Machen Saw What Was Coming

He warned of fascism and ethnonationalism and we should too!

J. Gresham Machen was certainly prescient about the havoc theological liberalism would wreak on the mainline churches in the 20th century. He also saw the rise of fascism and ethnonationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. We would do well to consider his warnings today.

Machen’s observations about the church and the world in his great short essay Mountains and Why We Love Them were read to a group of ministers in 1933 and published in 1934 (based on a 1932 mountain-climbing trip) and have never been more relevant. In 1932 Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was probably more well-known to Americans than Adolf Hitler. But Machen, who had studied in Germany and knew it well, was keenly aware of Hitler’s threat. He looked out across Europe from a peak in the Swiss Alps and did not like what he saw:

Then there is something else about that view from the Matterhorn. I felt it partly at least as I stood there, and I wonder whether you can feel it with me. It is this. You are standing there not in any ordinary country, but in the very midst of Europe, looking out from its very centre. Germany just beyond where you can see to the northeast, Italy to the south, France beyond those snows of Mont Blanc. There, in that glorious round spread out before you, that land of Europe, humanity has put forth its best. There it has struggled; there it has fallen; there it has looked upward to God. The history of the race seems to pass before you in an instant of time, concentrated in that fairest of all the lands of the earth. You think of the great men whose memories you love, the men who have struggled there in those countries below you, who have struggled for light and freedom, struggled for beauty, struggled above all for God's Word. And then you think of the present and its decadence and its slavery, and you desire to weep. It is a pathetic thing to contemplate the history of mankind.

Machen the Alpinist

Here it seems that Machen had in view modernity and its dehumanizing machinery (of state and of steel) and its godless “morality.” The introductory chapter of Christianity and Liberalism (written 10 years before) helps us understand more fully what Machen had in mind. In that book, Machen had extolled “the great principles of Anglo-Saxon liberty,” meaning the tradition of individual rights pioneered in the British Isles.

Machen goes on to speak of the evil ends that modernity’s machines and men were beginning to serve:

I know that there are people who tell us contemptuously that always there are croakers who look always to the past, croakers who think that the good old times are the best. But I for my part refuse to acquiesce in this relativism which refuses to take stock of the times in which we are living. It does seem to me that there can never be any true advance, and above all there can never be any true prayer, unless a man does pause occasionally, as on some mountain vantage ground, to try, at least, to evaluate the age in which he is living. And when I do that, I cannot for the life of me see how any man with even the slightest knowledge of history can help recognizing the fact that we are living in a time of sad decadence—a decadence only thinly disguised by the material achievements of our age, which already are beginning to pall on us like a new toy. When Mussolini makes war deliberately and openly upon democracy and freedom, and is much admired for doing so even in countries like ours; when an ignorant ruffian is dictator of Germany, until recently the most highly educated country in the world—when we contemplate these things I do not see how we can possibly help seeing that something is radically wrong. Just read the latest utterances of our own General Johnson, his cheap and vulgar abuse of a recent appointee of our President, the cheap tirades in which he develops his view that economics are bunk—and then compare that kind of thing with the state papers of a Jefferson or a Washington—and you will inevitably come to the conclusion that we are living in a time when decadence has set in on a gigantic scale.

Mussolini had been rampant for a decade. Hitler was an upstart by comparison, having lost the German presidential election in 1932 (the year of Machen’s trip), but was appointed chancellor-dictator early in 1933. Machen hated communism¹ and opposed socialism, but fascism appeared to be his primary concern in the last decade of his all-too-short life, possibly because fascists tried to appropriate the Christian religion. Machen also opposed a between-the-wars ideology in the USA called “100% Americanism” which bears some resemblance to the now-fashionable Christian Nationalism. Machen wrote to his mother in 1920:

“The Gospel of Christ is a blessed relief from that sinful state of affairs commonly known as hundred per-cent Americanism. And fortunately some of us were able to learn of the gospel in a freer, more spiritual time, before the state had begun to lay its grip upon the education² of the mind.”

100% Americanism was a nativist, anti-European, anti-immigration, all-American-and-only-American-everything jumble of prejudices. Some associated the revival of the Ku Klux Klan with it; others would point to a more benign American Legion version that was more generically patriotic. One of the tenets of the ideology was opposition to foreign language instruction and Machen particularly hated this aspect:

Thus religion has become a mere function of the community or of the state. So it is looked upon by the men of the present day. Even hard-headed business men and politicians have become convinced that religion is needed. But it is thought to be needed merely as a means to an end. We have tried to get along without religion, it is said, but the experiment was a failure, and now religion must be called in to help.

