14 MONOPOLY RETURNS AND THE FLOW OF FUNDS The power position of a fully developed bureaucracy is always great, under normal conditions overtowering. The political "master" always finds himself, vis-à-vis the trained official, in the position of a dilettante facing the expert.
Max Weber(1)
Weber (1864-1920) wrote these words sometime after the publication of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1905 and before his death in 1920. A social theorist or historian would be hard-pressed to find a passage this short that better describes the political and institutional crisis of the twentieth century: the accelerating triumph of bureaucracy.
As early as 1909, Weber argued that our century is the most bureaucratic era since the days of the pharaohs. The spread of bureaucracy seems unstoppable. "The technical superiority of the bureaucratic mechanism stands unshaken, as does the technical superiority of the machine over the handworker. . . . The problem which besets us now is not: how can this evolution be changed?--for that is impossible, but: what will come of it?"(2)
Two Social Models The premier model for modern bureaucratic civilization has been the Church by way of the university. But the university is not an ecclesiastical model. Its system of rewards and concerns is much narrower than we find in an ecclesiastical system. When we think of the Church, we think of something larger and more complex than a university. The university is a classic bureaucracy; the Church has bureaucratic elements, but it is more than a bureaucracy.
The university system originally was episcopal: no supreme Pontiff; a separate corporation with legal autonomy, marked by the wearing of robes of authority; semi-autonomous and specialized academic departments led by commanding personalities; funding in part from below (students) and in part from above (Church and wealthy donors). But a university is not inherently episcopal, for as knowledge grows and specialization advances, there can be no equivalent of an academic archbishop. The head of a university becomes a peace-seeking, fund-raising, critic-challenging agent of the faculty. He acts in the name of the trustees, but he will normally be an agent of the faculty.(3)
As Christian colleges grew more autonomous from the Church and more academically specialized during the nineteenth century, they began to resemble the Presbyterian hierarchy far more than any other ecclesiastical system. The heart of both the modern college and Presbyterianism is judicial impersonalism: the committee as a way of life. The committee exists to enhance the operations of the system. The system is personal only at the local level. The teacher at his lectern is analogous to the preacher in his pulpit, although the teacher has more autonomy because (1) his listeners (students) cannot fire him, and (2) he is protected by the doctrine of academic freedom and even tenure. Above both of these employees is a system of bureaucracy in which collegiate authority is greater than anyone's personal authority.
The Enlightenment's Two Wings
In the seventeenth century, the culture of Northern Europe began to be secularized, beginning with the philosophers: in physics, political theory, and economic theory. Isaac Newton's Unitarian vision of a universe under the rule mathematical law was a powerful one. Nevertheless, with respect to Enlightenment social theory in the eighteenth century, it was the Church's organization that supplied the models. There were two models. The Jesuit order, with its system of top-down control, supplied the model for the Continental Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment (left wing). The Presbyterian Church, with its bottom-up system of appeals courts, supplied the model for the Anglo-American Enlightenment (right wing). The culmination of this viewpoint can be found in the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith. Edmund Burke was influenced by the social evolutionism of Ferguson and Smith, and his political theory reflects this, especially in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
For two centuries, the battle for the minds of men all over the world was fought between the ideal of the French Revolution and the ideal of the Anglo-American capitalist order. With the collapse of the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980's, and the fall of the Soviet Union in August of 1991, the ideal of the French Revolution is dead. It took two centuries for the world to make up its mind. Being pragmatic, men have now made their choice against full collectivism. Capitalism clearly delivers the goods.
Social Darwinism's Two Models
What has this to do with the Presbyterian conflict? Everything. Two decades after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, a debate within the Anglo-American camp broke out. Social Darwinism came in two forms: the free market version and the scientific planning version. The free market version prevailed among intellectuals and literate people in the first phase of the debate, which paralleled the third phase of the Presbyterian conflict. After 1890 and escalating after 1900, the central planning version prevailed.(4)
Christians were left out of this debate, as they had been left out ever since the late seventeenth century. The general public has trusted no appeals to the Bible or the historic creeds of the Church as the foundation of social order. Christians therefore have had to choose which version of social Darwinism they preferred for the social order: the Whig version (decentralist, free market) or the Progressive version (centralist, bureaucratic).
The Old School, whose apologetic method invoked Scottish common-sense rationalism (empiricism), adopted the Whig tradition. The modernists, who affirmed evolutionary science as their intellectual model (scientific planning), adopted the Progressive version. The New School could not make up its mind. Its members preferred not to think about such matters. New School leaders called for simple evangelism. Theirs was the pietist tradition. They would decide which tradition would win, but they would not provide their own.
I. The Economic Theory of Monopoly It is time to survey some basic economic theory of institutions. (No snoring, please.)
Three Management Systems In 1944, Ludwig von Mises wrote Bureaucracy, a short book analyzing management in relationship to ownership. There are two forms of management, he argued: bureaucratic management and profit management. Profit management is based on the free market: private ownership, open entry, competition, and the profit-and-loss system. Consumers are sovereign in the profit-management system. They can buy or not, as they decide. Access to the consumer's money is based on satisfying his wants. In contrast, bureaucratic management is based on coercion: the ability to gain access to funds apart from meeting consumer demand in a free market. The State taxes those under its authority. Politicians allocate funds to various bureaucracies. These bureaucracies are dependent on the centralized collecting of funds. They do not meet consumer demand.(5)
The two systems lead to different operations. Both profit managers and bureaucratic managers seek autonomy, but the profit manager cannot escape the consumer without calling on civil government to establish a monopoly for his firm. Unless the State grants him a monopoly--protection from his competitors--he faces competitors who seek to gain a share of any above-market profits he may be experiencing. The bureaucratic manager does not face such a degree of competition. The State establishes his monopoly in advance: a sphere of lawful jurisdiction in which his word, while not final, is authoritative. Thus, the bureaucrat's strategy for autonomy is based on persuading the politicians who legally are superior to him not to interfere with the day-to-day operations under his jurisdiction, and fund everything without much question--preferably, without any question.
The profit manager wishes to escape his competitors so that consumers will have to buy on his terms. Unless the State intervenes, he is rarely able to achieve this goal, and never for very long. The bureaucratic manager wishes to escape the politicians' negative sanctions, while retaining their positive sanctions: more money, wider jurisdiction, and (above all) a growing number of employees under him.(6) The manager rises professionally in terms of the number of employees under him--one of Parkinson's famous laws: the law of the rising pyramid.(7) (The most famous of these laws is: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.")(8)
Both systems rely on the flow of funds. They differ in the way that they gain continuing access to the flow of funds. The profit manager must serve the consumers (or provide the illusion that he is serving them). The bureaucratic manager must serve the politicians who in turn seek to control the consumers.
There is a third management system: non-profit management.(9) Non-profit organizations are somewhere in between, possessing neither political compulsion nor profit-seeking owners. The model is the disestablished Church. No one compels someone to join a local church, nor are its members compelled to pay tithes to a local congregation. The Church depends on charity, mainly from its members. While there is competition--local church vs. local church--there is no profit-and-loss statement.
The non-profit organization's manager must serve the donors, but usually through intermediaries. In the Presbyterian Church, the primary intermediaries are local church sessions and the General Assembly.(10) The number-one institutional goal of a Church board was to seek ways of establishing a nearly automatic pass-through from the donors to the board, either directly or through whatever bureaucratic agency represented the General Assembly.
Success Indicators The crucial task of those who redesigned the Church's new structure in 1908 was to devise a system of success indicators that was consistent with the Church's non-profit legal status and consistent with the Church's goals. This was not done. The liberals did not want it done, and the conservatives had no idea that it should be done. Had it been done, when this new structure was imposed, the performance of those under this system of success indicators should have been monitored continuously to make certain that the bureaucrats were not using the system to attain goals--personal goals and institutional goals--other than those specified by the Church's officers. The employees should not have been allowed to use the letter of the law to thwart the spirit of the law. This is the problem of sanctions.
