As the PCUSA was circling the doctrinal drain at their 1932 assembly, they did not lack for social, political, or moralistic concern. As a friend (a former PCA General Assembly moderator) noted, those hard Depression days couldn’t have been easy for the pious, abstemious presbyterians. Imagine drowning your sorrows in lemonade! They had nothing stronger to drink…and claimed to like it that way. Oh well, the Ninth Commandment has always been a challenge.
Witness a wire-service account of the Assembly’s “expressions” and resoluting:
Oppose Referendum
The (Presbyterian Church in the USA) Assembly expressed opposition to "a referendum on the 18th Amendment," and reaffirmed "the deliverances of former Assemblies pledging unequivocal indorsement (sic) of the 18th Amendment."
Rev. Mark E. Matthews, of Seattle, declared that those who say legalized beer would produce some $300,000,000 in revenue "are insulting the intelligence of the business men of our country." The total tax on all liquor, "hard, red, round, and black," he added, was only a little over $300,000,000 in the old days.
(AP via the Philadelpia Inquirer, 5/31/1932)
This short snippet displays the mainline’s propensity for politicking which continues unabated, yea even in 2024. It also contains an unfortunate instance of Ministers Doing Mathematics which is almost always a bad idea. The PCUSA’s pious opposition was to no avail—a year and a half later the 21st Amendment killed the 18th and happy (and sometimes hoppy) days were here again.
It also reminds us how much things have changed. Nearly half of all PCUSA ministers are now females (thanks, Robert Speer), and one assumes that the average Minister Megan or Pastor Caitlyn can and does Wine Mom with the best of them…though they probably still have only Welch’s in their communion trays. Pietistic old liturgical habits die hard.
Faithful readers of this insignificant online publication know that nearly everything comes back to Machen here, and this post is no exception. In the same issue of Christianity Today (the CT of Machen, not Russell Moore!) that reported on the 1932 PCUSA General Assembly we find the approvingly quoted words of a Southern presbyterian minister that do touch on Prohibition:
Putting First Things First
MUCH present-day preaching has been aptly characterized as "suburban1 preaching." It deals with what lies on the periphery of the things of Christ rather than with what lies at their center. "Suburban," however, is about the last adjective that could be properly employed to describe the sermon preached by Dr. William Crowe of St. Louis at the opening of the General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church. Dr. Crowe…
It is the neglect of this primary task (preaching and evangelism) through absorption in things of secondary importance that, according to Dr. Crowe, explains as nothing else the present-day weakness of the Church. Lack of church attendance, diminished income, and such like, are merely symptomatic of the real trouble. The seat of the trouble lies in "confused thinking on the part of preachers and people." We cite a few typical passages: "When the pulpit loses its positive note and the pew its positive faith—the faith that makes all things possible—foreboding must prevail. ...'Away with the supernatural' is a slogan that gains in popularity. The doctrine of sin is taboo, of regeneration, an apostolic . fancy .... Therefore the whole head is sick, the whole heart faint .... The Church of Jesus Christ has allowed itself to become allied to a party of theorists, dominated by an idea of shallow social reformation, all the while forgetting that the great Head of the Church came into the world solely for the purpose of giving power to men to become the sons of God .... The only adequate solution is to be found in a return to the program of our Lord, which is Evangelism. The Church needs to retrace its steps and get back to the doing of one thing. May God help it to do that one thing well .... National prohibition is an achievement for the American people. But it is no business of the Church of Jesus Christ in its organized capacity to promote the addition of any amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It is not the business of the Church of Jesus Christ in its organized capacity to promote the election of any candidate for the presidency of the United States. Nor is it the business of the Church of Jesus Christ in its organized capacity to assume responsibility for defeating any candidate for the presidency of the United States. If the Church keeps up its program of meddling in the business of other people, the time may come when it will advise me to use some particular kind of roofing on my warehouse. Instead of spiritualizing business and politics. the Church is bent upon secularizing the Gospel of Christ."Dr. Crowe shows himself a true son of the Southern Presbyterian Church in his insistence on the principle of the strict spirituality of the Church with its corollary, the non-participation of the Church in its organized capacity in the political and secular.
