My husband said so too.
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Asking For Me 
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