Zachary Garris has now done what his accuser kept demanding: he put the receipts on the table. On September 21, he published a documented thread arguing that Eli McGowan has spent years defaming men to his right with the language of “racist,” “Nazi,” and “White nationalist,” as reputation-killing shorthand for his Antifa church dweeb hall monitoring. Garris framed the dispute in the only terms a Presbyterian pastor should: the Ninth Commandment as the Westminster Larger Catechism explains it. Defamation includes the refusal of “a charitable esteem of” a neighbor. It includes using even true fragments “maliciously to a wrong end” or twisting them “to a wrong meaning.”
Full thread:
McGowan’s reply was to deny the charge, nitpick chronology, and keep the labels in circulation. The pattern Garris laid out is not subtle. McGowan treated Stephen Wolfe as the academic engine of “Reformed white nationalism,” then let the stain travel to Garris because the two men co-authored Reformed Christian Politics. He called an American Reformer article an “overtly white nationalist screed.” He implied Garris had written a foreword for an “explicitly pro-Hitler” publisher, then, after the timeline was shown to be wrong, deleted one post without a public apology and left a similar insinuation standing. He told the public Garris faced trial “for various remarks on race” and for liking “racist memes,” when the court of the church found him not guilty on the slavery teaching charge and convicted him on a separate 2023 exchange with Anthony Bradley. He pointed to elders from his own PCA congregation who had signed an allegation letter and treated that as proof of “public false teaching,” long after the presbytery had already cleared the central doctrinal accusation. He even left a one-star Google review of Garris’s church claiming Garris does not think racism is a moral failing. That is not fraternal correction. That is a campaign.
McGowan presents himself as a lifelong PCA conservative, a postmillennial establishmentarian who has never voted Democrat and has never backed “Antifa, the street gang.” The denial is thin. It lets him keep the respectable Presbyterian costume while doing the work his critics on the right have long called antifa-adjacent: map a network, collapse distinctions, attach the worst available noun to the nearest available pastor, and dare the church courts to treat the smear as mere speech. He has written for The Bulwark against “Christian nationalists in our own churches.” He boasts of publishing leaked or private ecclesiastical material, Zoom clips, old sin, and association charts. He treats Wolfe as the gateway text for “Reformed white nationalists,” then treats anyone who writes with Wolfe, publishes with adjacent presses, or refuses McGowan’s taxonomy as contaminated.
The Rio Grande trial is the clearest proof that the method works even when it loses on the merits. Dozens of officers signed letters demanding an investigation of Garris over slavery comments and race rhetoric. The court examined the main charge and found him not guilty. The conviction that stuck was “unwholesome speech” over sarcastic 2023 posts aimed at Bradley. Supporters of Garris called the result process-as-punishment: acquit the doctrine, hang him for tone, and let the public remember only the word “suspended.” McGowan had already primed that memory. He broke news of recommended charges, framed the case around race and memes, and kept implying that a cleared pastor was still a public false teacher. A man who leaks, labels, and lingers after the verdict is not serving the peace of the church. He is using the church as a venue for an outside political fight.
Garris’s theological point is the one the PCA cannot keep dodging. If “White nationalist” and “Nazi” become the ordinary vocabulary for intra-Reformed disagreement over magistrates, nations, and the older Protestant establishment, then the Ninth Commandment is a dead letter. McGowan’s defense is that he is “identifying people correctly by ideology, by association.” Association is exactly the tool the Catechism warns against when it is used to pervert meaning. A foreword to Thomas Cartwright is not a Hitler preface. A liked meme about the inflation of the word “racism” is not a denial that ethnic malice is sin. Treating those gaps as proof is the opposite of charitable esteem.
The deeper problem is not that McGowan opposes Christian nationalism. The problem is the style of opposition he has imported into the courts and feeds of the PCA and other denominations: permanent suspicion, public humiliation, and the conversion of brothers into exhibits. He can reject the street-gang version of Antifa and still practice the church version of the same instinct, hunt the reactionary, collapse him into the worst historical analogue, and treat the resulting panic as righteousness. Garris, whatever one thinks of his politics, at least argued the case in the church’s own moral grammar. He named the texts. He posted the screenshots. He asked for repentance rather than another round of nickname theology. That is the difference between a pastor defending his name and a muckraker who needs the name to stay dirty.
