All Things Expounded

Presbyterian theologian Gresham J. Machen is generally connected with the various theological controversies in Princeton in the early 1900’s and the founding of Westminister Theological Seminary and the OPC.

However, there is another aspect to his thought, specifically relating to politicial issues. Was he a libertarian? George Marsden, The Freeman, and other sources believe so!

Historian George Marsden called him “radically libertarian” and stated that he “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.”

Daniel Walker said the following of him: “Machen is one of many prominent American defenders of political liberty and economic freedom who have been largely forgotten by a people intent on abandoning its heritage of freedom.”

Machen opposed the military draft during World War I and also opposed prohibition, two stances that might not seem to jive with the common caricature of how a theologically conservative Christian would think, especially in the early 1900’s.

Here are a few quotes right from Machen:

“Personality can only be developed in the realm of individual choice. And that realm, in the modern state, is being slowly but steadily eradicated.”

“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.”

On education, he said “If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well.” He also said: “Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.”