The year 2026 is the hundredth anniversary of one of the most significant votes that Machen cast as a Presbyterian minister. His response on the floor of the Presbytery of New Brunswick in the Spring of that year cost him a promotion at Princeton Theological Seminary where he had been teaching for two decades. Fallout from his vote also prompted an investigation of Princeton that eventually led in 1929 to the institution’s reorganization. That restructuring, Machen believed, compromised Princeton’s mission. In response he led in founding Westminster Theological Seminary. The new rival seminary soon produced graduates who were increasingly unwelcome in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (PCUSA). Those conditions, not to mention a major dustup over the Board of Foreign Missions (from 1932 to 1935), contributed directly to the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936), a communion where Westminster graduates could minister. Most see the pattern of falling dominoes—from Princeton’s reorganization to the founding of the OPC. But do people appreciate that Machen’s 1926 vote was the trigger that set the other events in motion? After all, in Christianity and Liberalism (1923) Machen had already drawn a line in the sand between historic Christianity and modernist Protestantism. Was it not more likely, some might ask, that his book was more decisive than a single vote in a routine business meeting of Presbytery? Was it not the case that Machen did not even ask for his negative vote to be recorded? How consequential could it have been?

The specific motion before the Presbytery was for officers to affirm support for the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and the related Volstead Act. Ratified in 1919, this legislation was one example of the Progressive movement’s embrace of the Social Gospel and its promise of a Christian America. It was a means for Protestants in government to suppress vice. Opposition to the consumption of alcohol emerged a century earlier among Protestants who initiated the temperance movement, the aim of which was for people to abstain from beverages that used distilled alcohol (whiskey and gin, for example). Initially, temperance allowed for moderate consumption of fermented alcohol in beer, cider, and wine. Overtime, temperance changed into total abstinence. What gave the Progressives a winning formula for a constitutional amendment was one-part opposition to monopolies (such as corporate beer producers) and another part government protection of citizens through regulatory agencies. To say that Progressives were perfectionist would be an overstatement. But to notice the morality and aspirations that inspired Progressives, not to mention white Anglo-American ambivalence (at best) of the non-Anglos immigrants coming to the United States in record numbers between 1870 and 1920, is plausible. At the national level, Protestants who belonged to the mainline denominations dominated American politics. Protestant Progressives added a new dimension to American politics—switching from the ideal of limited government to reliance on government regulations.

Whether officers and members of the PCUSA voted for Progressive Party candidates or not, the denomination consistently supported Prohibition. Motions like the one that came to the Presbytery of New Brunswick in 1926 were common at the presbytery and General Assembly level (and were reminiscent of Gardiner Spring’s resolution for the 1861 General Assembly to pledge allegiance to the federal government). Machen was in several ways out of step with political Progressivism even though he grew up in privileged sectors of Baltimore society and socialized his entire life with Protestant elites. A life-long Democrat (though the New Deal made him a reluctant one) from the South, Machen’s political instincts were libertarian. To him, government was necessary because human beings were sinners and needed restraint. But government was also a necessary evil; its own propensity for abusing power was fallout from original sin. The state in Machen’s view was not a cure but a crutch, which informed his opposition to the entire list of Progressive policies—from Prohibition and child-labor laws to government regulatory agencies and the military draft. Considering that Machen received his education (e.g., Johns Hopkins University) from the same institutions (the research universities) that provided the expertise behind Progressive reforms, his dissent from Protestant Progressivism was unusual.

At roughly the same time that Machen cast his vote on Prohibition, Princeton Seminary’s Board of Directors had reached a consensus on a successor to William Brenton Greene as the professor of apologetics. Greene had taught at Princeton since 1903, Machen’s second year as a seminarian. The choice of Machen as his replacement may have seemed odd since the younger professor was by training a New Testament scholar. But this was an age before academic specialization prevailed in seminaries. It was also the case that Machen’s own writing on the New Testament was a form of apologetics since both of his books, on Paul and the virgin birth, defended the supernatural character of historic Christianity. Princeton had tried to persuade Clarence Macartney, one of the leading conservative Presbyterian pastors, first in Philadelphia and then in Pittsburgh, to take the position in apologetics. But his rejection prompted Princeton to turn to Machen.

What Princeton Seminary’s directors approved still needed ratification by the PCUSA’s General Assembly, if only because the school was and remains the creation of the denomination’s highest court. The 1926 General Assembly met in Baltimore where commissioners might have been expected to give the benefit of the doubt to Machen, who was born and reared in the city. But when his name came up to the Committee on Theological Education, opposition emerged. The reason was Machen’s vote against support for Prohibition at the Presbytery of New Brunswick. He wrote a short defense of his position, but it remained unpublished until 2004 when a collection of Machen’s essays went into print.[1] Friends told Machen not to circulate a reply. The Assembly was so stridently Prohibitionist that any hint of opposition would alienate commissioners.

