J. Gresham Machen understood that education plays a central role not only in the defense of the Christian faith but also in maintaining our humanity in the face of modernism’s dehumanizing tendencies. Though his concern throughout Christianity and Liberalism was primarily theological liberalism and its effects, his comments on education demonstrate that he understood liberal theology to be a facet of Liberalism’s radical reconfiguration of the meaning of life. As we will see in what follows, Machen’s insights and warnings on the subject of education (both implicit and explicit) remain salient for the church today, particularly as we consider the education of children.
Why are Machen’s insights still timely? As seems clear to even the most casual of observers, the state’s educational agenda for our youth is dominated by a secular ideology that operates like a faux religion. The doctrine and dogma of the system is sacred, and catechumens are both baptized and confirmed into them. Whereas the “liberalism” of former days might have given lip service to a plurality of belief, the current system tolerates no dissenters—especially when parents push back against their children being indoctrinated into philosophies and lifestyles which contradict God’s Word and undermine parental authority to direct the education of their children.
Parents are rightly appalled to find that the moral instruction in which their children are being immersed at home and in church is being undermined in the classroom. But what would we expect? When God’s Word is jettisoned, questions of morality or of what constitutes good character will be decided by each individual, whose inclination will be to adopt the prevailing cultural norms of the day. Machen warned that the secular school bases “character upon human experience” and represents “maxims of conduct as being based upon the collective experience of the race.”1 His conclusion was that “character-building, as practiced in our public schools, may well prove to be character-destruction.”2
This threat to the faithful discipleship of our children is far from being a new phenomenon. For instance, recall with me the hostile culture of the Babylonians, and how the politicians (namely, the king) sought to indoctrinate the youth of the land into forsaking their faith and denying their identity, to the end that they could be assimilated into that society’s worship and lifestyle. As in our culture today, many succumbed and followed the path of least resistance. But when three holy youths (along with young Daniel) were faithful to the Lord and refused to apostatize, not only was the power of God put on display, but so too was the importance of their preparation.
All of this is to say that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego’s virtue, obedience, and piety was not theirs because they had been born “good eggs,” and neither were they formed into virtuous young men (nor is anyone formed) simply because they knew the right things, as though cognition alone was the secret to character. No! Those holy youths acted the way that they did because their character—their virtuous habits—had been effectively shaped before their time of trial.3 They had been prepared for their hour of testing.
Though contemporary youths live in a very different world than did those young men, the temptations that face our children are fundamentally the same. Our children are confronted with an alluring appeal to conform themselves to the pattern and priorities of this world, as opposed to those of the Kingdom of God. Against these rival kingdoms of thought and desire, the church is called to do battle, and we make a major mistake if our posture is predominantly one of defense or retreat. Machen recognized this 100 years ago, and he responded not with nervous handwringing (“The sky is falling!”), nor as the pessimistic fatalist (“It is what it is”); rather, he observed that “the present is a time not for ease or pleasure, but for earnest and prayerful work.”4 Such is certainly still the case. In light of the fact that the world always has and always will oppose the Lord and his people, and also in light of the fact that our calling is not to retreat and hide, but rather to live faithfully in this world such that the name of Christ is magnified, the church and her members have a duty to so prepare the youth who have been entrusted to our care that they may (by God’s grace) be prepared to meet the coming storm.5
The fact that more and more families and churches are recognizing the importance of building schools within the local church invites us to reflect upon what the purpose of such schools should be and what guidance Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism might provide, for Machen understood that a robust Christian education was needed in order to counter the prevailing norms of an increasingly non-Christian society. Let us now consider how his insights might help to shape our approach to the education of youth.
Machen helped his readers recognize three dangerous characteristics of Liberalism, namely that it tends to be naturalistic (that is, materialist), utilitarian, and solipsistic (exalting the individual both over God and his social duties). Each of these three aspects currently characterize the approach to education in most public schools in America, and so if congregations are going to help parents protect their children from being catechized into these systems, the schools that they build will need to understand what they are up against, and execute strategies that are appropriate to the need.
What follows is a brief consideration of how Machen’s insights as to the tendencies of Liberalism might shape our approach to educating children within a classical and Christian parochial model.
