“The generality of readers, I suppose, gathered thereby the notion that [Machen] was simply another Fundamentalist on the order of William Jennings Bryan and the simian faithful of Appalachia. But he was actually a man of great learning, and, what is more, of sharp intelligence.”

J. Gresham Machen was by most accounts a fundamentalist. In 1923 he wrote, Christianity and Liberalism, a book that held historic Christianity and liberal Protestants were two different religions. In 1929 he founded Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia after a reorganization of Princeton Seminary, where he taught since 1906, resulted in conservative Presbyterians losing control.

H. L. Mencken was a columnist and literary editor who made a career out of ridiculing most things American, including the chief expression of the nation’s believers, Christianity. One of his famous epigrams was “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.”

Mencken was born in Baltimore in 1880, a year before Machen was born in the same city.

Despite very different backgrounds and careers, they regarded efforts to trim and cut Christianity and so make it palatable to moderns — especially as an ethical way of life — was intellectually dishonest and foolish. When Machen died in 1937, roughly twenty years before Mencken, the journalist took stock of the fundamentalists life this way:

The Rev. J. Gresham Machen, D. D., who died out in North Dakota on New Year’s Day, got, on the whole, a bad press while he lived, and even his obituaries did much less than justice to him. To newspaper reporters, as to other antinomians, a combat between Christians over a matter of dogma is essentially a comic affair, and in consequence Dr. Machen’s heroic struggles to save Calvinism in the Republic were usually depicted in ribald, or, at all events, in somewhat skeptical terms. The generality of readers, I suppose, gathered thereby the notion that he was simply another Fundamentalist on the order of William Jennings Bryan and the simian faithful of Appalachia. But he was actually a man of great learning, and, what is more, of sharp intelligence.

What caused him to quit the Princeton Theological Seminary and found a seminary of his own was his complete inability, as a theologian, to square the disingenuous evasions of Modernism with the fundamentals of Christian doctrine. He saw clearly that the only effects that could follow diluting and polluting Christianity in the Modernist manner would be its complete abandonment and ruin. Either it was true or it was not true. If, as he believed, it was true, then there could be no compromise with persons who sought to whittle away its essential postulates, however respectable their motives.

Thus he fell out with the reformers who have been trying, in late years, to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works. Most of the other Protestant churches have gone the same way, but Dr. Machen’s attention, as a Presbyterian, was naturally concentrated upon his own connection. His one and only purpose was to hold it [the Church] resolutely to what he conceived to be the true faith. When that enterprise met with opposition he fought vigorously, and though he lost in the end and was forced out of Princeton it must be manifest that he marched off to Philadelphia with all the honors of war.

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