Men seek positive sanctions. They seek to avoid negative sanctions. The question is: Can a man gain positive sanctions without imposing negative sanctions on others?
If life were a zero-sum game, such as a game of chance, every winner would produce at least one loser. But life is not a zero-sum game. There can be co-winners. The division of labor is productive (I Cor. 12). Marriage is a good example. Two people, male and female, working together are more productive than they are when they work apart. Biology, if not misdirected by legalized or even compulsory abortion (as in Communist China)(11) produces an equal number of males and females, or close to it: more males are born, but more of them die in infancy. The human race survives and grows--a blessing: "Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate" (Ps. 127:3-5).
Beating the System
The institutional problem comes when men seek to advance their own ends at the expense of those who pay them and fund their activities rather than by serving the interests of those who fund them. Every system of rewards can be distorted in this way. The system is set up in terms of one set of goals--goals that are difficult to specify and difficult to integrate with each other--but the success indicators can be misused. Consider the grading system in school. It is established in order to pressure students to compete, work hard, and learn more. But it can be misused, such as by the practice of "studying for the test." Instead of learning the material for the sake of knowledge, the student studies whatever will enable him to score higher on a formal examination. Or consider profit in a business. The profit system is supposed to guide the producer in meeting the demands of customers. But in the short run, a producer can sometimes make money by cheating the customer. In short, every system of rewards and punishments (sanctions) can be misused by sinful man. Systems should be designed with negative feedback mechanisms that thwart cheaters.
The incentives of the system very often reward people in ways not suspected by those who originally designed the system. The problem is this: those who benefit from the system have an incentive to become masters of the system. It is easier for them to beat the system than for part-time supervisors to police the system. The full-time bureaucrat is in a far better position to beat the system than the politician is. If the bureaucrat has tenure, and the politician does not, the revolving door effect of politics tends to keep the politicians ignorant of the ways in which the bureaucratic system is rigged to benefit those who run it and are employed by it.(12) The personal payoff for gaining accurate information about the system is not symmetrical. Those inside the system have greater incentives to master it than those who are outside, who are not nearly so focused. This leads us back to Weber's original comment: "The power position of a fully developed bureaucracy is always great, under normal conditions overtowering. The political `master' always finds himself, vis-à-vis the trained official, in the position of a dilettante facing the expert."
So much for economic theory. Now we must apply it.
II. Applying the Economic Theory of Monopoly
Presbyterian Government Presbyterians have never developed a theory of Presbyterian bureaucracy. This is a great irony, since it is Presbyterianism, more than any other ecclesiastical system, that has provided the operational bureaucratic model for the non-socialist West. A Western bureaucracy is impersonal rather than patrimonial. It is a system of offices to be competitively earned rather than inherited or appointed by a monarch. Access to bureaucratic posts is officially based on such criteria as performance on examinations, not (theoretically) personal contacts.(13) The Presbyterian emphasis on an educated ministry has produced the same outlook that marks bureaucracy.
Competing Claims to Funds
The Presbyterian system of government, developed in the first half of the seventeenth century, has never suggested a systematically Presbyterian structure for hierarchical control over Church boards. Yet the boards in the twentieth century became the driving force of Presbyterianism above the congregational level.
The local congregation has the initial claim on funds because they are generated from within the congregation except in the case of Church extensions: home missions. Above the congregational level, the boards have the next claim on these funds. This is why they are the secondary driving force. No agency above the local congregation has a legal claim on these funds, so the moral claim becomes fundamental. In the twentieth century, no presbytery, synod, or General Assembly has possessed a moral claim on these funds equal to the boards, especially the missions boards. The boards come in the name of the heathen and the downtrodden, or in the name of the retired minister or missionary. The appeal is to personalism. In fund-raising, no appeal is more powerful. Entire systems of fund-raising have been developed in terms of such appeals. A photograph of some starving waif is going to generate more net income than a reproduction of an organizational chart. The presbytery, synod, and General Assembly come to the donors in the name of the Church as a whole--an amorphous, unfocused, appeal to fund an impersonal system. In the language of modern fund-raising, they ask prospective donors to pay for envelopes and stamps. They cannot expect to rival the service boards in terms of fund-raising. Because there is no compulsion in Presbyterian fund-raising, the local congregation and the charitable boards will usually receive the lion's share of the funds, in that order.
Two Forms of Sovereignty
Judicial sovereignty is one thing. Economic sovereignty is another. In non-compulsory organizations, economic sovereignty predominates. He who legally manages an organization is dependent on the flow of funds. He has judicial sovereignty, but he does not have economic sovereignty. The General Assembly possesses judicial sovereignty over the Church's boards. In fact, only in rare cases, usually marked by a scandal, will the judicial sovereignty of a General Assembly overcome the economic sovereignty of a Church board. It is clear why the boards seek to gain a voice in whatever bureaucratic agency represents the General Assembly.
Even though a Church bureaucrat can be fired, his sovereignty is greater within his sphere of authority than the sovereignty of a civil bureaucrat protected by Civil Service laws within his sphere. In relation to the General Assembly, a Presbyterian bureaucrat possesses far more sovereignty than the civil servant possesses in relation to a politician. The typical politician will probably be in office next year. The typical attendee of a General Assembly probably will not be. Politicians possess legal sovereignty over taxing as well as spending; they can therefore redirect the flow of funds more easily than a General Assembly can. A Church board receives donations directly from individuals and congregations. If it can also gain a predictable annual budget from the General Assembly as part of an impersonal, bureaucratic budgeting process conducted before and outside the annual meeting of the General Assembly, the board has thereby locked in the flow of funds.
Scandals occasionally shake the foundations (temporarily) of civil government bureaucracies. The bureaucracies themselves may be accused of malfeasance. Such institution-wide scandals are unheard of in Church bureaucracies. They happen, of course; they are rarely made public when discovered, and they are rarely discovered. The Church's system of rewards is different from the State's. Politicians in the minority party can capitalize on civil bureaucratic scandals. They have an incentive to expose them. But a denomination is not supposed to be political. There are no formally structured rival political parties in a Church. Interest groups are informal and unofficial; they will do whatever they can to avoid the label of "party" or "political." The example of Machen's Committee of Eight in 1925 is representative. Because they tried to organize a national voting bloc to send conservatives to the 1925 General Assembly, they were successfully pilloried by the well-organized, deeply political modernists. So, scandals are covered up whenever possible by denominations. No one inside the denomination has an incentive to publicize them if, like the pregnant Virgin Mary, they can be put away privately. Scandals are seen as the result of individual sinners, not an organized conspiracy. This outlook works to the advantage of organized ecclesiastical conspiracies.
The only way for political "dilettantes" to change a bureaucracy even temporarily is for them to cut its funding while they are re-writing the bureaucracy's rules. A cut in funding alone catches the attention of the bureaucrats. But short of a major scandal or a denomination-wide economic setback, Church boards' budgets are never cut by the General Assembly.
Preserving the Flow of Funds
The preservation of the flow of funds is the central goal of Church boards. No other goal has equal merit in the eyes of the bureaucrats who are part of the boards. Because the boards are nearly unassailable in public, the boards' incentives--success indicators--can be manipulated over time by the senior officials to meet the desires and hidden agendas of these semi-autonomous officials and their employees. The potential for misusing the board's formal success indicators is very great. The more time that the same self-appointing, tenured group has to manipulate the organization's formal success indicators, the more likely that the manipulation will take place. To imagine that this will not take place as time goes on is to imagine that original sin is no longer a factor in organizations.
Robert E. Speer led the Board of Foreign Missions from 1891 to 1937. As he proved in 1936, he was immune from criticism. His critics were not.
