What does it mean to be a conservative in the United States? Dictionaries are not much help on this one, since like most reference works, they turn out to yield fairly bland and abstract conceptions. For instance, the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines the adjective conservative as either "relating to a philosophy of conservatism" or "constituting a political party professing the principles of conservatism." Webster's does go on to say that being conservative has to do with the maintenance of "existing views, conditions, or institutions." In other words, conservative is supposed to be synonymous with "traditional," "moderate," and "cautious," favoring norms of "taste, elegance, style, or manners."

This is all well and good, but this definition, from an American dictionary no less, does not help much with the idea of American conservatism. The reason is that the United States is a novel phenomenon in human history. Of course, antecedents for it exist in ancient Greece and Rome. But the nation that emerged out of the late eighteenth-century British colonies in North America was hardly conservative, considering that it gave up on the two institutions that had preserved some semblance of cultural and political order in the West since at least the fifth century--namely, crown and church. What is more, whether the new nation was liberal or republican in its ideology, a point much debated by historians, it is not too controversial to suggest that the freedoms won in the American colonies' war for independence were also fairly novel from the perspective of European society. This is one of the reasons why Americans call Europe the Old World as opposed to our New one. The United States granted incredible intellectual, political and economic freedom to its citizens (slavery notwithstanding). These freedoms were so unusual that one of those traditional institutions of European social order, the papacy, condemned Americanism in 1899 as fundamentally incompatible with Roman Catholic teaching and practice. What Pope Leo XIII regarded as hostile to Catholicism was not so much theological novelty, but the liberal ideology that advocated representative forms of government, free markets and the separation of church and state, an ideology that Pius IX had already condemned in his Syllabus of Errors. In other words, the traditional institution of the papacy condemned ideas and sentiments that today's conservatives regard as traditional. This is another way of saying that conservatism in the United States is something of an oxymoron or a case of political schizophrenia. From an historical perspective, our conservatism is really liberalism, since it is on the side of the things that nineteenth-century liberals championed--limited government, individual freedom and economic opportunity. This means that watching conservatives trying to deny their liberalism can be either very confusing or very amusing. In the latter camp would fall H. L. Mencken, who, when pressed on why he lived in the United States, wrote that it was "incomparably the greatest show on earth . . . worth every cent it costs."[1]

No doubt, J. Gresham Machen would be a primary exhibit of American conservatism's strangely entertaining ways. In 1926, he testified before the Congress of the United States against the formation of a Federal Department of Education. Machen's reasons for opposing the proposal stemmed from his politics, which were decidedly liberal, if not libertarian. They may not have been all that unusual for a Southern Democrat, which Machen was. But they must have sounded odd coming out of the mouth of a fundamentalist who, during the same month that he appeared before Congress, also testified before a committee of the northern Presbyterian Church, and there did exactly what he criticized Congress for doing. In this testimony, Machen argued not for greater freedom but actually for more intolerance. He blamed liberalism for the controversy that was dividing Presbyterians and argued that preachers who could not affirm such doctrines as the virgin birth of Christ should be barred from the Presbyterian Church. For Machen, liberalism was an entirely different religion from Christianity, and conservatives should oppose it with all their might. But before Congress, Machen played a different tune. Instead of blaming liberalism for America's woes, he did the liberal thing of telling government officials to leave the American people alone.

So how do we square Machen's liberal politics with his conservative religion? Was he simply guilty of contradicting himself? Does ideological consistency, for instance, require being a conservative in all walks of life, including politics, religion, and culture? Or is it possible to be, as Daniel Bell thought of himself, a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture?[2] Could it be that Machen's apparently double-minded performance in 1926--liberalism before Congress and strict Calvinism before Presbyterian commissioners--is simply the dark side of conservatism in the United States? What I will do in these remarks is, first, explore Machen's political conservatism and its significance for federalism; second, look at the implications of his libertarianism for education; and last, make a few observations about what lessons Machen might offer to contemporary American Protestants who think of themselves as conservative.

