Rethinking The ‘Danger’ Of Public Christianity

D.G. Hart (Hillsdale College), Rethinking the "Danger" of Public Christianity:

In 1923, a middle-aged professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary, J. Gresham Machen, produced a book that asserted liberal Protestantism was not simply a defective version of Christianity but a different religion altogether. Talk about provocative. Was Machen trolling liberal Protestants? One hundred years later, white conservative Protestants in the US spent a good chunk of last year commemorating Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism. The reasons are not hard to imagine. Here was a student of the Bible who was fed up with what religious and political Progressivism was doing to American churches and society. Machen breached the manners and ethos of elite society to claim that America’s largest churches were Christian in name only. If today’s post-liberal Christian Nationalists wanted a historical figure to emulate in their own frustrations with contemporary America, Machen is an obvious candidate.

The problem is that the Princeton professor was several lanes removed from the idea that America was a Christian nation. His complaint about liberal Protestantism was mainly theological. He conceded that liberals had a point about the difficulty of science-following modern people believing in the miracles that came with the Bible. The virgin birth (a topic about which Machen wrote a lengthy book) and the resurrection of Christ were hard beliefs to maintain among college-educated Americans. The problem, as Machen pointed out, was that removing the supernatural parts of Jesus turned Christianity into a different religion. In the words of H. L. Mencken, who wrote a favorable obituary of Machen (who died in 1937), liberal Protestants had turned Christianity into effete “nursery rhymes,” a “series of sweet attitudes, possible to anyone not actually in jail for felony.” ...

Machen’s appeal to contemporary Protestants may have a significance that few have noticed. For all of the commentary, mixed with alarm, about blurring the lines of religion and American politics generally and the dangers of Christian nationalism specifically, the wide and diverse audience for Christianity and Liberalism shows that Protestant conservatives are motivated more by faith than by politics. Machen was far removed from Christian Americanism and mocked Progressives for identifying the United States (understood here as a redeemer nation) with the Kingdom of God. In a similar way, politics have been distant from the commemorations of his book. Today’s Protestants are drawn to Machen’s understanding of salvation and the church. ... Machen called for the church to be the church and to step aside from politics.  ...

If more people noticed all the Protestants reading Machen in 2023, those same observers might rethink the alleged danger that historic Christianity poses to the American Republic.

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