By Brad Isbell
Few Americans know much about an Alpine region called Tyrol. Machen knew all about it, having climbed mountains there. In the wake of World War I, he believed the German-speaking majority was treated unjustly in the region’s division between Austria and Italy. He wrote a letter to a US newspaper editor in 1926, which included this:
“The oppression of the Tyrol does, indeed, concern the kinsfolk of those oppressed people north of the Alps, but it also concerns the people of the whole world. It concerns the people of the whole world because a policy like the one which Italy has followed in the Tyrol since the Treaty of Versailles constitutes an attack upon international and interracial peace. So long as such things are condoned or commended war will follow upon war in a wearisome succession; when they are condemned by a truly universal public sentiment which even dictators shall be obliged to respect, not merely in the countries immediately interested but in all the countries of the world, then, and then only, shall we have peace.”
Stonehouse considered Machen’s words to show:
“…his strong sense of justice, his aversion to tyranny in every realm, his zeal to protect the rights of the weak and oppressed. His hatred of war was intense, and he was far from taking the position that it was inevitable or that it ought to be acquiesced in. But to his mind even worse than war itself, and the awful carnage of it, was the loss of liberty it involved or carried in its wake. Though he had come to regard the cause of the allies in the great war as just, he mourned the lack of vision and of zeal for justice in places of leadership that were manifested afterward. And nothing distressed him as much as the evidence at home and abroad of a readiness to sacrifice liberty for the sake of material prosperity.”
Adherents of the so-called Alt or Dissident Right would be cheered by Machen’s concern for borders, language, and culture, and for his early bias in favor of Germany and against the English in the run-up to the Great War, though his sentiments changed after seeing firsthand how Germany prosecuted the war. What never changed was Machen’s bias in favor of liberty and his warnings against sacrificing it for the sake of prosperity of any kind. This extended to things theological and ecclesial. One of his main criticisms of his moderate and liberal opponents was that they violated the Christian liberty and consciences of those committed to the historic Christian faith of the confessional Protestant denominations.
But is not advocacy of such separation (from those Protestant liberals who had abandoned orthodoxy) a flagrant instance of intolerance? The objection is often raised. But it ignores altogether the difference between involuntary and voluntary organizations. Involuntary organizations ought to be tolerant, but voluntary organizations, so far as the fundamental purpose of their existence is concerned, must be intolerant or else cease to exist. The state is an involuntary organization; a man is forced to be a member of it whether he will or no. It is therefore an interference with liberty for the state to prescribe any one type of opinion or any one type of education for its citizens. But within the state, individual citizens who desire to unite for some special purpose should be permitted to do so. Especially in the sphere of religion, such permission of individuals to unite is one of the rights which lie at the very foundation of our civil and religious liberty. The state does not scrutinize the rightness or wrongness of the religious purpose for which such voluntary religious associations are formed—if it did undertake such scrutiny all religious liberty would be gone—but it merely protects the right of individuals to unite for any religious purpose which they may choose.
Among such voluntary associations are to be found the evangelical churches. An evangelical church is composed of a number of persons who have come to agreement in a certain message about Christ and who desire to unite in the propagation of that message, as it is set forth in their creed on the basis of the Bible. No one is forced to unite himself with the body thus formed; and because of this total absence of compulsion there can be no interference with liberty in the maintenance of any specific purpose—for example, the propagation of a message—as a fundamental purpose of the association. If other persons desire to form a religious association with some purpose other than the propagation of a message—for example, the purpose of promoting in the world, simply by exhortation and by the inspiration of the example of Jesus, a certain type of life—they are at perfect liberty to do so. But for an organization which is founded with the fundamental purpose of propagating a message to commit its resources and its name to those who are engaged in combating the message is not tolerance but simple dishonesty. Yet it is exactly this course of action that is advocated by those who would allow nondoctrinal religion to be taught in the name of doctrinal churches—churches that are plainly doctrinal both in their constitutions and in the declarations which they require of every candidate for ordination. (C&L, ch. 6)
The mainline churches prospered numerically and materially right up to their mid-1960s peak. Orthodox clergy found themselves marginalized, if not pushed out. Orthodox believers were tolerated by mainstream churches as pewsitters, but their consciences were violated by the purposes to which their funds were devoted, and many of those who sought to separate for the sake of conscience literally had to “let goods and kindred go.”1 They were not free. For Machen, liberty and true flourishing went together.
The Presbyterian Conflict, Edwin H. Rian, ch.13. “Church Property Rights” https://www.opc.org/books/conflict/ch13.html Many PCA congregations suffered similiar loss when leaving the PCUS and (after the 1983 union of Northern and Southern churches) the PCUSA.