Anyone wondering why Machen would have been asked to testify before Congress about the proposed federal department of education most likely would have pointed to his credentials as an educator. After all, Machen had been associated with schools for practically all his life. He loved the study of classical languages and literature, and was very much alarmed that the "one-hundred percent American" crowd, the ones pushing for English-only curricula, would prohibit the study of not only German, but also Latin and Greek.

Yet his appearance on Capitol Hill stemmed more from his political views than his pedagogical convictions. The organization that brought Machen to Washington was the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian association spearheaded by Massachusetts businessmen who opposed all things federal, from military conscription, Prohibition, and the Child Labor Amendment, to the federal department of education. In an address Machen gave to the Sentinels, only a month before his appearance before Congress, he made clear that the proposed department was primarily about politics. "Let us be perfectly clear about one thing," he concluded, "if liberty is not maintained with regard to education, there is no use trying to maintain it in any other sphere. If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else."[3] Machen thereby established his political identity as an American conservative, that is, as one who was fundamentally committed to the principle of limited government.

Machen's conservatism began quite startlingly with the idea that government, was a necessary evil. The purpose of the state, accordingly, was not "to produce blessedness or happiness" but rather to prevent "blessedness or happiness from being interfered with by wicked men." Machen's politics began with the aim of sustaining the good life of individuals and families, rather than making a people into a great nation. In a lengthy passage from an address given before Christian day school teachers and administrators, Machen outlined the political creed of all genuine conservatives on this side of the Atlantic:

I believe in the notion that there are certain basic rights of the individual man and the individual family which must never be trampled under foot--never for any supposed advantage of the whole, never because of the supposed necessity of any emergency--certain basic rights like the right of personal freedom, the right of property, the right of privacy of the home, the real freedom of speech and of the press. I believe in the specifically American idea of government--not a nation divided for purposes of administrative convenience into a number of units called states, but a number of indestructible states, each with its inalienable rights, each with its distinctive features, with its own virtues to be cultivated by its own citizens, with its own defects not to be remedied at all unless remedied by its own citizens, and, on the other hand, a Federal government not in possession of any general and unexpressed sovereignty but carefully limited to powers expressly granted it by a Constitution which was not of its own making.

These were not merely political convictions but also deeply felt sentiments, so deep that Machen was almost embarrassed to admit his love for his country, confessing that his affection was probably "disgustingly sentimental."[4]

But these sentiments, Machen also admitted, were a source of great sorrow. His affection for the American idea of government caused much grief because of the beating that liberty was taking in his day. "The healthy hatred of being governed," he explained, "formerly so strong in the American people, is gradually being lost." As long as government policies conferred certain physical benefits, no one opposed legislative interference, threats to family life or government monopolies. Or, as Machen put it in his book diagnosing the defects of liberal Protestantism, where he wanted to retain the good sense of what liberalism meant, modern governments never considered whether forced welfare was a bad thing: "In the interests of physical well-being the great principles of liberty are being thrown ruthlessly to the winds."[5]

Machen's firm commitment to limited government was his chief reason for opposing the proposed federal department of education. That proposal, he believed, was grounded in the notion that education was essentially an affair of the state, "that education must be standardized for the welfare of the whole people and put under the control of government." In sum, governmental control and regulation of education implied that children "belong to the State, that their education must be provided for by the State in a way that makes for the State's welfare."[6] This assumption undermined the proper authority for education, namely, the parents who bore responsibility for their own children. Parents, Machen believed, had the right to educate their children in whatever way they saw fit. He even warned that if Christian day schools, institutions he greatly admired, ever competed with families, then he could never endorse them.

Consequently, protecting the legitimate authority of local powers--what Protestants used to call "lesser magistrates"--worked in tandem with Machen's commitment to limited government. In other words, he opposed federal control of or intrusion into the affairs of other duly recognized and constituted authorities, ranging from families, neighborhoods, and counties to the state governments that make up the United States of America. For this reason, Machen saw in federal programs, like a department of education or the Child-Labor Amendment, the same sort of centralization and consolidation of political power that Germany was exhibiting under National Socialism and the Soviet Union under Communism. The American alternative to such efforts, he believed, was not to centralize and consolidate power in a more benign fashion, but to avoid centralization altogether and limit national government by dispersing power to a host of local authorities, whether public officials or not.

