In 1923, a young assistant professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary named J. Gresham Machen published a scathing critique of the worldview animating establishment or “mainline” Protestant Christianity in Europe and America. That worldview, Machen argued in Christianity and Liberalism, consisted in a groveling obeisance to anything claiming to be based on “science.” So for instance if “science”—or the habit of mind claiming to be “scientific” that amounted to little more than doctrinaire materialism—insisted that a virgin could not conceive of a child and therefore the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth must be based on a myth, a certain class of Protestant clergy and intellectuals would dutifully drop the doctrine. If “science” denied the possibility of the Resurrection, those same Protestants would figure out a way to jettison the doctrine but keep calling themselves Christians.
“The liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science,” Machen wrote—he disliked the term “liberalism” to describe the obsequious attitude he inveighed against, but there was no convenient alternative—“has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene.” His aim in writing the book was not to show that Christianity shed of the supernatural was a bad thing, though he thought it was. His aim, rather, was to show that it was a form of mere uplift and not Christianity at all. To the extent that Christianity adopted “liberal” positions on its distinctive doctrines, Machen felt, it relinquished any claim to authority or purpose. Western nations had no shortage of institutions trying breathlessly to align themselves with dominant cultural trends. There was no need for another.
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