Standing Against Tyranny: The Life and Legacy of Arthur Perkins

Brian De Jong

Reviewed by: Wayne Sparkman

Standing Against Tyranny: The Life and Legacy of Arthur Perkins, by Brian De Jong. Independently published, 2023. Paperback, 537 pages, $19.99 (Amazon). Reviewed by Wayne Sparkman, Director, PCA Historical Center.

I first learned of Arthur Perkins from reading Gary North’s magnum opus, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church. North tells the story in short order:

On the day Machen died, Rev. Arthur F. Perkins’ funeral was held in Wisconsin. He died three days before Machen did. A year earlier he had been in good health. He was an even more obvious victim of the Presbyterian power religion. He had operated a summer camp for children in Wisconsin. . .. He had made the mistake of charging young people $3.50 a week instead of the $12 charged by the (PCUSA) presbytery’s camp. This brought down the wrath of his presbytery. In vain did he protest that the camp was not a deliberately rival camp, just a place for children to have Bible studies and have fun. It was non-denominational. It was not run through his local church. That, of course, was the liberals’ whole point in the summer of 1936. He refused to close it, and he refused to resign from the Independent Board. For this he was suspended. His health declined sharply after this. He died in late December, possibly as the result of a seemingly minor head injury. (Crossed Fingers, 748–749)

Remembering that account, it was exciting when in 2004, the Rev. Robert Smallman donated those documents previously stored at his Wisconsin church that now constitute the Arthur F. Perkins Manuscript Collection. Fourteen years later, I first met Rev. Brian De Jong when he was part of the OPC’s Committee for the Historian as they paid a visit to the PCA Historical Center in 2018, which in turn led to his later visits to research the Perkins Collection.

In my twenty-five years at the PCA Historical Center, I have yet to see anyone else take the ball and run with it the way De Jong has in his research into the life and legacy of Perkins. The Perkins Collection is actually one of our smaller collections, with less than one hundred pages in content. And while the material is rich, it was De Jong’s dogged pursuit of every lead given up in those pages that turned the whole matter into a masterpiece.

The result is a biography well worth your time, for as De Jong surveys Perkins’s story, we see that his legacy is clearly one we need today:

Arthur Perkins stood against tyranny in his day, and he paid a tremendous price for his stand. In his estimation, the truth mattered more than his own personal comfort, ease and happiness. In the end, his courageous stand cost him his sanity, and his very life. In a certain respect, Harry Rimmer was correct when he opined that when Arthur Perkins died on December 29, 1936, he was “one martyred witness who was faithful unto death.” (Standing Against Tyranny, 326)

Orthodox Presbyterians will particularly be interested in the correspondence between Perkins and J. Gresham Machen provided in appendix 4.