What was the formal success indicator for the Board of Foreign Missions? A numerical success indicator tends to become the dominant one in every bureaucracy, since it is easy to compare numerical performance, year by year. (Example: a student's grade point average.) The Mission Board's primary success indicator was numerical: the number of missionaries sent into the field. The Board was very successful: over 1,300 missionaries in 1935. The more important goal, Machen said, was to send theologically orthodox missionaries into the field. But it is much easier to compare raw numbers than confessions of faith. Speer had the raw numbers; meanwhile, Machen was unwilling to accuse any missionary of a crossed-fingers confession. It was obvious who would win that institutional dispute. Scandal was then re-defined: going public with the suggestion of a scandal.
The Quest for Ecclesiastical Monopoly Returns The late nineteenth century was the great era of monopolies in American business, at least in Americans' perception of United States manufacturing. John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s Standard Oil Company was the archetype: either as a model of efficiency or as a demon. The last great example of trust building came in January, 1901, the first month of the twentieth century, when J. P. Morgan created the United States Steel Corporation by organizing a group of hard-pressed steel manufacturers who bought the spectacularly price-competitive Carnegie Steel Corporation for $480 million, with $300 million in 5% per annum bonds going to Andrew Carnegie personally.(14) This made Carnegie the richest man on earth (since kings could not liquidate their wealth, converting it into money). Under President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), the trust-busting era began. It accelerated under his successor, William Howard Taft. It has never been reversed.
To make this process palatable to big business, the Federal government offered a stick as well as a carrot: government regulation, meaning Federal price floors, meaning barriers to entry that would protect existing corporate interests. In public, the directors of big business deplored the government's trust-busting activities; in private, they encouraged it and financed those politicians, such as Senator Nelson Aldrich, who promoted it.(15) Those who had already established control over huge markets preferred protective regulation to open competition. This is the mind-set of every successful monopolist.
The monopolist seeks a situation where his suppliers compete against each other, while no one is allowed to compete against him in his role as supplier. He reduces his output and raises his prices, thereby gaining monopoly returns.(16) The economic goal of monopolists is the control over the upward flow of funds from the consumer. They claim a legal right to the consumers' money, not through open competition but through legislation against competitive interlopers--all in the name of the public good. To gain this control, monopolists give up some of their decision-making rights to the State and also the right to supply consumers outside of the production and pricing boundaries agreed to by the other members of the monopoly. In short, they give up their judicial sovereignty over the property they own in order to gain economic sovereignty over consumers.
An Ecclesiastical Monopoly
This is exactly what the modernists in the Presbyterian Church sought from 1874 onward. First, they sought control over the theological seminaries: the source of supply for candidates to the ministry. Second, they sought control over the Church's boards and permanent committees. Finally, in 1934, they demanded a monopoly over the distribution of funds by local congregations. They sought to exclude all rivals to these funds. The upward and outward flow of congregational funds had to be funneled through the official boards and committees of the Church. This was said to be the judicial equivalent of the Lord's Supper. The fact is, the modernists cared far more about the flow of funds than they cared about the Lord's Supper. The General Assembly announced no rules regarding the Lord's Supper; it announced very explicit rules regarding the flow of funds. Control over the Lord's Supper was the decision of the local congregations; it was never an issue in any of the competing theological camps. Control over money (economic sanctions) was the fundamental issue for liberals, and very important for conservatives. As Machen put it in 1923, this control was a sacred trust.(17) The question was: Whose confession would determine who would exercise this trust?
As good Progressives, modernists publicly proclaimed the freedom of belief. They were free-thinkers--not in the Robert Ingersoll mode of outright atheism but in the Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry Sloane Coffin mode: faith in the indeterminate god of the evolutionary process. They refused to be bound by the terms of the Westminster Confession or by the opinions of the conservative majority of the laity in the denomination. With respect to the flow of funds, they were also Progressives: they demanded centralized control. To achieve these twin goals--confessional independence and economic monopoly--they had to control the twin pipelines: into the pulpits and into congregational treasuries.
If modernists could not control the supply of candidates to the ministry, then local congregations would be able to hire men who agreed theologically with the members. This would bring an element of competition that the modernists did not want to face. This would also transfer excessive judicial sovereignty to local congregations. Presbyterianism proclaims a system of balanced judicial sovereignty: presbyteries control ordination; congregations control hiring and firing. (There is a third but unofficial element of control: certification by seminaries.) Ministers belonged to their regional presbyteries, not to their local congregations. The congregations, however, did have financial control. They did have the right to hire and fire their ministers. They had the authority to set ministerial salaries. Thus, congregations retained economic sovereignty. The presbytery could control only the supply of ministers. All sides in the Presbyterian conflict understood what this meant: denominational monopoly returns for any group could be attained through control over ordination.
The modernists knew that the typical local church member was more conservative than they were. Thus, modernists had to gain control over the machinery of certification: the seminaries. They had long enjoyed the advantage here: even before the 1869 reunion, it had been considered important for candidates to seminary faculties to attend a German university for at least a year. This running of the German gauntlet undermined the Calvinism of candidates for the teaching positions. The experience had come close to undermining Machen's Calvinism; he had refused ordination from 1906 until 1914.
Machen had thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual challenge of German theological education, despite its effects on his faith. He had not accepted its philosophical premises, but he respected the vigor and discipline of German scholars.(18) He understood the eroding effects of both Darwinism and higher criticism. But as a scholar and as a representative of the Old Princeton, he could not bring himself to break from the old Presbyterian tradition of an educated ministry, which in his mind--and the minds of most Presbyterians--meant a formally educated, bureaucratically (academically) certified ministry. He believed in the eventual triumph of logic in human affairs. He wrote that "the true way in which to examine a spiritual movement is in its logical relations; logic is the great dynamic. . . ."(19) He deeply believed in higher education. He knew what devastating results German theological training was having on his contemporaries, yet he could not break with the idea that a young man with a bachelor's degree, a seminary degree, and no experience in the ministry could still benefit from studying humanism from humanists. He seems not to have recognized that his personality was unique; he possessed a psychological defense against humanism that few young men ever enjoy.
The other Presbyterian screening device was the possession of an advanced degree from a secular college. The prestige colleges and universities after 1900 were controlled by secularists: the allies of the modernists outside of ecclesiastical boundaries. The modernists needed to do nothing here except sit tight.
By 1920, the modernists had control in all of the Presbyterian seminaries except Princeton. They also had to control ordination: presbyterial exams. In the first phase of their strategy, they had to cut off questions from conservative members of the presbyterial ordination committees regarding the details of the Confession or the five points of the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910. Beginning in September, 1933, the General Council mandated a new question for all presbyterial exams: "Are you willing to support the boards of this Church?" Anyone answering in the negative could not be ordained. A candidate's free thought theologically was not regarded as a valid reason to oppose his ordination; his free thought on matters of denominational agency financing was prohibited.
After 1936, the modernists' monopoly could not be broken by either local ordination or independent parachurch agencies. It could only be broken through competition from outside the denomination: an exodus by ministers and members. To reduce this competition, the modernists used two threats: loss of pension benefits for ministers who departed and loss of local church property for congregations that departed. This second goal had to be enforced by the State. The State obliged. With only three exceptions, local church properties remained in the PCUSA.(20) To complete the process, the PCUSA sued in civil court in 1937 to force the Presbyterian Church of America to change its name--a kind of trademark infringement litigation. The denomination had previously proposed the name when considering union in 1932 with the United Presbyterians.(21) The secular courts upheld the larger denomination in 1938; in February, 1939, the new denomination changed its name to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.(22)
The Iron Law of Cartels: Breakdown
The ecumenical movement was the ultimate hoped-for means of the modernists to restrict the exodus of its members. If every mainline denomination had joined the ecclesiastical cartel, this would have forced Church members to remain inside a confessionally modernist organization if they wanted the traditional higher Church or mid-Church (Presbyterian) liturgy of most hierarchical churches. The only other ecclesiastical options would have been local Bible churches and conservative Baptist churches: low Church liturgies.(23)
Ecumenism stalled. There are many reasons, but economically speaking, the main one was the concern over the division of the flow of funds and power. Those who controlled the denominational hierarchies in 1940 had established successful cartels by defeating the conservatives in their denominations. They were at the top of the flow of funds. To unite with other denominations' bureaucracies would have forced them to share an unknown portion of these funds and power with other bureaucrats. They were not convinced that in terms of money, power, and prestige, this was a good idea. The United Presbyterians had hesitated to join the PCUSA in 1934. It was not until 1958 that the union was consummated. This reluctance was shared by the officials in the other mainline denominations. The ecclesiastical leaders never broke down the liturgical and jurisdictional barriers, nor did they overcome the problem faced by the members of any incipient cartel, namely, the threat of giving up control over funds without being sure what the post-cartelization distribution of funds would be.
Every cartel eventually breaks down because its members cheat on the agreement or because its customers discover new sources of supply or substitutes. Firms quietly offer goods and services on terms more favorable than those agreed to publicly by the members of the cartel. Customers depart. The monopoly breaks down. It either lowers its prices or sees its markets shrink. This is the iron law of all cartels that are not protected by the threat of State violence. The modernist ecclesiastical cartel has been breaking down visibly since at least 1960, accelerating after 1965.
This breakdown had already begun in Machen's day. First, the old modernism was replaced by the new modernism: neo-orthodoxy. The Progressives and the old modernists had been believers in Kant's phenomenal realm: the techniques of scientific planning. Neo-orthodoxy represented the triumph of Kant's noumenal realm over Kant's phenomenal realm. Barth's faith in a self-authenticating and liberating but non-rational Christ-event or a Christ-encounter of the individual was substituted for faith in the liberating effects of the social gospel. Heilsgeschichte overcame mere historie. This switch in theology to neo-orthodoxy began at Princeton Seminary in the early 1930's, at the point of the triumph of the old modernism in the denomination.(24)
Second, younger members in the Church, when they reached the late teens or early twenties, departed into secularism, evangelicalism, or cults. Henry P. Van Dusen, ten years after his ordination by the New York Presbytery had provoked a storm of protest from conservatives, was an associate professor of systematic theology at Union. (He later became its president.) In his book, The Plain Man Seeks for God (1933), he lamented the failure of the older liberalism. "In seeking to save religious belief from annihilation by the accepted thought-forms of the secular world, it has become a pallid reflection of the secular philosophy. . . . Youth's verdict is sound: `Religion has become an elective in the university of life.'"(25) His warning was echoed that same year by John C. Bennett, who in 1963 succeeded Van Dusen as the president of Union. "The most important fact about contemporary American theology is the disintegration of liberalism."(26) Yet the modernists of 1910 had insisted that without the religion of modernism, young members would leave the Church. While younger members are leaving, older members are also departing: into the jurisdiction of the absolute Monopolist of the universe.(27) New members are not being recruited at rates sufficient to offset the departing members.
Millions of people outside the churches have accepted modernism's dogma--which is humanism's dogma--that it really does not matter in eternity what men have believed in history about God, man, law, sanctions, and time. If it does not matter, then why join any Church and be forced to share a portion of one's income with those who have proclaimed the modernist dogma of the irrelevance of dogma? Better to eat, drink, and be merry--preferably through credit card debt--for tomorrow we die.
Dry Rot Had Set in Early Machen wrote to his mother in 1915, his first year as an attendee at a General Assembly:
Dreadful things seem to be going on at the General Assembly, the "liberal" candidate for moderator having been elected by a large majority. Of course a good many brethren did not know how bad he is. He posed as a "moderate conservative." But I fear the Union Seminary men, with their deceitful phrases, and their contempt for the Christian faith, will go quite unmolested. I trust the Southern Church will keep quite separate. If things get much worse in the North, I should hardly like to continue making contributions to the foreign missions fund, for example, of the Northern Church. Our Southern Board may continue to provide for the preaching of the gospel, and it will be well for those who believe in the gospel to have some faithful administrators of their funds. The mass of the Church here is still conservative--but conservative in an ignorant, non-polemic, sweetness-and-light kind of way which is just meat for the wolves.(28)By the time that Machen wrote this letter, a few weeks after the 1915 General Assembly, the theological drift he described was far advanced. He knew that the Southern Presbyterian Church was still Calvinistic, that its foreign missions board was still basically orthodox. He admitted in private in 1915 what he announced in public in 1933: he had deep suspicions regarding the Board of Foreign Missions. He knew in 1915 that Union Seminary had gone modernist, that those who ran for General Assembly moderator as "moderate conservatives" were in fact operational representatives of the modernists, and that the conservatives were too naive to do anything about the continuing drift into liberalism. While this drift was temporarily slowed in the General Assembly from 1923 until 1925, it accelerated rapidly after the Scopes trial in the summer of 1925. There was no way to reverse it after that.
Machen's concern was valid in 1915: the Board of Foreign Missions was indeed the representative ecclesiastical agency that had fallen to those who were opponents of Calvinism. There were reasons for this, most notably Speer's ecumenical vision. Union Seminary was officially outside the Church's authority after 1892; the Board of Foreign Missions was not.
Why was the Board of Foreign Missions so vulnerable to subversion? There are numerous possible answers: (1) the minimal theological confessions of the sources of the funding (laymen); (2) the board's sources of recruits; (3) the leadership of Speer; (4) the non-denominational impulse of those involved in foreign missions, both domestically and abroad; (5) administrative centralization, especially unified budgeting; (6) the great distances involved if North American presbyteries were made the locus of jurisdiction.
Foreign Missions and Ecumenism David Dawson has surveyed the development of Presbyterian missions philanthropy. (He calls this mission, not missions. Conservatives support missions; liberals support mission. The official change in Presbyterian terminology came in 1958.)(29)
In 1800, a Permanent Mission Fund was established by the General Assembly, but most money after 1810 was funneled through the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a joint Presbyterian-Congregational board, which was established in 1810, and also through the American Home Missionary Society after 1826.(30) Joint-venture missions drew the wrath of the Old School in the 1830's. In 1831, the Synod of Pittsburgh established the Western Foreign Missionary Society. In 1837, the General Assembly created the Board of Foreign Missions.(31)
The 1869 reunion brought consolidation. Presbyteries were reduced from 259 to 165. The missions agencies merged. Seven specialized boards were created to consolidate the work of the two churches' boards. The size of the individual boards shrank.(32) The work of the boards increased. This increased the responsibilities of the permanent secretaries of the boards. They became lobbyists for their boards.(33) The most famous such member after 1891 was Speer. The Church's officials hoped that consolidation of finances would make budgeting more predictable. Local churches were encouraged to send money to the boards. This request rarely worked.(34) Nondenominational ministries competed effectively for Presbyterians' money.
In the early 1870's, Presbyterian women began establishing local missionary societies. This was a major factor in the expansion of foreign missions of the Church.(35) Reifsnyder writes: "Although technically subordinate to the church boards, these women's societies largely managed their own affairs, raising their own money and determining where it would be spent."(36) Between 1880 and 1890, giving to missions doubled to $890,000.(37) Gifts from these societies tended to be designated for specific missionaries or children in missions schools.(38) Dawson allows an 1879 primary source document to draw a sexist (and accurate) observation for him: "Christian women always want to be brought into immediate contact with the object of their beneficence," which includes receiving "stirring letters" from the recipients.(39) After the reunion, women's giving was heavily weighted (designated) to independent missionaries and missions organizations. Of the $7.8 million raised through women's Thank Offerings, 1869-1876, only $114,500 reached the General Assembly.(40) (A parallel influence, of even greater impact, took place in the United Presbyterian Church in the 1880's: the Women's General Missionary Society.(41) In the Southern Presbyterian Church in the late nineteenth century, new missionaries were sent out largely through the support of women's missions societies, which, along with Sunday schools, contributed one-third of the missions funding.(42))
This development placed considerable economic sanctions over missionaries into the hands of women's organizations, i.e., laymen. These sanctions were less direct than in local congregational giving, but more direct than in missionary giving through a board. Women's societies were not authorized to screen candidates in terms of theology. Yet access to free money always involves screening. The question is: What was the most likely basis of this screening? Without documentary evidence to the contrary, I surmise: a one-time interview plus a lifetime of letters. The candidate for a foreign mission field had only to appear once before a group of women, give a 20-minute speech about the great challenge of the missionary endeavor broadly conceived, and introduce his wife. If he received a promise of support, he could depart in peace, probably for the rest of his life. There would be no further interviews or reviews. So long as he continued to send inspirational letters back to his missionary sponsoring group, he would forever remain "that nice young man with the lovely wife." This is the problem of the lowest common theological denominator. The ecclesiastically unofficial confession of women would become the screening standard in the absence of presbytery sanctions.
The General Assembly in 1871 set up a General Assembly Benevolence Committee to promote giving to all eight GA boards. (An identical move was made for the eight boards in the United Presbyterian Church in 1871.)(43) The GA adopted a unified budget in 1874 for the agencies, with each receiving a fixed percentage of the undesignated gifts. Result: "It seemed to have had no impact on designations."(44) The GA and the benevolence societies were caught in a dilemma that never faded: if they wanted to maximize giving, they had to allow designated giving. Any attempt to centralize and bureaucratize the collection and disbursement of funds reduced total donations. People generally prefer to give to people rather than organizations.(45) Not until the 1950's did officials in the PCUSA discourage designated giving. In the 1960's, this policy became official, yet even today, the issue still divides the denomination.(46) Dawson points out that "virtually every individual Presbyterian and every congregation participate in designations in one form or another."(47)
The Collegiate Awakening
After 1886, the largest source of recruits for Protestant American missions was the cooperative parachurch movement in general and John R. Mott in particular. His theological confession shaped American foreign missions, and a lower common denominator confession did not exist in the evangelical community.
The 1890's saw a Collegiate Awakening. Methodist Mott and his friend and associate Speer became the major figures in Protestant foreign missions in this period. They recruited a generation of college men to serve on the foreign missions field. These recruits came through the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), founded in 1888,(48) and the foreign missions arm of the YMCA, both of which were led by Mott for over three decades in the 1890-1920 era.(49) From at least the 1890's, he regarded his own work as an ecumenical ministry. "The unifying of the Christian organizations of the student world is not an end in itself. It is but a preparation for a larger work in the world."(50) He believed in "the strategic importance of the colleges and universities" in "the spiritual conquest of the world."(51) He was not alone in his views. The centrality of non-denominational, non-creedal, non-ecclesiastical student ministries was proclaimed by Presbyterian layman and ex-President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison: "But now in many, perhaps most, of the great universities and colleges the students are dependent upon volunteer agencies for such instruction in the Word of God as they receive. There is no agency so efficient, none so free in action, as the Christian College Association. It is within--it is not an intruder; it unites all, of every name."(52)
It was during this period when the number of candidates for the Presbyterian ministry moved steadily upward from fewer than 100 per 100,000 members per year in the late 1870's to over 150 in the early 1890's, with a steady fall after 1896 to fewer than 75 at the turn of the century. (After World War I, this figure fell to slightly over 50.)(53)
Moody and Mott Mott had received his calling in July, 1886, in the sixth year of Dwight L. Moody's summer conferences held at his Mount Hermon conference grounds in Northfield, Massachusetts. This one was unique, however: it was a month-long foreign missions conference aimed at college students. By the end of that conference, Mott had emerged as the leader of the student group.(54) Moody became Mott's personal model for the devoted life.(55) In 1887, Speer arrived at Northfield, where his life was equally transformed.(56)
There were three aspects of Moody's ministry that are not widely known by those who know of his reputation as the greatest evangelist of his day. Gundry's biography discusses all three. These features became very important for the subsequent development of the world interdenominational missions movement. First, Moody was never ordained. He was a lay evangelist.(57) He believed that the theological confessions of simple Christians constituted the bedrock of theology; beyond this minimal common denominator, he was not too concerned personally. This was especially true late in his career, when he would invite such modernists as Henry Drummond and William Rainey Harper to speak at his Northfield conferences.(58) His most famous student disciples, Mott and Speer, also were never ordained. Thus, they could not easily come under pressure from theological conservatives in their respective denominations regarding confessional standards, which applied only to ordained men.
Second, Moody hesitated to preach on the doctrine of hell. He believed in it, but he rarely preached it.(59) "Terror never brought a man in yet," he proclaimed.(60) On this point, Mott, Speer, and the modernists agreed completely. Moody's premillennial pietism, however, did not sink into the thinking of his collegiate missionaries, especially Mott, who became a defender of the social gospel.
A third feature of Moody's last days was important for subsequent developments in the lives of his liberal disciples. Moody grew weary of the infighting between modernists and conservatives. In 1899, less than a year before his death, he criticized the modernist-conservative debate. His strongest words were against the conservatives. "Instead of fighting error by emphasis of truth, there has been too much `splitting of hairs,' and only too often an unchristian bitterness. This has frequently resulted in depleted churches, and has opened the way for the entrance of still greater errors. Under these conditions, the question of the authorship of the individual books of the Bible has become of less importance than a knowledge of the teaching of the Bible itself; the question of the two Isaiahs less urgent than a familiarity with the prophecy itself."(61) This was also Speer's recommendation: reduce confrontation by ignoring the dividing issues. This meant, in practice, that conservatives had a moral obligation to remain politely silent while liberals taught higher criticism in denominational colleges, seminaries, magazines, and pulpits.
There was a fourth aspect worth mentioning: the Rockefeller connection. Until Moody's death in 1899, Rockefeller was a financial supporter of Moody's ministry.(62)
Mott was a liberal. His liberalism can be seen in his recommended reading list for laborers. Half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays (unnamed), Bishop Butler's Analogy, Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities, Boswell's Johnson, and Blackstone's Commentaries: these are conventional enough, although the four tedious volumes of Blackstone seem inappropriate for anyone who is not a late-eighteenth-century lawyer. He rounded out this brief list with Alfred Wallace's Natural Selection (in 1858, Wallace discovered evolution through natural selection, word of which forced Darwin to go into print to get at least partial credit for the discovery)(63) and Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution.(64) These two books were openly Darwinian. Kidd was a defender of social planning. He called for national legislation to "raise the position of the lower classes at the expense of the wealthier classes. All future progressive legislation must apparently have this tendency. It is almost a conditio sine qua non of any measure that carries us a step forward in our social development."(65) Free market economics is obsolete. "It has served its end in the stage of evolution through which we have passed; . . ."(66) Religion, including Christianity, was defined by Kidd as a belief in the supernatural which provides non-rational sanctions that pressure individuals to subordinate their interests to social interests, "in the general interests of the evolution which the race is undergoing."(67) The book is insufferably dull, highly dated, and long forgotten. Mott's suggestion that it was of the same importance as Shakespeare, or even Bishop Butler, testifies to Mott's hidden political agenda.
Ecumenism in the Church The gradual centralization of the Church's agencies paralleled the growth of ecumenical foreign missions. While there is always tension between the one and the many, as occasional disagreements between Mott and Speer over the role of denominations illustrated, these two developments complemented each other institutionally. This was possible because of the de-emphasis on theology that was inherent in both developments. The denominational agencies wanted theological peace intradenominationally so as not to interrupt the flow of funds. The interdenominational organizations wanted theological peace interdenominationally for the same reason. The cause of Christ is greater than theological fine points, Christians were told, and the cause of Christ was therefore seen as ecumenical. This was especially true of foreign missions, where the cultural contrast between paganism and Christianity was stark. Reifsnyder has described the results:
A significant byproduct of the expansion of the denominational machinery in support of the evangelical cause was a shift in theological focus. Precise doctrinal formulation became less important to a new generation challenged by the scope of the work before them. Whereas prior to the Civil War denominational machinery, particularly in the Old School, was designed to preserve doctrinal truth, now theological precision was sacrificed to insure that the broadest possible consensus would be maintained for denominational work.
The boards and agencies naturally tended to encourage this commitment to "the work" as a basis for national denominational unity and identity. They provided a focus for the church's crusade to create a Christian America and thus they sought to appeal to a broad constituency. Promoting the Presbyterian work of their boards was more likely to secure broad loyalty and support than trying to define theologically what it meant to be Presbyterian. This is not to say that doctrine was ignored. But the reorganization and the eagerness of the church to promote mission expansion by the latest means accelerated the theological shift to a focus on Christ rather than the Calvinistic distinctives.(68)
The motivation of the boards paralleled the motivation of the experientialists and the modernists. This was to prove fatal to Old School Presbyterianism in 1936.
Interdenominational Foreign Missions from 1900 to 1906 Paralleling the SVM in the first decade was the Forward Movement, another interdenominational ministry that gained support in the Presbyterian Church. This movement emphasized local Church support of specific missionaries. The General Assembly backed it from 1902 on. So did the Board of Foreign Missions. This is not surprising. The director of the Presbyterian Church's branch of Forward Movement was a layman, David McConaughy, who had been general secretary of the YMCA in Philadelphia in 1895 and had served as the Y's first American secretary to India.(69) In 1902, he, Speer, Mott, and a few others organized a prayer circle that met annually: "Quiet Day."(70) They would meet together each year until only Mott was left; his last meeting was in 1951.(71) (During and after World War I, McConaughy became one of the two most important fund-raisers employed by the Presbyterian Church,(72) the author of the denomination's book on giving, In Account with the Silent Partner.(73))
The Laymen's Missionary Movement was another interdenominational missions organization. It sprang from the Haystack Commemoration held in 1906 in New York City. The first meeting was held at the Henry Sloane Coffin's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.(74) It soon became a major source of missionary giving to the cooperating denominations, of which the Presbyterian Church was one. It quadrupled donations. It appealed to businessmen to make designated offerings.(75)
There were many of these interdenominational missions movements.(76) These movements encouraged designated giving to mission stations. A local church supported one station or one missionary. Each station had two budgets: the primary one from the Board of Foreign Missions and a secondary one from its supporting churches or individuals. The Board wanted the money to be sent through the Board, if possible. The growth of independent sources of income would threaten the control of the Board over its missionaries. Would the rise of these independent parachurch missionary funding societies threaten Board control? Not if they sent the money through the boards. The president of the Forward Movement understood this concern and did his best in 1905 to gain support of the boards of the denominations by issuing this Board-pleasing scenario: "The tendency will be more and more for churches to turn over their missionary obligations to societies, for societies to turn it over to boards, for boards to turn it over to Executive Committees, and Executive Committees to Secretaries; so that, in the last result, the chief responsibility for the great work will rest on the shoulders of a dozen men."(77) Only if the independent societies cooperated would this be true. Only those nondenominational societies formally committed to such centralization would receive the formal approval of the boards.
Mott and Speer
In 1906, the SVM held its fifth United States-Canadian convention. The preparatory service began with a speech by Mott. It was followed by a speech by Speer.(78) This pattern did not change. Fourteen years later, the eighth international convention was held. It was led off by a prayer by J. Ross Stevenson, the president of Princeton Seminary. It was followed by a speech by Mott. This was followed by an address by Speer.(79) These addresses were followed by speeches from S. Earl Taylor, who, along with Mott,(80) was leading John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s short-lived ecumenical project, the Interchurch World Movement,(81) and from Sherwood Eddy, Mott's long-time assistant in the YMCA.(82) Some 6,000 students were in attendance at the 1920 meeting.(83) By 1920, Eddy had joined the Socialist Party and had come out in favor of the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States. Later that year, Mott threatened to resign from the YMCA if Eddy was fired, thus saving Eddy's position of leadership in the missionary movement.(84)
Eddy's ideas were representative of the more radical members of the next generation of SVM members, who led a revolt against Mott at the 1920 convention. The social gospel of the 1920's was far more radical than the earlier version.(85) Yet Mott and Speer remained as the visible intermediaries between mainline Protestant missions and social gospel radicalism until their deaths. Speer served as president of the Federal Council of Churches, 1920-24.
By 1906, Mott and Speer had become the dominant figures of American Protestant foreign missions. Through the SVM, they had supplied almost 3,000 missionaries sent out by 50 denominations, from 1888 to January 1, 1906.(86) Of these, 826 went to China, 275 went to Japan, and 624 went to India, Burma, and Ceylon.(87) In addition, the SVM sponsored missions classes; over 12,000 students had attended by 1906.(88) From the beginning, it was an ecumenical operation. This, Mott said, was one of its great contributions. "Uniting as it does so many of the future leaders of the Church who have spent from four to seven years in the most intimate spiritual fellowship and united Christian service in student life, it is not strange that this should be true."(89)
Mott was a proponent of the social gospel.(90) According to his reminiscences, this influence came after the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference.(91) But ecumenism had always been present in his thinking. Mott and Speer had not spent their time recruiting Calvinists and what would later become known as fundamentalists. They had recruited "the best and the brightest" of American colleges.
While it would be misleading to blame the rise of Chinese and Japanese socialism entirely on Mott, Speer, and their recruits, there is no doubt that Protestant missionaries from the United States and Britain were the source of socialist ideas among Chinese intellectuals, who had been taught in missionary schools. This influence began in the 1890's, paralleling the recruiting activities by Mott and Speer.(92) The rise of socialism in both China and Japan prior to 1907 came as a result of English and American Protestant missionaries. As Martin Bernal comments (favorably), "The United States was undoubtedly the Western nation most responsible for introducing socialism to China."(93) It was missionaries--evangelicals or "low church" missionaries, as Bernal calls them--who accomplished this. The same was true in Japan.(94) The old-line missionaries in China were conservatives, most notably those recruited by the China Inland Mission. The new ones, recruited in the United States through the SVM and the YMCA, tended to be liberals.(95)
Liturgy vs. Ecumenism There is more to the failure of liberal ecumenism than the churches' failure to establish a cartel. Liturgy also has played a major role. Men are emotionally committed to traditional liturgies. What they grew up with they tend to regard as the preferable liturgical standard. There are exceptions, of course. A religious experience later in life in a Church with a different liturgy can move a person out of his original commitment. Usually this will be a lower Church liturgy designed to produce such experiences. The older liturgy will be regarded in retrospect as too narrow, too cold, or too formal: "stifling the spirit." But apart from such a conversion experience, or the acceptance of a spouse's liturgical preferences, most people remain content with the liturgy they grew up with if they remain in a local church at all.
Liturgy is the greatest single barrier to ecumenism. Church members look upon another tradition's liturgy and shudder. "If I wanted to be a [Lutheran, Episcopalian, Baptist, etc.], I'd have joined a [Lutheran, Episcopal, Baptist, etc.] Church!" On the one hand, the presence of a familiar liturgy keeps men from departing, even in the face of a major shift in theology in the pulpit. The liberals in Presbyterianism and the other mainline churches could be confident that if they were careful to avoid the rhetoric of confrontation, their parishioners would rarely defect. Liturgy would keep them in their pews until death did them part. This proved to be the case. On the other hand, this very liturgical commitment has kept ecumenists from being able to consummate Church union except with other denominations with the same liturgical tradition. For example, the Presbyterians never succeeded in joining with the Episcopalians, although this was attempted. The Episcopalians would not "move down" liturgically.
There is also the social phenomenon of denominationalism. I think of the remark of the well-educated Presbyterian minister in the movie A River Runs Through It. He dismissed Methodists sometime around 1935 as "Baptists who can read." There is a sense of cultural and social superiority that a higher liturgy Church member has. There is also a sense of spiritual superiority that the lower Church liturgy member has. Neither is willing to move downward into the void, which is where he sees rival ecclesiastical organizations sliding.
Rent-Seeking Monopolies: Sacraments and Money I have argued elsewhere that it is the historian's task to seek answers to two fundamental questions: (1) How did a man or organization celebrate the sacraments? (2) Where did the money come and go?(96) In the case of Presbyterian liberals, the answer to both questions is the same. For them, collecting the money was the equivalent of taking the sacraments. They actually announced this in 1934--something that few if any other liberals have ever been willing to do. This had been their implicit theory of the sacraments from the first stirrings of Presbyterian liberalism in the mid-1870's until the takeover in 1936. It 1934, they made it explicit. The experientialists went along with this.
The economic mark of the Church's authority is its collection of tithe, just as the economic mark of the State's authority is the taxation of those within its jurisdiction.(97) Churches do not believe this regarding their authority, although they do believe it with respect to the State's authority. They do not make the right to vote in local church elections conditional on the payment of ten percent of a family head's net income.(98) The crucial institutional question in both Church and State is this one: Which level of the hierarchical structure possesses the designated authority to collect money from the individual? The answer to this question will determine the degree of centralization within the organization. In all hierarchical churches, this authority lodges in the local congregation. In all modern states, it lodges in the central government. The goal of twentieth-century political and theological liberalism has been to centralize the money-collection machinery and the law-making authority.
The local congregation is not regarded as possessing the right to demand the tithe as a condition of membership. Because of this, there has always been a debate over ministries outside the control of the Church. There has also been a debate over the claims of Church agencies higher up the chain of command. In Presbyterianism prior to 1936, the Church's higher levels were supported, voluntarily or involuntarily, by the lower levels, i.e., by money collected from congregations and individuals. The local congregation was not compelled to support the higher levels. Even today, a member is not compelled to support his local congregation. This has led to endless debates over who has primary claim to the donated money. In the 1830's, the Old School denied the legitimacy of the claims of missionary agencies that were outside the denomination. The New School denied this claim. In the 1930's, the roles reversed, with this addition: those in control of the agencies were either liberals or the functional representatives of liberals.
Presbyterianism before 1933 had always been judicially silent regarding any Church agency's legal or moral claim on money collected by the local congregation. The ordinances of a Church were local; this idea extended back to the Form of Presbyterial Church-Government (1645), Of the Ordinances in a particular Congregation: psalm-singing, preaching, the reading of the Bible, sacraments, a collection taken for the poor, and a closing blessing. This entrenched localism is why the history of the Presbyterian Church has been marked by interminable appeals for money from all the agencies as well as the local congregations.
The 1934 directive did not specify sanctions to be imposed against any member or congregation that refused to pay, nor could it: the tradition of charitable voluntarism was too deeply ingrained in the Presbyterian Church's history. The hierarchy could not legally coerce payments into their boards' coffers. The hierarchy could, however, impose restrictions on the outflow of funds. This was a classic assertion of monopoly: a monopoly cannot legally compel payments upward, but it can legally prohibit payments outward. The monopolist announces: "If you buy, you must but from us!" The General Assembly announced: "If you give, you must give only to those controlled by us!" Economists call such judicially coercive activities rent-seeking.(99) Machen called them tyrannical, the mark of apostasy.
The directive did specify sanctions against members or congregations that paid money to rival boards outside the denomination. This really meant sanctions against ministers who recommended giving money elsewhere. There was no way that a Church court would prosecute laymen in this matter unless they became extremely vocal, which was unlikely within Presbyterianism. Ministers made the public pronouncements. The liberals' goal was to set a judicial precedent with ministers.
The culmination of this process of bureaucratic rent-seeking came in 1936. It was a well-established Presbyterian tradition by then. It had begun in the early nineteenth century with the Old School's denial of legitimacy for gifts by Presbyterians to interdenominational missions. It reappeared in the late nineteenth century and escalated after 1906: the effects of the Cumberland reunion. The liberals' war was won in the trenches of the Church's bureaucracies, where there are very few easily accessible records. The liberals knew how to fight that war; the conservatives never had a clue as to what was going on until it was way too late. They came under the liberals' negative sanctions.
Conclusion The Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., was like a large, poorly guarded bank with a vault full of cash and mortgages. If it remained unguarded, it was going to be robbed, sooner or later. It remained unguarded. But the eventual robbers were not one-shot lone gunmen or midnight safe-crackers. They were more like embezzlers. They were after a flow of funds. This process of redirecting the flow of funds would go on for a long time. They used the embezzled funds to buy up shares in the bank until they owned a controlling interest in it. Then they kicked the original managers off the Board. The Church's General Assembly meeting was like an annual corporation meeting of a very large firm: open to the shareholders but rarely controlled by them. Unlike corporate shareholders, however, the attendees at the General Assembly could not sell their shares short.
These professional embezzlers had a working arrangement with the bank examiners on the outside. Modernists inside the churches had a working relationship with Progressives outside the churches. There would be no public criticism from the outside; there would be only acclamation. "A fine bank, well run, and getting better all the time."
The problem has come in our day: the Presbyterian Bank's capital is running out. New banks in town are attracting the old bank's depositors. Unlike the Presbyterian Bank, the Episcopal Bank, the Methodist Bank, and the other Mainline Banks of America, these new banks are independent, well-managed, and must be taken over one at a time. They also offer higher rates of interest to depositors. This makes it tough on professional embezzlers. The negative sanction of consumer rejection has made itself felt. The crucial issue is sanctions.
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Footnotes:
1. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster, [c. 1917?] 1968), p. 991. Reprinted in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 232.
2. Weber, speech to the Verein für Sozialpolitik (1909); reprinted in J. P. Mayer, Max Weber and German Politics (London: Faber & Faber, 1956), pp. 126, 127. See Gary North, "Max Weber: Rationalism, Irrationalism, and the Bureaucratic Cage," in North, ed., Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1976), ch. 8.
3. Henry Manne, "The Political Economy of Modern Universities," in Anne Husted Burleigh, ed., Education in a Free Society (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1973), pp. 116-18.
4. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis, 2nd ed. (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), Appendix A: "From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty."
5. Mises, Bureaucracy (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1944).
6. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 142.
7. C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law: And Other Studies in Administration (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), ch. 1.
8. Ibid., p. 2.
9. Richard C. Cornuelle, Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1966), ch. 5.
10. In the case of the Board of Foreign Missions, there was another agency, the women's missionary society.
11. Michael Parks, "Peking Moving to Curb Killing of Baby Girls," Los Angeles Times (April 17, 1984); Nicholas D. Kristof, "A Mystery of China's Census: Where Have All the Girls Gone?" New York Times (June 17, 1991).
12. This is the strongest technical argument against term limits for politicians in a government that provides Civil Service protection for bureaucrats.
13. Weber, Economy and Society, pp. 998-1001. Cf. From Max Weber, pp. 240-43.
14. Harold C. Livesay, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), pp. 187-88.
15. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York: Free Press, [1963] 1977). On Aldrich--godfather of the Federal Reserve System, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and grandfather of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller--see Nathaniel Wright Setevenson, Nelson W. Aldrich: A Leader in American Politics (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat, [1930] 1971); Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., Old Money: The Myth of America's Upper Class (New York: Knopf, 1988), ch. 1.