Of course, decentralizing power--what we would call today devolution--would mean less uniformity and even less efficiency. But Machen would not blink when confronted by these apparently negative consequences. He even went so far as to say that inefficiency and diversity were good things in themselves. Although Machen was not at all happy with many of the individual States' education policies, especially with legislation making English the only language, he was far more comfortable with forty-eight governments having spoons in the pot than with allowing the federal government to be the sole chef. Some of the States might "become very bad in the sphere of education," he explained, "but it is perhaps not likely that all of them will become utterly bad." In fact, he thought there was "a great safeguard" in the multiplicity of local governments. What is more, Machen believed that such multiplicity would foster greater competition, another benefit of decentralization. He held that "there ought to be [in the sphere of education] the most unlimited competition--competition between one state and another and competition between state schools and private schools." If such competition led to inefficiency, so much the better. Efficiency was no magic wand that made everything it touched good. Instead, efficiency directed to harmful ends was equally destructive. Better, then, he reasoned, to have many agencies and authorities taking a hand in education so that efficient forms of bad education would not snuff out good education, no matter how inefficient. As he told senators and representatives, "a more uniform and efficient system of public common school education . . . is the worst fate into which any country can fall."[7]

This is a place where contemporary conservatives would likely be uncomfortable with Machen's views, since many on the right not only want to reduce the hold of the federal government on educational policy and funding, but also think they know what a good education looks like and desire to see the blessings of such a curriculum extended to all of America. But Machen was a consistent conservative and did not flinch from the consequences of limited government. Local control in the service of liberty meant more people having a say in such matters as education. And more people having a say, especially more parents determining the nature of their children's schooling, meant a greater chance of diversity in approaches to and the content of education. Machen believed that preserving liberty for parents and nurturing diversity in education were far more important than having national educational standards, and he did not naively believe that in the end the distribution of power to local authorities would work out automatically for the good of the nation, conceived as an efficient and uniform world power. What Machen thought to be in the best interests of America was a wide spectrum of families and local communities determining their own affairs, not the dissolving of familial and regional idiosyncrasies for the sake of national interest.

Despite Machen's silence about religion in his testimony before Congress, his conservative politics did stem implicitly from theological convictions. But it is important to note before spelling out some of these Presbyterian foundations for his commitment to liberty how much Machen departed from the dominant Protestant conceptions of freedom, diversity, and the common good. For one thing, Machen's Calvinistic predecessors from New England would have been completely dumbfounded by his apparent disregard for a uniform public order based on commonly held convictions about the good, the true, and the beautiful. Puritan notions of religion and public life did not make room for diversity and religious freedom--just ask Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams--since Puritans held that true religion was the bedrock for good government. New England's Congregationalists eventually reconciled themselves to America's religious freedom after much kicking and screaming. But Machen was fighting not just the holy-commonwealth heritage of New England Calvinism, but also more recent Protestant efforts to secure Christian civilization in America. Ever since the end of the Civil War, northern Protestants had been advocating various ecumenical and interdenominational endeavors in order to work together more efficiently. They wanted to establish a united Protestant front against the centralized and uniform power of America's growing Roman Catholic population, and extend the virtues of Anglo-American morality to all classes, races, and regions.

Yet, despite swimming against the Protestant tide, Machen's politics had a strong footing in Calvinist notions about liberty of conscience, the limits of church power, Presbyterian polity, and sphere sovereignty. Presbyterians did not have a market on the belief in liberty of conscience, but they were one of the few communions with a whole chapter devoted to it in their doctrinal standards. Chapter twenty of the Westminster Confession of Faith reads, "God alone is Lord of conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men." To be sure, this was not a justification for unbridled license, since the confession goes on to recognize legitimate authorities, like the magistrate, to whom Christians are to be submissive unless compelled to do something contrary to conscience. But this doctrine, along with the Calvinist notion that the only authority that could legitimately bind consciences was the Word of God, not the state, the church or the family, gave Presbyterians like Machen a hermeneutic of suspicion that was ever watchful for abuses of power. And even when power was legitimate, the doctrine of sphere sovereignty implied that the church, the state, and the family were limited each to its own sphere of authority and could not go beyond it. State control of education was a flagrant violation of sphere sovereignty. But Calvinists believed that parochial or church-based schooling was also wrong, since the family was the sole institution responsible for the training of children except in such dire circumstances as those of orphans. For that reason, Machen favored Christian schools run by families, not church-schools that were overseen by clergy.