Concerns about Machen’s politics and character led to an investigation of Princeton Theological Seminary. For several years, faculty at the seminary had been divided over the selection of moderators for the General Assembly. The two major contenders, Macartney and Charles Erdman, both had close ties to Princeton. The former was a member of the Board of Directors, the latter a professor of practical theology. Macartney was the favorite of conservatives and in 1924 he moderated the Assembly, winning support from commissioners over the candidacy of Erdman. Opposition to Erdman in 1924 was most noticeable in the conservative magazine The Presbyterian, where an editorial explained why Erdman was not equipped to stand up to liberals. Because Machen was a contributing editor of the magazine, Erdman interpreted the anonymous editorial as the product of his New Testament colleague. Machen had not written the editorial. But Erdman’s blame further discredited Machen in the eyes of many Presbyterians. Erdman was a popular speaker in the world of Bible conferences (also a co-editor of The Fundamentals) and served on several agencies of the PCUSA. The apparent antagonism between Machen and Erdman, combined with Machen’s vote on Prohibition, was sufficient for creating a committee to investigate the dynamics of Princeton Seminary.

The moderator of the 1926 Assembly, William O. Thompson, emeritus president of Ohio State University, chaired the committee and selected the other members, two ministers and two elders. The pastors, Walter Whallon from Newark, New Jersey, and George Luccock from Wooster, Ohio, had relatively high profiles in the PCUSA. Whallon was a graduate of Princeton Seminary and likely overlapped with Machen as a student. The Newark pastor eventually became president in 1943 of the Lord’s Day Alliance, an organization that sought to uphold laws that restricted business on Sundays. Luccock was in his seventies when the committee met and had served as college president (Berea), trustee (McCormick Seminary), and member of the foreign missions board. The two laymen, Richard B. Ernest and Thomas B. Bradley, worked in politics, the former as a U.S. Senator from Kentucky (Republican), the latter a judge in Chicago. The chairman, Thompson, a graduate of Western Theological Seminary, had served as president of a Presbyterian college in Colorado (Longmont) before overseeing Miami University of Ohio and Ohio State University.

As distinguished a group as this committee was, it was not well versed in the combination of Reformed orthodoxy and doctrinal polemics that had characterized the Princeton faculty. As the New York Times reported, the committee’s assignment was to determine the sources of conflict between two parties at Princeton, one led by Machen, the other by the seminary’s president, J. Ross Stevenson. The newspaper added that the basis for the investigation was to provide grounds for opposition to Machen’s promotion. Critics maintained that Machen was disqualified because of his temperament and his failure to “vote in favor of a resolution endorsing the Eighteenth Amendment and pledging support of the Presbytery to the Volstead law.”[2]

To assume that Machen and his fellow conservatives on the faculty never had a chance is unwarranted. At the same time, Erdman and Stevenson, who were both well connected to denominational leaders, represented a side of the seminary that Presbyterian moderates hoped to cultivate. After the contentious assemblies of 1922, 1923, 1924, and 1925, especially over controversial views on the virgin birth circulating in the Presbytery of New York, church leaders wanted to end controversy so that the church would not be distracted by controversy and present a positive vision of Christianity to Americans.

In the end, the committee reported that the real problem was a clunky management structure that divided oversight of academics and administration between two separate boards. To undo this redundancy, the committee recommended merging the two boards into one. The resulting single body took away conservative control of the directors responsible for academics at the seminary. In reorganization, these directors became a minority within the new single board. A legal battle ensued. The Seminary’s charter and New Jersey law gave hope to those who opposed reorganization. Those efforts finally failed and in 1929 the new administration went into effect. It did so without Machen, who that same year founded Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia to perpetuate Princeton’s ideals.

By 1929, Machen’s refusal to support Prohibition through the Presbyterian Church had taken a back seat to the effort to preserve Princeton. Meanwhile, anyone wanting to know why Machen voted against Prohibition could not find out because his statement was filed away in one of his desk drawers. His rationale was nonetheless important because it showed a basic difference between liberals and conservative Presbyterians during the 1920s controversies. What was the best way to Christianize the United States, through Progressive legislation as most liberals believed, or through the ministry of the church as conservatives argued? Beyond different conceptions of the church’s responsibility for society was Machen’s own suspicion about the effectiveness of legislation. He started his response by denouncing inebriation. “No one has a greater horror of the evils of drunkenness than I,” he wrote, “or a greater detestation of any corrupt traffic which has sought to make profit out of this terrible sin. It is clearly the duty of the church to combat this evil.”[3] But the exact form legislation should take to reduce this public harm was a different question. By 1926, Machen was aware, like most of his ecclesiastical peers, that Prohibition had done little more to stop the consumption of alcohol than create conditions for criminals to profit from its illegal sale and distribution. That is why he wrote that “in the effort to accomplish moral good,” Prohibition was “really causing moral harm.”[4]