Naturalistic Materialism
A naturalistic approach to education treats God as being either irrelevant or as an arbitrary and prejudicial intrusion into all subjects of study.6 For the materialist, truth, goodness, and beauty are arbitrary concepts—malleable in keeping with an individual’s opinions and orientations, no matter how perverse. Machen saw that the only authority for the naturalist is based upon the individual’s experience and warned that “such an authority is obviously no authority at all; for individual experience is endlessly diverse, and when once truth is regarded only as that which works at any particular time, it ceases to be truth.”7 The moral and theological collapse of the American mainline denominations in the hundred years since the publication of Christianity and Liberalism demonstrates the accuracy of Machen’s insight.
Whereas the “liberalism” of former days might have given lip service to a plurality of belief, the current system tolerates no dissenters.
Instead of a naturalistic approach to education, the parochial school begins each day with worship, intentionally signaling to students and faculty alike that all that they do is in God’s sight and is meant to be offered to him. In Anglican contexts, this daily rule of prayer takes the form of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer (in my parish, the 1662 version of Cranmer’s magnificent liturgy). These services ground students in the moral and metaphysical reality of God’s created order. The services begin with a confession of sin in which students and faculty acknowledge: “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.”8 Students and faculty alike ask God for pardon and restoration not in order that they might feel better about themselves, but so they “may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of [God’s] holy Name.” As the service progresses, they hear lessons from Holy Scripture, sing the Psalms, recite the Creed and Decalogue, and offer their prayers, thereby being reminded again and again that God is the sovereign over all creation and we owe him our allegiance: “For he is the Lord our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.” These times of daily worship are integral parts of the school day, providing both catechetical instruction and drawing students into the narrative of God’s redemptive work (past, present and future).
But simply adding chapel services to an otherwise secular school day is not all that is necessary in order for us to teach in a truly Christian manner. Students need teachers who will enliven their imagination as to the Lordship of Christ in all things, thereby helping them to approach any subject in such a way that God is seen to be relevant and his Word authoritative. Machen envisioned such an approach, as can be seen in comments such as this:
A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life— those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.9
At St. Mark’s Classical Academy, we aspire to put Machen’s insights into practice in every aspect of our curricula. For example, science classes seek to evoke wonder (not merely to explain mechanistic workings of the world or man’s manipulation of God’s creation), and history teachers seek to inspire students with the stories of men and women of courage and conviction, inviting students to model their virtues and learn from their failures rather than simply presenting dates, statistics, and complaints against social injustices. Likewise, handwriting, grammar, and math are taught such that students learn order and elegance, not merely functionality. An approach to education that prioritizes functionality leads us to Machen’s next insight as to the nature of Liberalism.
Utilitarianism
Machen was concerned with the utilitarian trends in the educational philosophies of his day, along with the danger of resulting totalitarianism. He observed that: “The dominant tendency, even in a country like America, which formerly prided itself on its freedom from bureaucratic regulation of the details of life, is toward a drab utilitarianism in which all higher aspirations are to be lost.”10
A utilitarian approach to education regards children as little more than cogs in the great machine of industry. The purpose of education, according to this approach, is simply to learn what is necessary in order to work at a particular job, which in turn has the base purpose of earning money, so as to secure for oneself material necessities and (if possible) luxuries—all to obtain a life that is as comfortable as possible. Thus, in a utilitarian approach to a child’s education, learning is reduced to the accumulation of data or of skills (as commodities), the value of which is simply that they are means by which one may find employment, earn wages, and pursue some vacuous version of “the good life” glamorized by media outlets of the world. In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens satirized this approach to education:
Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Stick to Facts, sir! (…The speaker stepped back and regarded the children) little vessels ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim, (and he) … like a cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.11
What a very poor pedagogy this is, in comparison to an approach to education in which wonderment and joy are central, and in which young image bearers are being trained not solely for the workplace, but to live in such a way that they enjoy and delight in every good gift that God provides, including the joy of learning. As Dorothy Sayers wrote in The Lost Tools of Learning, “… the sole end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”12 Many would argue that there is no more strategic a time to equip children with the tools of learning than when they are young. Machen agreed:
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 then 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.13
A classical and Christian approach to education avoids the trap of utilitarianism by recognizing that students are more than their future jobs. For this reason, we seek to develop the capabilities of the whole person, and to uphold and preserve the true value of every student.14 A teacher’s role, therefore, is one of nurturing and inspiring students to their highest ability, rather than simply trying to dump the required facts, knowledge, and abilities into them. If a congregation wants to establish a school that joins Machen in battling utilitarianism, it will need to be populated with faculty that center on the students’ vocation as students rather than a particular desired outcome. It also needs to be a school in which students learn not only their abilities but also their limitations, and consequently their mutual need to love and forgive their fellow men as they would have God love and forgive them. Such an orientation will help to avoid the third tendency of Liberalism against which Machen contended.