One last theological conviction that helps to account for Machen's political convictions is Presbyterian church government. Unlike episcopal forms of government, as found in the Lutheran, Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions, Presbyterians keep church power out of the hands of one officer or bishop and vest it in a series of graded courts--from the session of the local congregation, to the presbytery consisting of congregations in a particular geographical area, to the general assembly, the highest court where representatives from all presbyteries gather to oversee the ministry of the church. This principle of structural obstacles to the centralization of power also informed American government's separation of power. American Presbyterian polity also protects the rights of lower courts against those of the higher, giving the greatest power to sessions for the week-in and week-out life of a congregation, while also granting to presbyteries the responsibilities of ordaining ministers. The point is that Presbyterians of Machen's stripe, who were always wary of higher courts usurping the powers of local bodies, believed that even though this system of government was often long on procedure and short on quick decisions, it left the most important matters of church life to members and officers most immediately affected by those decisions.

In other words, Presbyterianism is the form of church government most compatible with such sociological notions as mediating structures or the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity. The idea behind both concepts, negatively, is that large structures like those of centralized government are clumsy if not ruthless in addressing the variety of circumstances and problems of ordinary individuals, families, congregations, and communities. Positively, these concepts also teach that the state should not perform tasks which other institutions and communities can perform themselves. In the words of Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno:

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.[8]

Ironically, in the twentieth century it has been Roman Catholics, those who affirm an infallible centralized authority, who have explored most the political implications of subsidiarity. In contrast, twentieth-century American Protestants, whose very denominational diversity is a vindication of the principle of subsidiarity, lament their lack of uniformity and pine for a Protestant pope to give them the order and stability necessary for greater influence.

Be that as it may, a commitment to liberalism in the classic political sense, that is, as the political philosophy of American conservatives, need not mean an equal commitment to individualism. One reason why Machen's libertarianism fails to resonate with contemporary religious conservatives, aside from their belief in the goodness of government, is that they do not notice that Machen's politics are rooted in this notion of sphere sovereignty. It was not that he believed all governmental power was always harmful. Rather, when government overreached its proper bounds, Machen expressed alarm. The creation of a federal department of education was a prime example of national government overstepping its proper sphere. For this reason, Machen put his finger on the problem with the growth of the federal government. Too often we think that social or political problems come down to the tension between the rights of individuals and the compelling interest of the state. But as Mark C. Henrie has recently argued, building on the work of Robert Nisbet, twentieth-century American politics is bound up with a historical paradox:

The power of the state in our lives has risen hand in hand with the rise of the individual "rights" about which we are so proud. . . . These two movements--increasing political power and increasing individual "freedom"--are directly related. For the rights that have been "recognized" by the modern liberal state are not so much rights against the state as they are rights against other social bodies that used to have some measure of authority in the lives of men and women.[9]

Machen's plea for liberty, then, was not aimed at license for individuals. It was an argument for the freedom of legitimate authorities to exercise power in their proper spheres. In other words, the debate over the federal department of education was essentially, according to Machen, a struggle between the rights of parents and the rights of the nation-state. And this explains why he was opposed to federal intervention in education, no matter how good it might be. Even if the bureaucrats in Washington devised a classical curriculum that taught Greek, Latin and all the wonders of ancient literature and history, he still would have opposed them. The reason was simple--it wasn't the state's business to educate children; that business belonged only to parents. For Machen, it was the essence of paternalism to let government do good things that involved it in spheres where it should not go. The rule of a benign dictator was still tyrannical, no matter how good his policies. As he explained to one congressman, the best thing to do would be to "diminish rather than to increase the function of the public school, and to place the responsibility . . . of children where it exactly belongs, upon the individual parents."[10] The contest over a federal department of education, then, was plainly and simply a struggle between families and Washington. And for Machen, the principles of American government made this an easy call, since the liberty he favored was premised upon the conviction of limited government.