It is telling that Machen and friends did not comment on the PCUSA’s anti-Prohibition deliverances but did include the words of a Southern counterpart that put the spirituality of the church ahead of the suppression of spiritous liquors. Machen was hardly a boozer. We seem to recall Machen’s mention of drinking beer while a student in Germany (imagine such a thing!), but beyond that evidence suggests that Machen was a practical— though not a principled—teetotaler. He opposed Prohibition on principle. And his loving liberal opponents had already2 used his principles against him in the most underhanded way:
The election and promotion of any Princeton professor required confirmation by the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.'s General Assembly. This step in the nomination process was usually a mere formality. In the history of Princeton no nominee had ever been vetoed. Yet a different outcome awaited Machen. The 1926 General Assembly received a report that questioned his soundness because of his attitude toward Prohibition. At the spring meeting of the Presbytery of New Jersey Machen had voted against a resolution that endorsed the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. He did not want his vote recorded because he knew his position differed from most American Protestants. The prohibition of the sale and distribution of alcohol enjoyed widespread support as an effort to retain the Christian character of the nation at a time of unprecedented non-Protestant immigration to the United States. Machen's opposition to Prohibition was a major reason for the General Assembly's failure to confirm his nomination. As one of his friends later told him, the Assembly was "rabidly Prohibitionist"; commissioners could not understand why a good Christian would not support such an obviously good and biblical cause.
Machen opposed Presbyterian support for Prohibition, however, not because he approved of drunkenness or preferred unpopularity. Rather he did so for important theological—even Reformed—reasons. In a statement defending his position (never published again because of the damage his friends believed it would have done) Machen argued that the church had no legitimate rationale for taking a side in this political question. Aside from the question of the relations between church and state, he believed that the church was bound by the Word of God and so all of its declarations and resolutions had to have clear Scriptural warrant. The Bible did not, however, provide support for Prohibition. It taught the idea of temperance, that is, moderate consumption of alcohol and the other good things of God's creation. This meant that Scripture forbade inebriation. But even here the Bible did not give directions to government officials for abolishing drunkenness. Should this be a matter for the federal government to regulate or should states and local governments? Was legislation the best way to shape public sentiment or was an educational program more effective? Was regulation of private citizens' behavior even a proper concern of the state? The Bible did not answer these and various other questions. So, Machen concluded, the church had no business meddling in the politics of Prohibition or any other matter where Scripture did not speak. (Hart & Muether)
Fellow son of Baltimore H.L. Mencken3 (the lampooner and skewerer of most things Christian) recognized Machen’s principled stance even if he never claimed to believe in Machen’s God: “I have noted that Dr. Machen is a wet. This is somewhat remarkable in a Presbyterian (in the early 20th Century - see above), but certainly it is not illogical in a Fundamentalist. He is a wet, I take it, simply because the Yahweh of the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New are both wet—because the whole Bible, in fact, is wet. He not only refuses to expunge from the text anything that is plainly there; he also refuses to insert anything that is not there.”4
Moralistic concern for society or nation is no indicator of orthodoxy, as the do-gooder liberals of the early 20th century proved. Machen modeled moderation and had concerns about the downside of drafts and drams—he spent countless hours and a small fortune assisting and trying to reform a Princeton drunk.5 But when it came to the church and her mission he was more concerned with the Spirit than spirits, with doctrine rather than the demise of Demon Rum.
By Brad Isbell - more to come on mainline moralism and its implications for today
It is interesting that “suburban” already had negative (banal?) connotations in 1932.
This (among many other slights and injustices) could help explain his 1932 aggressiveness.
Mencken (born in Baltimore as was Machen) wrote an important obituary of JGM in 1937.
You can read all about this in Ned Stonehouse’s Machen biography.