J. Gresham Machen’s Fight Against the Department of Education
After nearly half a century as the Republican Party’s bête noire, the U.S. Department of Education seems headed for abolition. This is far from the only alteration in American primary education over the past five years. In the aftermath of COVID-19, homeschooling has doubled; a dozen states have passed new school choice legislation; and this June, the Supreme Court will likely order states to permit religious charter schools. Americans are radically reconsidering the role of government schools in their society.
It is helpful, in the midst of this re-evaluation, to look again at the thought of the Protestant churchman who most vocally opposed the creation of the Department of Education in the first place—the Presbyterian New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen. Machen is now most remembered as a dominant figure in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy and the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary. But Machen was a cultural commentator and educational theorist as much as he was a clergyman, and even his theological works often digress into political matters1. Indeed, Machen was a political activist. In the 1920s and 30s, he served on the Executive Committee of the Sentinels of the Republic: a conservative political organization committed to defending individual freedom, states’ rights, and the U.S. Constitution against the governmental centralization associated with the Progressive Movement.
Machen spoke and wrote against the federal Department of Education in his capacity as a leader of the Sentinels rather than as a pastor. In 1926, for instance, he testified before the House and Senate Committees on Education against various bills to create a department. He also spoke at Sentinel gatherings to rally opposition to these bills. Due to the actions of the Sentinels and other groups, Congress eventually rejected all the proposals for a federal department of education that arose during the 1920s. Thanks to Machen and others, it would not be until 1979 that Congress finally created the present-day Department.
Machen best expressed his hostility to a department of education in his essay on “The Necessity of the Christian School”—originally a speech delivered before a convention of Christian teachers in 1933 but later reprinted as an article2. By 1933, Machen’s battle against the proposed department was years in the past, yet Machen reflects in this article on the reasons why he successfully opposed the department as part of his larger defense of private Christian schooling. Strikingly, Machen makes almost no legalistic or constitutional arguments against the proposed department. As the son and brother of prominent Supreme Court litigators, Machen was certainly familiar with such arguments. Yet he chose, instead, to focus on the philosophic ramifications of a department of education.
According to Machen, independent Christian schools—free from government regulatory control—were necessary both “for the maintenance of American liberty” and “for the propagation of the Christian religion” (66). Machen viewed “the tyrant of the scientific expert [a]s the most crushing tyranny of all” (67) and “[u]niformity in education . . . [as] one of the worst calamities in which a people can fall” (73).
Partly, the problem was the nature of educational “experts.” Machen stresses that the groups lobbying for a department of education were not composed of eminent chemists, or historians, or other teachers. Instead, these groups were filled with “educators . . . professors of ‘education,’ superintendents of schools, and the like” (72)—the whole apparatus of administrators and assistant deanlets that have swelled to dominate the budget and staff of American schools in the years since 1979 and increasingly disempowered real faculty. Machen prophesied how a department of education would operate. First, Congress—unwilling to anger competing constituencies by legislating clearly—“will pass legislation which, in accordance with the plain meaning of the language, will be quite unenforceable” (70). As a result, “[t]he exact degree of enforcement will be left of Washington bureaus” and to “the arbitrary decisions of officials” (70)—to the unelected educational “experts” who would staff such a department. Thus, Machen opposed not only a federal department but also alternative proposals to merely supply federal funding to state schools because “federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy” (74-75).
Even if this bureaucracy were better staffed, however, Machen believed it would work great evil, because the goal of systematizing education was itself a problem. Souls are not products. “[W]hat is good for a Ford car is not always good for a human being, for the simple reason that a Ford car is a machine while a human being is a person” (74). The standardization, uniformity, and efficiency are for industrial assembly lines, not schools. Thus, Machen was “entirely opposed” to legislation designed to ensure no child was left behind in “backwards states” (74). “If all the children in the United States have equal opportunities, no child will have an opportunity that is worth very much” (74).
As dangerous as the “soul-killing collectivism” of government-controlled education would be to natural human development and liberty, Machen also had “vastly more important” theological objections (75). Independent Christian schools were necessary for the spread of the gospel. “[T]echnical education” without the cultivation of “the moral interests of mankind” is an impossibility, which would “produce not a human being but a horrible Frankenstein” (75)—meaning Victor as much as the monster. Machen had something like Lewis’ “men without chests” in view. As a result, educational experts will seek to supplement technical and scientific training with “character building” based on “the flimsy, muddy embankments of an appeal of human experience,” on “good citizen[ship],” and on “the collective experience of the race” (76-77).
Even when the content of this government-approved moral education accords with Christian morality—often it will not, as teachings on gender and sexuality in contemporary public schools demonstrate—it will be taught “with optimism . . . in a way radically opposed to the Christian doctrine of sin” (77). Thus, Machen warned strongly against proposals, for instance, to have public schools teach the Bible as a literary classic that all well-read people should know or to have prayers recited at the opening of a school day. “What could be more terrible . . . than the reading of the Lord’s Prayer to non-Christian children as though they could use it without . . . be[ing] purchased by the blood of Christ” (79). Even at its best, character education can only tell unredeemed persons that they can have hope from embracing “the ethical portions of the Bible apart from its great redemptive core” (79). Even at its best—when it does not inculcate immorality outright—character education is government-funded propagation of a false gospel of works.
Machen’s writings against the federal department of education are largely negative. His positive prescriptions—promoting competition between government, parochial, and secular private schools; set weekly hours of release from school for private religious instruction; a network of Protestant schools modeled on the Roman Catholic school system—are underdeveloped. But it is clear Machen would have thought that present-day educational reformers often plan far too small.
The end of the federal Department of Education, plus the spread of vouchers and homeschooling, is a step forward. But little will be gained if we replace an officious “expert” bureaucracy in Washington with one in Sacramento or Richmond. State regulations and state funding can also crush souls. From Machen’s theological perspective, the goal of educational reform cannot be merely improved test scores or increased local control. It must be to ensure that the “distinctiveness” (83) of traditional Christian schooling in which theology, as the queen of science, underlies every part of the curriculum, is not lost from this earth. For that is the only education fitting for souls.
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