Still, Machen's reasons for opposing the proposed federal department of education were not merely political. They also stemmed from convictions about the nature of a good education. He believed that the advocates of national standards for schooling held a fundamentally flawed understanding of the education of children.

As is the case with so many of Machen's views, his idea of a good education emerges only from occasional pieces or in the course of arguments about other subjects rather than from a systematic, formal treatment of the topic per se. Still, he had a very definite view of what he opposed. The modern pedagogical notion that teachers ought not to teach but simply "give students an opportunity to learn" was the sort of argument that set Machen off. It was one of the best examples of what he called the "intellectual decadence" or "anti-intellectual tendency" of twentieth-century America. Progressive educators had substituted methodology for content and put a child's development, rather than the three Rs, at the center of education. This progressive conception of education was supposed to "involve emancipation from a vast amount of drudgery."

"It used to be thought necessary to do some hard work at school," Machen wrote. "When a textbook was given to a class, it was expected that the contents of the textbook should be mastered." But according to the new theory, "storing up facts in the mind" was too long and painful a process. "The exercise of the memory" was too childish and mechanical. Self-expression was now the desired outcome. What teachers were telling students was that they needed to think for themselves and "unify [their] world." The problem, of course, was that students usually made a poor business of unifying their world. And the reason was that they did not have much of a world to unify. They had not acquired "a knowledge of a sufficient number of facts in order even to learn the method of putting facts together. . . . The modern student," Machen added, was "being told to practise the business of mental digestion; but the trouble [was] he [had] no food to digest." Students were actually being "starved for want of fact."[11]

The irony was that modern pedagogical theory promised individualism but delivered greater uniformity. Supposedly, the idea of letting students think for themselves would generate a diversity of perspectives and a stimulating intellectual environment as opposed to the old model of students merely reciting what teachers or textbooks taught. But in point of fact, when students had not mastered a body of knowledge, their so-called "independent thinking" conformed hopelessly to the views of their teachers. For instance, college students, Machen lamented, were not "half original enough," but went "on in the same routine way, following their leaders like a flock of sheep, repeating the same stock phrases with little knowledge of what they mean, swallowing whatever professors choose to give them--and all the time imagining that they are bold, bad, independent young men, merely because they abuse what everybody else is abusing."[12] Although his reference here was to higher education, Machen believed that primary and secondary schools suffered from the similarly destructive tendency of putting self-expression above learning a body of information. This was the educational equivalent of federalism in politics--the exaltation of individualism by national educational experts at the expense of what local school teachers and parents thought children should learn. A child-centered education was one further step in "liberating" children, conceived as individuals, from their proper sphere of authority and putting them in the hands of bureaucrats.

Ironically, then, Machen, the educational conservative, if not dinosaur, was the real champion of individualism in schooling. A proper view of education, he told Christian day school teachers, was the one whose purpose was to broaden the student so that he could enjoy the good things of life without being dependent on others. In other words, the aim in education "was to make human beings just as much unlike one another as possible." This idea stemmed from Machen's recognition of the real diversity of gifts among people. It would be a drab world, he believed, if everybody agreed with everybody else. For the higher ranges of human life to flourish, the world of ideas and the soul, children had to be liberated from what government experts thought were the proper goals of education. Students needed to think for themselves and not rely on strangers to tell them what was worthwhile or amusing. "The truly educated man" was one who loved to read good books, who either carried pocket editions around with him or knew those books so well that "he [could] draw at any moment, in meditation, upon the resources of a well-stocked mind."[13]

Aside from personal experience, it is not clear on principle why Machen thought such a mind would be produced by parents and teachers free from governmental red tape. As likely as it is for bureaucrats to foul up schooling, it is not on the surface obvious that parents or local communities will necessarily have a better understanding of education. But Machen's own upbringing, along with his awareness of what educational experts were up to in Washington, tipped the scales against national officials in favor of local authorities. His own parents had provided him with a first-rate primary and secondary education through a combination of home-schooling and a private school in Baltimore. To be sure, he knew that his mother and father were unusually accomplished--the former wrote a book about Robert Browning and the latter was a collector of rare works of Greek and Latin classical literature--and that not all parents were well educated. But he saw the proposals that proponents of a federal department of education brought forward and concluded that such plans, with the backing of the state, would not only monopolize schools but also standardize a bad education. The assumptions of state educators always made parents a safer bet for supervising a child's education.

