"Everywhere there rises before our eyes the specter of a society where security, if it is attained at all, will be attained at the expense of freedom, where the security that is attained will be the security of fed beasts in a stable, and where all the high aspirations of humanity will have been crushed by an all-powerful state."
One of the most articulate defenders of orthodox Christian
theology against the liberalizing and rationalizing trends of the early twentieth
century was J. Gresham Machen. Influenced by his Reformed Protestant background,
Machen was trained as a pastor at Princeton Seminary (once the center of conservative
Calvinism), and authored numerous religious texts. Distressed by the forces
of theological liberalism, Machen left his teaching post at Princeton to found
the Westminster Theological Seminary and the
Orthodox Presbyterian denomination.
Yet the radical ideas Machen resisted were not exclusively
theological. His historical significance also lay in his opposition to the increasing
encroachment of the state in the lives of American citizens. According to historian
George Marsden, Machen's politics were “radically libertarian.” As
Marsden explains, Machen “opposed almost any extension of state power and
took stands on a variety of issues. Like most libertarians, his stances violated
usual categories of liberal or conservative.”
In his most important work on freedom, Christianity
and Liberalism, he made his case for individual liberty. In it he wrote
that “Personality can only be developed in the realm of individual choice.
And that realm, in the modern state, is being slowly but steadily eradicated.”
He saw theological liberalism and increasing state control growing at the same
time and warned that as the church withdrew from its biblical obligations to
its fellow man, a void was created filled by the state.
