“Machen didn’t much care for politics. He saw it as inherently stifling and anti-individual. The idea that true Christianity was to even a small degree compatible with any form of statism — socialism, communism, or fascism — was, to Machen, a dangerous fiction.”

Of the Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck declared,

The man was admirable. He never gave in one inch to anyone. He never bowed his head. It was not in him to trim or compromise, to accept any peace that was less than triumph. He was a glorious enemy because he was completely open and direct in his angers and hatreds. He stood for something and everyone knew what it was.

Lest you be tempted to dismiss Buck’s praise as predictably biased because, after all, she was raised by Presbyterian missionaries living in China, consider the view of H.L. Mencken.

Mencken was known for his caustic criticisms of Christians in general and ministers in particular. He described the Creator as “a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh” and once wrote, “Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”

And yet, Mencken pronounced great admiration for Machen:

Dr. Machen is surely no mere soap-boxer of God, alarming bucolic sinners for a percentage of the plate. On the contrary, he is a man of great learning.… His moral advantage over his Modernist adversaries, like his logical advantage, is immense and obvious. He faces the onslaught of the Higher Criticism without flinching, and he yields nothing of his faith to expediency or decorum.

When Machen died, Mencken compared him to another prominent Presbyterian, politician William Jennings Bryan, with these words: “Dr. Machen was to Bryan as the Matterhorn is to a wart.”

I present Machen as a “real hero” not because he best represents my personal perspective on Christ, the Bible, and Christianity — though I enthusiastically admit that he does — but rather because he exhibited a remarkable degree of courage and logical consistency that I wish were far more common within Christian leadership. His convictions were deep and thoroughly reasoned. He expressed them in the face of powerful opposition. When he hit a brick wall, he didn’t retreat to his sitting room; instead, he created opposing and influential institutions. He saw liberty as God’s intention for humanity and would not abide the presumptuous claims of earthly governments to diminish it for our own good. This was a man confidently, persuasively, and fearlessly principled.

Machen was born in Baltimore in 1881 to an Episcopalian father, but it was his Presbyterian mother who exerted the greater influence. By the time Machen enrolled as an undergraduate classics major at Johns Hopkins University, he was Presbyterian to the core. Having distinguished himself as a first-rate scholar at Hopkins, he went on to Princeton, where he focused on theology at the seminary and philosophy at the university. After a year at a German university, he returned to America resolved to defend conservative Reformed theology against the growing influence of the modernists, the theological wing of the “progressive” movement that watered down traditional Christian beliefs and elevated such dubious notions as moral relativism and activist government.

Princeton Seminary was Machen’s home base for 23 years, from the day in 1906 when he began as a New Testament instructor until his conscience led him to break with the school in 1929. The president of Princeton University during Machen’s first four years at the seminary was Woodrow Wilson, who became a close family friend. That friendship, however, did not prevent Machen from later speaking out against Wilson’s agenda as president of the United States.

The young theologian steadfastly opposed US involvement in World War I and condemned the subsequent Versailles Treaty as “an attack on international peace” that would produce war after war “in a wearisome progression.” He deemed Wilson’s overseas interventions as naïve, starry-eyed adventurism. He denounced conscription, arguing that the draft was an assault on freedom and a “brutal interference” with the individual and with family life.

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