One of those assumptions was the idea that the state had a compelling interest to ensure that students were educated in the rudiments of being good citizens. Here the dangers of uniformity and standardization applied not only to the mechanics of coordinating curricula and funding schools, but also to the goal of education itself. If part of the state's interest in public education was to produce good citizens, then the state's self-interest would be for schools to yield compliant and loyal graduates. Of course, examples of pedagogical social engineering go back to the first half of the nineteenth century with the founding of common schools in the United States. But in Machen's day the nationalistic aims of education were all the more alarming, thanks to the increasing power of the federal government and the cultural establishment's fear of un-American forms of thought.

A classic example of this was the "one hundred percent Americanist movement" of the early 1920s, when nationalism and nativism led to the restriction of civil liberties for groups thought to be disloyal to the United States. This movement gave a black eye not only to socialist schools in New York City but also to Lutheran parochial schools that taught German, and to Catholic parochial schools that professed allegiance to a power higher than the United States government. Yet, Machen thought that religious and political freedom required tolerance not only for "that with which we are agreed but also . . . for that to which we are most thoroughly opposed." He went on to lament, "What absurdities are uttered in the name of pseudo-Americanism." Roman Catholics and socialists had as much a right to propagandize in the United States as any other group because tolerance did not mean "merely tolerance for what I hold to be good, but also . . . for what I hold to be abominably bad."[14] In other words, freedom of thought was not only necessary to the American form of government but also essential to a good education. If the aim of schooling was self-reliant individuals who could think for themselves, education inherently involved the possibility that not all individuals would think alike, and hence, dissent from the ideas and norms propagated by the state. Liberty can be a risky proposition.

Another arena where the aim of forming good citizens intruded upon public education was the effort to introduce "character-building" or morality codes into the curriculum. This was another form of social engineering that, in this case, used religion for the sake of the common good. Machen opposed such efforts because they reduced Christianity to its moral dimensions and avoided entirely the larger context of sin and grace. For that reason he argued strenuously against both Bible reading and prayer in public schools. "The truth is," he wrote, "that a garbled Bible may be a falsified Bible; and when any hope is held out to lost humanity from the so-called ethical portions of the Bible apart from its great redemptive core, then the Bible is represented as saying the direct opposite of what it really says." Machen's opposition to religion in public education was just one example of his more general animus toward a functional view of Christianity that used faith for civil or social ends. On this score, he was wont to quote Christ's instructions to his followers in the Gospel of Luke (14:26) that any one who did not hate his father and mother was incapable of being his disciple. "Whatever those stupendous words may mean," Machen explained, "they certainly mean that the relationship to Christ takes precedence of all other relationships, even the holiest of relationships like those that exist between husband and wife and parent and child. Those other relationships exist for the sake of Christianity and not Christianity for the sake of them." Machen conceded that following Christ would likely yield many social benefits, but if the gospel is "accepted in order to accomplish those useful things it is not Christianity."[15]

This otherworldly understanding of Christianity proved offensive not only to liberal Protestants who under the banner of the social gospel appealed to the teachings of Christ to soften the edges of industrialization and urbanization. Machen's ideas also conflicted with conservative Protestants who believed that America was a Christian nation and feared what would become of their society should correct doctrine and biblical morality go unheeded. Yet in Machen's quirky mental universe, a commitment to limited government and intellectual freedom on the one hand, and to the spiritual or apolitical nature of Christianity on the other, were thoroughly compatible. The error that liberals and fundamentalists made, in his estimation, was not simply that they did not take religious freedom seriously. It also involved a pragmatic understanding of Christianity that failed to see that the gospel transcended the American or any nation's way of life. For Machen, the best forms of religion and government were both limited to their appropriate spheres. And when either the church or the state extended its influence beyond its lawful domain, churches and governments, church members and citizens were all sure to suffer.

