Machen helped found a denomination shortly before his death whose order and standards in no way encouraged racist, segregationist, or ethnonationalist views. Machen is not the hero modern kinists, racists, or segregationists are looking for; his own writings and his all-too-short life as a churchman make that clear. Machen changed, and so can we.

NO ONE DISPUTES that, before the First World War (~1913), J. Gresham Machen privately expressed sympathy for segregation and anger toward those who disagreed with him on the subject. He wrote things and reportedly said things to and about his beloved colleague B.B. Warfield that nearly any late-20th or early-21st-century person would call “racist” and demeaning. These statements and views delight some online neo-kinists and the (at least) near-racists of the “new right,” reactionary Reformed, or certain ethnonationalist Christians today. But Machen’s case, taken as a whole, does not support these groups, and I’ll explain why.

First

Machen was born in the 19th century to a mother (the daughter of a wealthy slaveholding family) who witnessed the depredations of the Union Army marching into her town in 1865 and who lived through Reconstruction. Sixteen years later, J. Gresham was born. That he held such views on race and segregation is altogether unsurprising; he and his views on these things were wrong, but he came by them “honest”—most likely at his mother’s knee. Today’s race-obsessed religious types, nearly all of whom were born 100 years after Machen, have no such “excuse”—if excuse it be. This might be called the “man of his times” argument, but really it is a “son of his family” consideration.

The name of Jesus is discovered to be strangely adapted to men of every race and of every kind of previous education.
—Christianity and Liberalism, 1923

Second

Machen’s views changed, or he at least grew in wisdom. He did not make his early racial views the hallmark of his writing or ministry at any time—they were expressed privately. There was no rehearsal of these views (as far as we know) post-WW1, where Machen saw the horrors of the European war while serving as a YMCA volunteer, running canteens near the front lines (which sometimes shifted with alarming rapidity) in Belgium and France. It is well documented that his views on the church, state, society, and politics changed after the war. He became “church-first,” and by 1923, he was writing about the rights of minorities and openly opposed the postwar “100% Americanism” movement. He lamented “all those things that divide nation from nation and race from race.” The society and culture about which he was most concerned was that of the church.

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