Solipsism
Machen understood that Liberalism’s tendency is to reduce everything to individualistic concerns. He saw this as a denial of the full distinction between creature and Creator which then leads to a minimization of the problem of sin. “Modern liberalism has lost all sense of the gulf that separates the creature from the Creator,” he wrote, and “at the very root of the modern liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin.”15 He goes on to indicate that the result of this false anthropology is an unrealistically optimistic view of the future, including man’s ability to overcome personal and social problems.16 This false confidence, coupled with a denial of the problem of sin, led to the fascist and socialist totalitarianisms that devastated the twentieth century. It is leading now to the sort of democratic totalitarian conditioning envisioned by John Dewey and his ilk.
A naturalistic approach to education treats God as being either irrelevant or as an arbitrary and prejudicial intrusion into all subjects of study.
Because classical Christian education understands the problem of evil, it understands that education must include the shaping of loves (affections) and that, by learning to lovingly pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful, we increase our capacity to know and love God. Conversely, if education focuses only on the mind and is content to leave the heart unchanged, increasing learning and ability will only allow the student greater scope for wickedness. Machen remarked:
We have provided technical education (but) … there is also the moral interests of mankind; and without cultivation of these moral interests a technically trained man is only given more power to do harm. By this purely secular, non-moral, and non-religious, training we produce not a real human being but a horrible Frankenstein.17
The classical and Christian school’s desire is that through the formation of character—habitual virtue winning out over habitual vice—the student learns not only to rightly discern what is pleasing to God, but further that his desires become reformed such that we begin to long for what is right(eous).18 A teacher’s focus, therefore, must not be only upon the student’s mind, but also upon his heart, for as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1800s: “One cannot doubt that in the United States the instruction of the people serves powerfully to maintain a democratic republic. It will be so, I think, everywhere that the instruction that enlightens the mind is not separated from the education that regulates mores.”19 American education since the triumph of Liberalism has sought to abolish rather than regulate mores. The disunifying and totalitarian effects on a democratic republic and its institutions are manifest.
Conclusion
One hundred years ago J. Gresham Machen helped to expose the errors of Liberalism and he called upon the Church to take notice and respond. One such response is the building of schools in which our children may not only be educated in Christian doctrine, but in which they might also learn to engage in any and every subject as well-formed disciples of Christ. Parents who desire to heed Machen’s call to play an active role in the education of their children (rather than relinquish their authority to the secular state) will be greatly helped if an increasing number of congregations would (1) determine to establish Christian schools with classical pedagogies, and (2) influenced by Machen's observations, seek to cultivate the kind of character that is able to effectively resist the deformative influence of secular society.
1. John Gresham Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State (Hobbs, New Mexico: The Trinity Foundation), 76.
2. Ibid., 77.
3. “… so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7).
4. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 150.
5. “The ‘otherworldliness’ of Christianity involves no withdrawal from the battle of this world; our Lord Himself, with His stupendous mission, lived in the midst of life’s throng and press. Plainly, then, the Christian man may not simplify his problem by withdrawing from the business of the world, but must learn to apply the principles of Jesus even to the complex problems of modern industrial life…. the whole of life, including business and all of social relations, must be made obedient to the law of love.” Ibid., 130.
6. Machen understood that a robust Christian education was needed in order to counter the prevailing norms of an increasingly non-Christian society.
7. In describing Liberalism, Machen wrote: “… the many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism—that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of Christianity.” Ibid., 2.
8. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer International Edition, “The Collect for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity” (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 3.
9. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 81.
10. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 10.
11. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 5–6.
12. Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning (London: Methuen, 1948), 30.
13. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 12.
14. At St. Mark’s Classical Academy, the stated mission is to endow children with the tools of learning, and the wisdom of the ages, by nourishing their souls with truth, goodness and beauty, so that they may serve God and their fellow man with virtue, dignity, and strength.
15. Ibid., 55.
16. “Characteristic of the modern age, above all else, is a supreme confidence in human goodness … Get beneath the rough exterior of men, we are told, and we shall discover enough self-sacrifice to found upon it the hope of society; the world’s evil, it is said, can be overcome with the world’s good; no help is needed from outside the world.” Ibid., 56.
17. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 75.
18. “Almighty and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen” (The Book of Common Prayer, 185).
19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield & Delba Winthrop (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 510.