A variety of lessons may be learned from Machen's views about public education. But the one that emerges as perhaps the most compelling for our time is a point not readily obvious from the discussion so far. It does not involve what our attitude today should be toward the federal Department of Education, the devolution of federal programs to local communities, the limitations of outcome-based education, or the monopolistic methods of the National Education Association. Instead, it concerns a point that Wilfred McClay made a few years ago in two thoughtful essays about federalism. The question, as McClay put it, is not so much one of finding policies and programs that will limit federal government and return power to cities, townships, counties and states, or, in the case of education, restore to parents their full rights in the schooling of their children. Rather, the question is whether the American people, myself included, can handle the responsibility that goes with such authority. As McClay puts it, "[D]o the states and localities, and the citizenry now have both the will and the ability to accept the pains and pleasures of greater responsibility, and thereby to bring the nation into a more balanced and more fully realized federalism?" McClay does not tip his hand to suggest his estimation of the American people, but he does caution that we should not underestimate "the degree to which we will have to change, individually and collectively," if the talk about less government is ever to become the walk of self-government.[16]

The reason for raising questions about the relative abilities of Americans to bear the responsibilities required for limited government is not just that the Founding Fathers knew that the American form of government would require a virtuous citizenry and that religion, as the basis for morality, was indispensable to political order. The road between civil polity and civic virtue is not one way. As much as republicanism and federalism require moral citizens, moral citizens may also require republican and federal forms of government. In other words, good political structures do not simply emerge from good people, but good political structures also nurture and shape virtuous character. Political conservatives may shy away from that sort of determinism, associating it with a kind of reductionism posited typically by those on the left. Still, could it be that in order to cultivate greater civic responsibility, we should worry less about the character of individual leaders and more about the structures of our political and economic order?

This is a particularly important question for contemporary conservatives, since they have recently gained the reputation of being "scolds," accused of having "traded liberation from the state for moral righteousness." In the words of Andrew Sullivan, conservatism at the end of the twentieth century is "a mix of big-government conservatism and old-fashioned puritanism."[17] Although Sullivan wrote those words for the readers of The New York Times Magazine with his own partisan interests in mind, he does have a point. What has galvanized American conservatives for the past twenty-five years has been an array of moral issues, from abortion to homosexual rights; hence the strong input from evangelical Protestants, a group whose political philosophy has long been dominated by a moralistic and eschatological reading of public affairs. But if the cultivation of character and virtue depends less on laws and regulations, and more on the autonomy of individuals and families from the reach of government, then maybe contemporary conservatives have it backwards. Instead of working for family-friendly regulations at whatever level of government, maybe the plan should be to allow families the prerogatives and responsibilities to establish their own values without having to check with government. But if that is the case, then McClay's question surfaces again: Can we handle that responsibility for ourselves, and can we live with other families as neighbors whose values differ from ours?

McClay suggests two reasons why we can't. One problem with the American idea of government that Machen advocated was that it will not tolerate a single "overarching" solution to the practical problems facing local authorities, but instead requires powers of discrimination that tolerate a multiplicity of approaches, all dependent on local and individual circumstances and the idiosyncrasies of time and place. Modern-day conservatives may like the idea of localism, but not if it results in regional or ethnic differences that make America the home of peoples rather than one big people. Another reason for thinking we are incapable of living up to the demands of liberty concerns our commitment to America's status as a superpower, since the sort of virtues that the Founding Fathers believed were necessary to their political order depended to a large extent on the size and scale of the republic. As McClay notes, the republican vision reflected "a presumption that a truly self-governing community was also, to some extent, a moral community, and that excessive size fatally undermined that possibility."[18] In other words, America may be too big and too powerful to become the sort of republic that encourages and nurtures virtuous citizens and that elects virtuous leaders. So do we want a smaller and less powerful United States? Do we really want more virtue in the home if it means fewer American virtues around the world?