For example, there is the problem of the immigrants; great populations have found a place in our country; they do not speak our language or know our customs; and we do not know what to do with them. We have attacked them by oppressive legislation or proposals of legislation, but such measures have not been altogether effective. Somehow these people display (sarcasm alert) a perverse attachment to the language that they learned at their mother's knee. It may be strange that a man should love the language that he learned at his mother's knee, but these people do love it, and we are perplexed in our efforts to produce a unified American people. So religion is called in to help; we are inclined to proceed against the immigrants now with a Bible in one hand and a club in the other offering them the blessings of liberty. That is what is sometimes meant by “Christian Americanization.”³

Machen was no anonymous online edgelord

But wait, you may ask, didn’t Machen use words like “Anglo-Saxon” and refer to the “race”? Of course he did (see above). Yet, the immigrants being clubbed with “Americanism” were not just Dutch, Scandinavian, or German. Some were Italian or other non-Nordic, non-Northern European “races.”⁴

Machen, an ardent supporter of Christian schools and family rights, even opposed the Lusk Laws because he believed, though they were designed to suppress radical and socialist schools, that accepting the principle behind them would result in the loss of liberty for Christians:

The evil principle is seen with special clearness in the so-called "Lusk Laws" in the state of New York. One of these refers to teachers in the public schools. The other provides that "No person, firm, corporation or society shall conduct, maintain or operate any school, institute, class or course of instruction in any subjects whatever without making application for and being granted a license from the university of the state of New York to so conduct, maintain or operate such institute, school, class or course….This law is so broadly worded that it could not possibly be enforced, even by the whole German army in its pre-war efficiency or by all the espionage system of the Czar.”⁵

For Machen, “scares” (Red or otherwise) were no excuse for the suppression of basic liberties. Back to Machen in the mountains:

What will be the end of that European civilization, of which I had a survey from my mountain vantage ground—of that European civilization and its daughter in America? What does the future hold in store? Will Luther prove to have lived in vain? Will all the dreams of liberty issue into some vast industrial machine? Will even nature be reduced to standard, as in our country the sweetness of the woods and hills is being destroyed, as I have seen them destroyed in Maine, by the uniformities and artificialities and officialdom of our national parks? Will the so-called "Child Labor Amendment"⁶ and other similar measures be adopted, to the destruction of all the decencies and privacies of the home? Will some dreadful second law of thermodynamics apply in the spiritual as in the material realm? Will all things in church and state be reduced to one dead level, coming at last to an equilibrium in which all liberty and all high aspirations will be gone? Will that be the end of all humanity's hopes? I can see no escape from that conclusion in the signs of the times; too inexorable seems to me to be the march of events. No, I can see only one alternative. The alternative is that there is a God—a God who in His own good time will bring forward great men again to do His will, great men to resist the tyranny of experts and lead humanity out again into the realms of light and freedom, great men, above all, who will be messengers of His grace. There is, far above any earthly mountain peak of vision, a God high and lifted up who, though He is infinitely exalted, yet cares for His children among men.

In the machinery of modern industry and government, and in worldly, pragmatic ideologies, Machen saw a real threat to liberty, society, and the church. The only solution for him was the knowledge of a God who cared enough to send his Son, beneath whose cross and in whose church is the only refuge from the decay and depravity of the world:

Is there no refuge from strife? Is there no place of refreshing where a man can prepare for the battle of life? Is there no place where two or three can gather in Jesus' name, to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation and race from race, to forget human pride, to forget the passions of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife, and to unite in overflowing gratitude at the foot of the Cross? If there be such a place, then that is the house of God and that the gate of heaven. And from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive the weary world.⁷

by Brad Isbell

The Matterhorn…Machen scaled it.

1. Later in 1935: “…all over the world these elemental forces of evil are mightily at work, these forces that have given us Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler…” - Selected Shorter Writings, D.G. Hart, ed., p. 382

2. In the service of national cohesion and “Americanization” education was being centralized and standardized.

3. Christianity and Liberalism, chapter 6 - “Salvation”

4. Race had an elastic meaning in earlier times, as it does today. Sometimes it seemed to refer to continent, sometimes to broader or narrower ethnic or national categories.

5. Christianity and Liberalism, chapter 1 - “Introduction” (footnote)

6. Machen was not afraid to be the odd man out. He opposed the Child Labor Amendment because he thought it would violate the families engaged in farming or cottage industries. He disliked national parks because of the roads that inevitably cut them up—he generally opposed New Deal programs. And he was fervently against jaywalking laws.

7. Christianity and Liberalism, chapter 7 (closing paragraph)