Still, Machen’s most important reason for voting “no” was his belief that the church “ought to refrain from entering, in its corporate capacity, into the political field.” For support, he quoted the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF 31.4) which limited the church’s oversight to matters ecclesiastical. The church should not “intermeddle with civil affairs which concern the commonwealth, unless by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary. . .” (WCF 31.4). Machen believed the Presbytery of New Brunswick had violated this principle. Worse, the church had confused the nature of its ministry with the coercive power of the civil magistrate. Machen insisted that in supporting so many social reforms, the church was siding with agencies instituted to enforce the law. Yet, the duties of police were far removed from the church’s proper function, namely, “of bringing to bear upon human soul the sweet and gracious influences of the gospel.” Machen affirmed that the functions of police were important and that Christians, “in their capacity as citizens,” were obligated to aid law enforcement “by every proper means within their power.” But “the duty of the church in its corporate capacity” was “of quite a different nature” from the responsibilities of civil government.[5]

Machen’s explanation of his vote found its way into an address he gave seven years later, during some of the worst circumstances of the Great Depression, to a gathering of political scientists and economists. The topic of the panel to which Machen contributed was the responsibility of religious groups for improving social conditions. Machen joined a Rabbi and a Roman Catholic priest in presenting papers. As it turned out, his response to an economic meltdown was the same as his vote on Prohibition. The church’s calling was spiritual, not economic or political. Machen stated:

You cannot expect from a true Christian Church any official pronouncements upon the political or social questions of the day, and you cannot expect cooperation with the state in anything involving the use of force. Important are the functions of the police, and members of the Church, either individually or in such special associations as they may choose to form, should aid the police in every lawful way in the exercise of those functions. But the function of the Church in its corporate capacity is of an entirely different kind. Its weapons against evil are spiritual, not carnal; and by becoming a political lobby, through the advocacy of political measures whether good or bad, the Church is turning aside from its proper mission, which is to bring to bear upon human hearts the solemn and imperious, yet also sweet and gracious, appeal of the gospel of Christ.[6]

If people should not look to the church for insights about government or the economy, then what should they expect from pastors, presbyteries, and assemblies? Machen’s answer may have been the most eloquent paragraph in all his published writing:

The responsibility of the Church in the new age is the same as its responsibility in every age. It is to testify that this world is lost in sin; that the span of human life—nay, all the length of human history—is an infinitesimal island in the awful depths of eternity; that there is a mysterious, holy, living God, Creator of all, Upholder of all, infinitely beyond all; that He has revealed Himself to us in His Word and offered us communion with Himself through Jesus Christ the Lord; that there is no other salvation, for individuals or for nations, save this, but that this salvation is full and free, and that whosoever possesses it has for himself and for all others to whom he may be the instrument of bringing it a treasure compared with which all the kingdoms of the earth—nay, all the wonders of the starry heavens—are as the dust of the street.[7]

That statement of the problem before American society and the church’s possible responses to it was remarkable considering the way that Christian politics had changed Machen’s career. Prohibition was a way for government officials, many of them Protestant, to remove one social stain and improve moral standards across the nation. Machen believed that the church should not support political programs of any kind. Nor was he impressed with the effectiveness of Progressive reforms. His single vote against a motion in support of Prohibition at his presbytery nevertheless became a weapon to use against his promotion at Princeton Seminary and to justify an investigation of Machen’s employer. The ensuing reorganization of Princeton and Machen’s decision to start another seminary, placed him on a trajectory that eventually gave birth to a new Presbyterian denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

And yet, despite the politics in both the American government and the Presbyterian Church, Machen did not counter with his own political program, a Presbyterian or Christian plan to recover America’s religious heritage. Instead, Machen avoided policy and legislation, even though as a citizen he had definite views and worked with various political organizations to support his convictions. Machen’s response to a politicized church was to call for a spiritual church, one that drew its significance not from changes to living conditions in this world but from a capacity to shape the eternal destinies of ordinary men and women. The contrast between the PCUSA’s PCUSA’s politicized Christianity and Machen’s spiritual conception of church is almost as striking as it is ironic. And yet, for all that it reveals about Presbyterianism in America a century ago, it may be even more instructive for contemporary officers and church members who assess the prospects once again of making the United States a Christian nation.

Endnotes

[1] “Statement to the Presbytery of New Brunswick” was eventually published in D. G. Hart, ed., Selected Shorter Writings: J. Gresham Machen (P&R Books, 2004), 332-33.

[2] “Princeton Inquiry by Church Nov. 22,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1926.

[3] Machen, “Statement to the Presbytery of New Brunswick,” 333.

[4] Machen, “Statement to the Presbytery of New Brunswick,” 333.

[5] Machen, “Statement to the Presbytery of New Brunswick,” 333.

[6] Machen, “The Responsibility of the Church in the New Age,” reprinted in D. G. Hart and John R. Muether, Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (The Committee on Christian Education and the Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1995), 197–209; quotation on 208.

[7] Machen, “The Responsibility of the Church in the New Age,” 209.

Darryl G. Hart is distinguished professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, and serves as an elder at Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Hillsdale, Michigan and as a member of the Committee on Christian Education. Ordained Servant Online, September–October, 2026