Machen on Tolerance in an Intolerant Age

...100 years ago

By Brad Isbell

In 1923 and 1924, Machen was the supply preacher at First Presbyterian Princeton. His sermons in this period angered some, including Henry Van Dyke, whom we have written about previously. By this time, Machen said, the world, academia, the intelligentsia, and much of the church were opposed to biblical religion. Sound familiar? One crank in England had written that he hated the then-ubiquitous Wednesday night evangelical prayer meeting above all religious exercises, pagan or Christian. This will help explain some of Machen’s words.

The prevailing (negative) attitude toward evangelical Christianity may be necessary (for society to hold) in order to avoid trouble; it may be safe and prudent, but tolerant, at any rate, it certainly is not.

Contrary to Aaron Renn, Machen is saying the “neutral world” already existed in the mid-1920s.

The prejudice against Christianity may ultimately become beneficial. It may be that when the Wednesday night prayer meeting becomes as strange as dervish dances, it will be revived as a great new discovery to which the attention of men will turn. (This remark is almost Menckenian!) Already, there is the most abysmal ignorance of the gospel; the Epistle to the Galatians, even among scholars, is almost as much a sealed book as it was just before Luther's day. Yet it is really so gloriously plain. When will it be rediscovered?

When it is rediscovered, there will be a great revival of the Christian religion. None can say how soon that will come, and certainly it will not be produced by human effort. It will come not by might and not by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord of Hosts. Yet, although a revival of the Christian religion is not the product of human effort, there are certain favorable conditions which the Spirit may first produce and then use for the accomplishment of His beneficent work.

Those favorable conditions fall into two classes. First, there are those conditions which may be expected to appeal to all men, whether Christians or not, provided only they are really seeking some spiritual advance; in the second place, there are those conditions which will be appreciated by Christians alone.

Under the former head may be mentioned tolerance or religious liberty—the freedom of any citizens to hold, propagate, and teach to their children any form of religious belief that they desire. Tolerance was a great achievement for our forefathers. But now, apparently, in America, it is being given up. (Again, sound familiar?)
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Tolerance on the part of the state, and its corollary, the right of individuals to associate themselves for propagation of any creed which they may honestly hold, no matter how foolish it may seem to others—these are general conditions of any spiritual advance.

He then inveighed against a series of laws (proposed or enacted) which hindered religious and civil freedom (banning foreign language instruction, for instance), and against government education monopolies. Some of the laws he opposed were meant primarily to tamp down socialists and their schools in big cities. He reiterated the importance of liberty for the church in the interest of “spiritual advance.”

But the danger (to liberty) is certainly very great. Unless there is tolerance (of all faiths) on the part of the state, any great spiritual advance, whatever its direction may be thought to be, will be hindered. It will not, I suppose, be prevented. Men of real convictions now as always may perhaps maintain their convictions even under a hostile government. But why should the old battle for freedom be fought again? Why should we not retain the freedom which, at such great cost, our fathers won?

Machen believed a free country might again become a Christian country. He believed the risks of freedom were worth taking and that American constitutional freedoms were worth retaining.

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From “The Issue in the Church,” a sermon in God Transcendent (1949)