The reporter described the unseating of three “Machenite” commissioners, “ all members of the rebel Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions,” and quoted the response of conservative leader and Machen ally, H. McAllister Griffiths: “The machine may find out that its high-handed tactics have at last awakened the Church to Modernist tyranny.” What the “Machinists” found out, we gather, is that top-down tyranny worked for the mammoth mainline church for decades…until it didn’t.

As early as 1925, Machenism was a codeword for BIG FAT CHURCH MEANIE-PANTS EXTRORDINAIRE…only two years after Christianity and Liberalism was published. It would seem that purveyors of clear and punchy polemic have never gone unpunished in the parlors of the pious. A review (of someone else’s book) in the old Anglo-Catholic magazine, The Living Church, is the first place we find this eponymous petard directed at our favorite presbyterian:

As a study of Modernism more sane in spirit and catholic in charity one may cite Dr. Hall’s Christianity and Modernism. Both show the tremendous advantage of defending a faith which has back of it the witness of Christian experience and the wholeness of Catholic truth, rather than the support of man-made theories. Controversies which began by being doctrinal have too often degenerated into the bitterness of personal antagonisms. Compare Dr. Machen’s spirit—that of the controversial advocate—with Dr. Hall’s method—that of the Christian apologist—and the difference is manifest. Even Dr. Fosdick, who began as a constructive teacher, has sometimes been pushed by controversy into an attitude of destructive antagonism. The present volume does not indulge in personalities, but its argument is of the rigidly mechanical type that verges upon “Machenism,” and is but a step short of individual attack.

Breaking news—Machen was a controversial controverter of ecclesial controversies. The big question is not why Machen trampled a few toes, but why there weren’t more pastors hopping around on one foot, wincing in pain and stifling bad words. Of what was Machen a “controversial advocate? Well, it was for the historic Christian faith, the Bible, and supernatural religion. And poor Fosdick! To hear this reviewer tell it, Machen “pushed” the dear man into controversy! The humanity! Rigid, mechanical Machen could have been worse, it seems, but he was still pretty dang hurty.

Ten years later, TIME magazine—evidently no friend of conservative Christianity—also delighted in the drubbing that “fundamentalists,” of whom Machen was supposedly chief, took at the PCUSA’s 1935 General Assembly (its 147th) in lovely Cincinnati. And the breezy magazine correspondent quoted the haters who huffed about “Machenism!”1

“Machen & Machine”—that was the actual headline in TIME’s religion section on June 3, 1935. The piece began with a shot at Fundamentalists based on the overheard sniping of reporters, and as someone who used to be a “newshawk,”2 this account has the deafening ring of truth about it:

“Several of them,” said newshawks to one another, “are broke. They would like nothing better than a chance to bring a libel suit against someone.”

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