The Battle for Freedom

Working through a landmark Machen article, part 3

Jul 22, 2024

All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”?
It has been already in the ages before us. - Eccl. 1:8-10 (ESV)

MACHEN’S WORDS from nine decades ago have not become stale or irrelevant; they stand as a warning to those tempted to trade liberty for security:

What estimate of the present age can possibly be complete that does not take account of what is so marked a feature of it—namely, the loss of those civil liberties for which men formerly were willing to sacrifice all that they possessed? In some countries, such as Russia and Italy, the attack upon liberty has been blatant and extreme; but exactly the same forces which appear there in more consistent form appear also in practically all the countries of the earth. Everywhere we have the substitution of economic considerations for great principles in the conduct of the state; everywhere a centralized state, working as the state necessarily must work, by the use of force, is taking possession of the most intimate fields of individual and family life.

This was written in 1933 before Hitler or Franco rose to power. Machen’s examples of tyranny were the communists in Russia and Mussolini’s fascists in Italy—left and right. Machen’s reply to 2024’s Christian Nationalists who would scuttle constitutional liberties to ease the way for their longed-for “Protestant Franco” or “Christian Prince” would be identical to R.C. Sproul’s famous exclamatory question:

Christian Nationalists and other post-liberals rail against the “postwar (WW2) consensus.” Pre-war Machen says do the reading:

These tendencies have proceeded more rapidly in America than in most other countries of the world; for if they have not progressed so far here as elsewhere, that is only because in America they had a greater handicap to overcome. Thirty years ago we hated bureaucracy and pitied those countries in Europe that were under bureaucratic control; today we are rapidly becoming one of the most bureaucratic countries of the world. Setbacks to this movement, such as the defeat, for the present at least, of the misnamed “child-labor amendment,” the repeal of the Lusk laws in New York placing private teachers under state supervision and control, the invalidation of the Nebraska language law making literary education even in private schools a crime, the prevention so far of the establishment of a Federal department of education—these setbacks to the attack on liberty are, I am afraid, but temporary unless the present temper of the people changes.

Some today believe that a dose of authoritarianism (if not autocracy) is the indicated treatment for modern societal ills. Shrinking the federal government used to be the goal of conservatives. One wonders if the illiberal dissident right (which includes many Christian Nationalists) is concerned less about the size of government than who wields its power at a given moment. And have there ever been small-government autocrats? Could the most righteous Christian Prince withstand the temptation to expand and use (rather than dismantle) the massive federal apparatus?

Machen hated one of the great enablers of big government—bureaucracy—which he saw as the inevitable enemy of liberty. The examples of execrable legislation he cited (the anti-Bolshevik Lusk Laws and the anti-German Nebraska language laws) were favored by rightist proponents of “100% Americanism” as weapons against foreign ideologies and (assumedly) unassimilated immigrants. Machen hated socialism, but not so much that he was willing to support legislation that could easily be turned against Christian (or other religious) minorities:

“There was always tolerance for established religious bodies, even in the Roman Empire; but religious liberty consists in equal rights for religious bodies that are new… Bad as the (Lusk) law must be in its immediate effects, it is far more alarming in what it reveals about the temper of the people. A people which tolerates such preposterous legislation upon the statute books is a people that has wandered far away from the principles of American liberty.”1

As Samuel of old warned the children of Israel about the downside of princely autocracy…

So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots…He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
- 1 Samuel 8:10-12, 15-18 (ESV)

…so does Machen (with international examples) warn of a range of government evils from military conscription to government control of education:

The international situation, moreover, is hardly such as to give encouragement to lovers of liberty, especially in view of the recent proposal of (French) Premier Herriot that a policy of conscription, inimical as it is to liberty as well as to peace, shall be made general and permanent. Everywhere in the world we have centralization of power, the ticketing and cataloguing of the individual by irresponsible and doctrinaire bureaus, and, worst of all, in many places we have monopolistic control of education by the state.

Machen considers all “dilettante tyrants” (new and old, right or left) as enemies to be battled. And he would not hand the machines of tyranny to anyone. Rather, he would dismantle them posthaste:

But is all that new? In principle it is not. Something very much like it was advocated in Plato’s Republic over two thousand years ago. The battle between collectivism and liberty is an age-long battle; and even the materialistic paternalism of the modern state is by no means altogether new. The technique of tyranny has, indeed, been enormously improved; a state-controlled compulsory education has proved far more effective in crushing out liberty than the older and cruder weapons of fire and sword, and modern experts have proved to be more efficient than the dilettante tyrants of the past. But such differences are differences of degree and not of kind, and essentially the battle for freedom is the same as it always has been.

Stay tuned for future installments.

- by Brad Isbell

READ PART 2: