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Not an “Ordinary Man”: J. Gresham Machen and the Un-Queering of Evangelical Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2023

Austin Steelman
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Abstract

In the 1920s, Princeton Seminary professor J. Gresham Machen was the leading fundamentalist intellectual of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. His Calvinist theology, commitment to biblical inerrancy, and opposition to liberalism were passed on to and spread by his influential students including Carl McIntire, Harold Ockenga, and Francis Schaeffer. But in the early days of 1906, the young man who would go on to indelibly shape evangelical theology wrote home from Germany where he was a graduate student that he could never go into Christian ministry because of his “moral fault” that no “ordinary man” could understand. This article analyzes the coded language of J. Gresham Machen's letters during his pivotal personal crisis in the context of changing German understandings of “homosexuality” and Machen's lifelong homosocial tendencies. Moreover, it connects Machen's confrontation with his sexuality with his simultaneous confrontation with German liberal theology. In the fall of 1905, Machen found himself drawn to the more experiential and pluralistic Christianity of Wilhelm Herrmann. However, in facing his own perceived immorality, Machen found “Calvinism a very comforting doctrine indeed.” He rejected modernism and spent his life defending a rigid orthodoxy against the theologies that would come to accommodate and embrace queerness. The results of his personal crisis echoed through the history of twentieth-century American evangelicalism. This article analyzes the historical process of “un-queering” theology that emanated from that crisis and demonstrates that resistance to queerness was woven into the ideological fabric of evangelicalism far earlier than scholars have yet recognized.

Type
Research Article
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Religion and American Culture , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , Fall 2022 , pp. 338 - 374
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Copyright © 2023 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

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References

Notes

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22 Machen to Mary Gresham Machen, March 26, 1905, Machen Papers.

23 Ibid.

24 Machen to Mary Gresham Machen, May 7, 1905, Machen Papers.

25 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., July 24, 1905, Machen Papers.

26 J. Gresham Machen, “Mountains and Why We Love Them,” Christianity Today, August 1934, 66.

27 Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 95–96.

28 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., December 10, 1905, Machen Papers.

29 Ibid.; Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., November 2, 1905, Machen Papers.

30 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., December 10, 1905.

31 Machen to Mary Gresham Machen, October 24, 1905, Machen Papers.

32 Machen to Arthur W. Machen, October 28, 1905, Machen Papers.

33 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., November 2, 1905, Machen Papers.

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38 William Armstrong to Machen, November 12, 1905.

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45 Machen to Mary Gresham Machen, February 1, 1906, Machen Papers.

46 Machen to Arthur Machen, February 4, 1906, Machen Papers.

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51 Arthur Machen Jr. to Machen, October 23, 1904; Arthur W. Machen Jr. to Machen, October 22, 1905; Machen to Mary Gresham Machen, July 7, 1912; Machen to Mary Gresham Machen, June 28, 1908, Machen Papers.

52 Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen; Machen, “Mountains and Why We Love Them.”

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55 Ibid. citing Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, “Gladius Furens” in The Riddle of “Man-Manly” Love, I:261–71; Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany, 4–9.

56 Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany, 85–86.

57 Beachy, “The German Invention of Homosexuality,” 822–30; Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany, 45.

58 Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany, 85–88; Murphy, Political Manhood; Chauncey, Gay New York, 12.

59 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic, 1975).

60 Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany, 48.

61 Machen to Arthur Machen, August 17, 1902, Machen Papers.

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63 Henry W. Coray, J. Gresham Machen: A Silhouette (Willow Grove: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1981), 8–12.

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71 Machen to Mary Gresham Machen, March 6, 1921, Machen Papers.

72 Mary Gresham Machen to Machen, March 10, 1921, Machen Papers.

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74 L. V. Buschman to John C. Finney, November 15, 1926, Norman L. Euwer to John C. Finney, November 15, 1926, in Transcript of the Hearings by the General Assembly's Special Committee to Visit Princeton Theological Seminary, November 22–24, 1926, Machen Papers.

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82 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., February 25, 1906.

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84 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., April 18, 1906, Machen Papers.

85 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., June 3, 1906, Machen Papers; Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 122–29.

86 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., June 3, 1906.

87 Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen, 145.

88 Machen, “Christianity in Conflict,” 248–49, 261–62.

89 Ibid., 256–57.

90 Ibid., 263–64. The castle of Giant Despair is a reference to a place in John Bunyan's 1698 allegorical Christian novel The Pilgrim's Progress.

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98 Machen, “What Is ‘Orthodoxy’?,” The Presbyterian Guardian, November 4, 1935, 38.

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102 Machen to Arthur Machen Jr., April 28, 1910, Machen Papers.

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105 Machen to Mary Machen, April 1, 1917, Machen Papers.

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