16. The best studies of this process remain Fritz Machlup's The Political Economy of Monopoly (1952) and The Economics of Sellers' Competition: Model Analysis of Sellers' Conduct (1952), both published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.
17. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), p. 166.
18. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, [1954] 1977), pp. 104-12.
19. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 173.
20. The three were: Leith, North Dakota; Portland, Maine; and Branchton, Pennsylvania. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church 1936-1986, edited by Charles G. Dennison (Philadelphia: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), pp. 70, 163, 224. The Leith church later suffered a setback. Its attorney had not filed the papers correctly. A decade later, after having paid off all but a few hundred dollars of its mortgage, the congregation lost the property to the PCUSA presbytery, and had to buy it again. Ibid., p. 70.
21. "News of the Church: The Proposed `Presbyterian Church of America,'" Christianity Today (Jan. 1932), p. 19.
22. Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1940), pp. 233-34.
23. One mark of these low Church liturgies is the "altar call" at the end of each service: the minister asks people to come forward to accept Christ publicly. The altar call is the lineal descendent of the "anxious bench," an invention of Charles G. Finney. See Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), pp. 143-44. It was Finney's New School evangelism techniques and theology that had led to the division of the Presbyterian Church in 1837.
24. The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, wrote Hegel.
25. Henry P. Van Dusen, The Plain Man Seeks for God (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933), p. 25.
26. John C. Bennett, "After Liberalism--What?" Christian Century (1933), p. 1403; cited in Robert T. Handy, "The American Religious Depression, 1925-1935," Church History, 29 (1960), p. 10.
27. I cannot resist the temptation: a soul proprietorship.
28. Machen to his mother, summer, 1915; cited in Stonehouse, Machen, p. 221.
29. In 1958, the year of the union between the United Presbyterian Church and the PCUSA, the new denomination adopted a new term, the "General Mission Program." Dawson writes: "This was the beginning of a new era of unified administration, mirroring developments in other areas of society, in which all `mission' (defined much more broadly) would be addressed through a centralized interpretation and administration." David G. Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Selected Giving and Presbyterians, Part II," American Presbyterians, 69 (Fall 1991), p. 211.
30. Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Selected Giving and Presbyterians, Part I," ibid., 68 (Summer 1990), p. 122.
31. Ibid.
32. Richard W. Reifsnyder, "Presbyterian Reunion, Reorganization and Expansion in the Late 19th Century," ibid., 64 (Spring 1986), p. 29.
33. Ibid., p. 30.
34. Ibid., p. 31.
35. Ibid., p. 32.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Part I," ibid., p. 123.
39. The Foreign Missionary (Sept. 1879), p. 115; cited in ibid., p. 124.
40. Ibid.
41. Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Part II," ibid., pp. 204-205.
42. Ibid., p. 207.
43. Ibid., p. 204.
44. Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Part I," ibid., p. 124.
45. A basic rule of all fund-raising letters: say "I," not "we." "We-we" letters pull significantly lower returns.
46. Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Part II," ibid., p. 223.
47. Ibid., p. 222.
48. Eldon G. Ernst, Moment of Truth for Protestant America: Interchurch Campaigns Following World War I (American Academy of Religion & Scholars' Press, 1974), p. 18.
49. Senior secretary, Intercollegiate YMCA: 1890-1915; General Secretary, YMCA: 1915-1928. Chairman, Student Volunteer Movement, 1888-1920. Honorary General Secretary, World's Student Christian Federation: 1895-1897; General Secretary, 1897-1920; Chairman, 1920-1928. C. Howard Hopkins, John R. Mott, 1865-1955 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1979), p. 800, "positions held."
50. John R. Mott, Strategic Points in the World Conquest: The Universities and Colleges as Related to the Progress of Christianity (New York: Revell, 1897), p. 22.
51. Ibid., p. 23.
52. Ibid., p. 6.
53. Herman C. Weber, Presbyterian Statistics Through One Hundred Years, 1826-1926 (n.p.: The General Council, Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1927), chart, p. 100.
54. Hopkins, Mott, pp. 24-30.
55. Ibid., p. 28.
56. Robert E. Speer, D. L. Moody: An Address to the Northfield Schools (Founder's Day address, 1931), p. 11.
57. Stanley L. Gundry, Love Them In: The Proclamation Theology of Dwight L. Moody (Chicago: Moody Press, 1976), p. 166.
58. It was at the 1887 student conference that Moody brought in Drummond, who openly espoused liberalism. Ibid., p. 213. This was the first Northfield conference attended by Speer.
59. Ibid., pp. 96-101.
60. Ibid., p. 99.
61. Moody, "To Stir Up the Churches and Convert Christians," Detroit Journal (April 1899), cited in ibid., p. 212.
62. Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1995), p. 15.
63. Arnold C. Brackman, A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Times Books, 1980).
64. Addresses and Papers of John R. Mott, 6 vols. (New York: Association Press, 1947), VI:499.
65. Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution, rev. ed. (New York: Putnam's, [1898] 1921), p. 249.
66. Ibid., p. 253.
67. Ibid., p. 111.
68. Reifsnyder, "Presbyterian Reunion," p. 35.
69. Hopkins, Mott, pp. 67-68.
70. Ibid., pp. 214-15.
71. Ibid., p. 700.
72. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1917, p. 58; Minutes of the General Assembly, 1920, p. 245.
73. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1918, p. 59.
74. Ernst, Moment of Truth, p. 19.
75. Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Part I," p. 126.
76. Ernst, Moment of Truth, pp. 20-22.
77. Francis Wayland, The Forward Movement Handbook (1905), cited in Dawson, "Mission Philanthropy, Part I," p. 127.
78. Students and the Modern Missionary Crusade (New York: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1906), pp. 3-15.
79. North American Students and World Advance, edited by Burton St. John (New York: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1920), pp. 16-34.
80. Mott resigned from the Executive Committee in April, 1920. Hopkins, Mott, p. 621.
81. See Chapter 6, above: section on "The Interchurch World Movement, 1919-1921."
82. North American Students, pp. 37-56.
83. Mott, "The World Opportunity," ibid., p. 17.
84. Hopkins, Mott, pp. 621-22. Eddy was not only a socialist, he was an ethical relativist. "I regard morality as a spirit rather than rules," he proclaimed in his autobiography, A Pilgrimage of Ideas or The Re-education of Sherwood Eddy (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934), p. 264.
85. William McGuire King, "The Emergence of Social Gospel Radicalism: The Methodist Case," Church History, 50 (Dec. 1981).
86. Mott's estimate in 1906 was 2,953 missionaries sent out by the SVM alone. This did not count the YMCA and other Mott-related organizations. Between 1902 and 1906, exactly 1,000 were sent out. Mott, "The First Two Decades of the Student Volunteer Movement," Students and the Missionary Crusade, p. 42.
87. Ibid., p. 43.
88. Ibid., p. 46.
89. Ibid., p. 52.
90. Hopkins, Mott, pp. 622-33.
91. Addresses and Papers, VI:522.
92. Martin Bernal, Chinese Socialism to 1907 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), ch. 2, a study of the China-based English-language newspaper, The Review of the Times, whose influence for socialism began in the 1890's.
93. Ibid., p. 8.
94. Ibid., p. 9.
95. Joel A. Carpenter, "Introduction," in Modernism and Foreign Missions: Two Fundamentalist Protests, edited by Carpenter (New York: Garland, 1988), p. [3]. On the YMCA as liberal in spirit, see C. Howard Hopkins, History of the YMCA in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951).
96. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), p. 553.
97. Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994).
98. Ibid., ch. 3.
99. James M. Buchanan, Robert D. Tollison, and Gordon Tullock, Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1981).