Your Weekly Machen Fix: Christianity and Liberty

This is an excerpt from “Christianity and Liberty” that originally appeared in Forum and Century 85 (1931).

The real indictment against the modern world is that by the modern world human liberty is being destroyed.  At that point, no doubt, many readers will only with difficulty repress a smile.  The word “liberty” today has a decidedly archaic sound.  It suggests G. A. Rnety, flag-waving, the boys of ‘76, and the like.  Twentieth-century intellectuals, it is thought, have long ago outgrown all such childishness as that.  So the modern historians are writing “liberty” in quotations marks, when they are obliged to use the ridiculous word: no principle, they are telling us, for example, was involved in the American Revolution; economic causes alone produced that struggle; and Patrick Henry was indulging in cheap melodrama when he said: “Give me liberty or give me death.”  Certainly, at any rate, whatever our estimate of history, liberty is out of date in modern life.  Standardization and efficiency have very largely taken its place.  

Even nature is being made to conform to standard.  In the region that I have visited in Maine off and on for the past thirty years, I have seen the wild exuberance of woods and streams gradually giving place to the dreary regularities of a national park.  It seems almost as though some sweet, delicate living creature were being ruthlessly destroyed.  

But that is only a symbol of what is also going on today in the higher sphere of human life: the same ruthless standardization of human souls.  That is particularly true in the all-important field of education.  If, it is said, we allow all sorts of queer private schools and parochial schools to confuse the mind of youth, what will become of thw welfare of the state?  How can we have a unified nation without a standardized school?

I know that this process of standardization has recently been checked in America here and there.  The Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional the Oregon school law that simply sought to wipe all private schools and Christian schools out of existence in that state, and it also declared unconstitutional the Nebraska language law (similar to laws in other states) that made literary education even in private schools a crime….  The misnamed “child-labor amendment” to the Constitution of the United States, which would have placed the youth of the country under centralized bureaucratic control, has not yet received the requisite ratification from the states.  But I fear that these setbacks to the attack on liberty, unless the underlying temper of the people changes, are but temporary, and that the process of standardization and centralization will go ruthlessly on.  

In some spheres, no doubt, standardization is a good thing.  It is a good thing, for example, in the making of a Ford car.  But it does not follow that it should be applied to human beings, for a human being is a person and a Ford car is a machine.

 

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The typical modern experts deny this distinction, and that is our fundamental quarrel with the “modern mind.”  I know that there are those who tell us that this tendency to which we object is merely incidental to a change in the physical conditions of life.  The liberty of the individual, they tell us, has always had to be limited somehow in the interests of the community and of the race; and the limitation, as life becomes more complex, merely has to appear in somewhat more intricate form.  We may be passing through a period just now when the pendulum between individualism and collectivism has swung too much to the latter extreme, but it will swing back, and all will be well.  

 

I should like to think that this view of the situation is correct, but I am unable to think so.  The trouble is not that the modern world has been unsuccessful in an effort to preserve liberty, but that it is not seeking to preserve liberty at all.  Mussolini is thought to be a benefactor of the race because, although liberty of speech is destroyed in Italy, the streets of Italian cities are clean.  The Soviet tyrants in Russia are said not to be efficient, but it never seems to occur to modern critics that they would be far more dangerous tyrants if they were.  Mankind, in other words, has become willing to buy material benefits at any price.  I do not know how the bargain will turn out in detail.  But in the bargain something at any rate will have been lost.  We may have gained the whole world, but we are in danger of losing our own soul.