Guest Post by Matthew H. Lee
For the 2023 Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, I enter into nomination J. Gresham Machen.
While Machen would be an inspired choice in any year, this year is particularly appropriate to recognize his humanitarian contributions as it marks the 100th anniversary of what is widely considered his greatest work. Originally published in 1923, Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism in response to the growing influence of theological liberalism and modernism in the United States, and in particular the Presbyterian church, of which he was a minister. However, while he was first and foremost a theologian, he wrote and spoke extensively on education. For the purposes of the “Al,” I’ll focus on his humanitarian contributions to education.
Much of modern thought on private school choice traces back to Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” in which he argued that government could fund education without running schools and that competitive pressures would improve the quality of schools. Notably, his argument emphasized the importance of parents exercising choice for their children.
Two decades before Friedman penned his essay, Machen had already begun articulating the arguments for parental school choice. “A public-school system, in itself, is indeed of enormous benefit to the race,” he wrote in Christianity and Liberalism. “But it is of benefit only if it is kept healthy at every moment by the absolutely free possibility of the competition of private schools… once it becomes monopolistic, it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised.”
Machen was absolutely opposed to the public school tendency to usurp parents’ authority to oversee their children’s moral education. Since modern education was more interested in process than in knowledge (and modernist teachers more interested in method than in content), modern education attempted to compensate for the lack of moral instruction through the imposition of “morality codes” in Machen’s day. These he found “vicious” as they were both “faulty in detail” and “wrong in principle” (1926, “Shall We Have a Federal Department of Education?”). He opposed the Lusk Laws and other attempts to standardize the teaching profession that emphasized method over content. Modern attempts to infuse morality into education have proven equally disastrous, whether through social and emotional learning or Holocaust education, which has in some cases served to promote anti-Semitism.
In addition to supporting educational liberty, Machen was also a proponent of religious liberty, his second broad humanitarian contribution in education. While it is generally true that Protestants in Machen’s day put their eggs in the public school basket, passing Blaine Amendments and other measures to restrict the religious liberty of Catholics and other groups, Machen serves as a notable example of a Protestant academic who favored religious liberty for all groups. In Christianity and Liberalism, he lamented the treatment of Catholic children in Oregon, many of whom were forced to attend public schools despite the objection of their parents. The publication of Christianity and Liberalism in 1923 predated the conclusion of the Oregon case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which was decided by the Supreme Court in 1925 in favor of parents. In a 1926 speech, he lauded Justice McReynolds, who delivered the unanimous opinion of the Court, for establishing the “great principle” that the child is not the mere creature of the state.
Machen’s third broad humanitarian contribution to education comes through his opposition to federal power in education. He was an active member of the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian organization whose goal was to resist expansion of federal power. Speaking at a gathering of the Sentinels, he warned that the formation of a federal Department of Education “would be the very worst calamity into which this country could fall.” He testified before Congress on behalf of the Sentinels, “I do not believe that the personal, free, individual character of education can be preserved when you have a Federal department laying down standards of education which become more or less mandatory to the whole country.” Machen’s testimony helped defeat the passage of the proposed federal department in 1926.
Would that we had more humanitarians like Machen! Since his death in 1937, many of the modernist reforms he opposed have passed, including teacher certification and the formation of a federal department of education. But the spirit of his core conviction in parental choice lives on in the year of universal choice, one hundred years after the publication of Christianity and Liberalism. For these reasons, I heartily endorse J. Gresham Machen for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
This man was a hero. And gave us the most concise case for religious freedom ever formulated: “It is useless to approach a man with both a club and an argument.”