So the $64,000 question still remains. Are Americans sufficiently wary of government to take charge of and responsibility for their own affairs? If recent polls about tax cuts are any indication, the answer would appear to be a resounding "no." Rather than seeing a larger sum in their take-home pay, Americans are allegedly content to keep paying the current rates of taxes so that Medicare and Social Security will have enough funds for the aging baby boomers responding to pollsters. The same likely goes for education. It is one thing to gripe about Sally Has Two Moms in the local public school library and then turn the kids over to a private Christian academy with basically the same curriculum and assumptions about the American nation-state, minus the liberal social engineering. But it is another entirely to take on the massive responsibility of overseeing a child's education--asking basic questions about the purpose of an education, figuring out the parents' hopes for their children, and thinking about how to discern a child's vocation, and then putting together an education that will hand on the family's identity to its youngest members, as opposed to one that will merely prepare the child for admission into the best college and a successful middle-class existence. It's not just that most Americans don't want to tackle these hard questions and responsibilities, but also that most of us would prefer to go forward in the rut of dependence on the institutions that make our comfortable--if not luxurious--standard of living possible.

Either to his credit or to his folly, depending on your perspective, Machen was willing to take the risk of political liberty. He believed that the only way to preserve the American ideal of government was through responsible citizens, and that the only way to have responsible citizens was by giving them the freedom to be irresponsible. One of the axioms of Machen's political philosophy was a proposition that most Calvinists and, for that matter, most contemporary conservatives find repugnant if not nonsensical. It is the notion that greater freedom leads to greater moral responsibility. Human nature being what Calvinists think it is, that is, totally depraved, it is not clear how giving more elbow room to wicked individuals will make them more virtuous. The typical Calvinist response, demonstrated by the Puritans, was to rein in sinful men and women through a variety of laws and much surveillance by watchful neighbors and public authorities. Yet Machen reversed that logic, or at least so it seemed.

In one of his many letters to the editors of New York City and Philadelphia newspapers, he reacted strongly against proposed legislation calling for the fingerprinting of all known criminals. Aside from the danger that such a policy would turn America into a police state and make it like the Old World where governments had the authority to keep tabs on citizens, Machen feared that paternalism was beating liberty at every turn. He wrote:

At every individual step in this direction all sorts of plausible arguments are advanced. "Is not this or that beneficial?" we are asked. "What harm can there be, then, in having government do it and in forcing every one to submit to that which is for his own good?" Thus the whole of life is gradually being placed under bureaucratic control. . . . The proposed measure, together with all similar bureaucratic measures, is being advocated as though in the interests of the stability of the State. Will it not knit the people together; will it not insure an orderly life? As a matter of fact, experience shows that in the long run it will have exactly the opposite effect, as it has had, for example, in Germany. A nation is the more stable the looser its control is over individual lives. The reason is that the life of any country depends ultimately upon the moral quality of its individual citizens. Bureaucracy, with its narrowing of the area of individual choice, destroys moral fiber; it is liberty which is really stable in the long run.[19]

Now, Machen still believed in total depravity. But he also wanted people to take responsibility for their own lives. The best way to do that was by giving them freedom to make their own choices. To be sure, people would make bad choices, and they would, in Machen's liberal order, have to live with the consequences. That is the risk of limited government--it is not there to bail you out. But far worse would be the bad choices made by political bureaucrats, not only because the consequences would affect everyone, but also because of the danger of creating a culture of dependence where citizens became wards of the state.

Machen knew in his day, a time before the prolific growth of federal government through the New Deal, World War II, and the Great Society programs, that his vision was radical. It threatened the emerging comforts that trickled down from federal programs and policy wonks. And if his views were radical in the 1920s and 1930s, how much more are they today? Yet if we really want to bring the Leviathan back down to size, radical questions are definitely in order. One of those fundamental questions concerns the nature of liberty. If American conservatives are really conservative, if they are New World conservatives and not of the Old World stripe, they will not shrink from accepting the burdens as well as the blessings that emerge from a system of government that requires responsible citizens, precisely because they are autonomous from a powerful state, free to govern their own lives, regulate their own affairs and even educate their own children. 

Dr. Hart is head librarian and associate professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Dr. Hart is author of Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism (John Hopkins Universtiy Press, 1994).