If someone had penned an obituary for Jesus the day after his death, it might have very well concluded with the same words: “He failed.” But such a memorial would betray an ignorance of the God of resurrection. Often what appears to be failure and defeat is, in fact, success and victory. What was Machen’s success? With clarity and consistency he drew a line in the sand. He sharpened the creedal edge that had long been blunted by compromise. You either stand on the side of biblical Christianity or you don’t. 

Appearing in the Baltimore Evening Sun on January 18, 1937 was an obituary for J Gresham Machen written by cultural critic and essayist HL Mencken. It’s an interesting tribute from an unlikely source. Machen’s life was a heroic struggle against the influence of Modernism within the mainline Presbyterian church, and a tireless attempt to contend against fake Christianity that revised and rejected the Bible. For his part, Mencken wasn’t a Christian and believed that the doctrine Machen espoused was a horror little removed from cannibalism. Yet, Mencken highly praised Machen as more clear, cogent, and consistent than his adversaries. The closing words of the epitaph simply read: “He failed — but he was undoubtedly right.”
In one sense, that assessment is understandable. If we measure success in human terms then Machen did appear to fail. His compelling and intellectual defense of the orthodox faith — summarized so well in his book Christianity and Liberalism — didn’t persuade most of his contemporaries. The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America and Princeton Seminary theologically collapsed forfeiting biblical Christianity, and America’s other mainline denominations followed a similar course.
The inability to stem the tide is still felt today. One hundred years after first being published, World Magazine named Christianity and Liberalism as their 2023 book of the year. Why? They explained: “If you want to explore the background of the moral collapse in churches today over same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ issues, this book is a good place to start. That collapse follows logically from the more important and foundational fight of 100 years ago.”
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Every time you tell me about the great Russian painting, I will tell you about the peaceful Ukrainians shot in the back in the Makariv district. And before they could shoot, the orcs tied their hands. About hundreds of corpses on the streets of Bucha, Irpen, Gostomel. About mass graves in the yards of residential neighborhoods. Until recently, the mass graves of civilians were cozy and safe cities. Mass graves. In the 21st century. Here is what I will tell you in return about the great Russian painting.

Dear heartbroken Europeans and other connoisseurs of great Russian culture !!! (including Ukrainians), today I watch photos and videos from liberated cities and villages of Kyiv region all day. My native Kyiv region. And here’s what I want to tell you:
Every time you talk about the great Russian ballet, I will tell you the story of a young teacher from Brovary who was repeatedly raped in front of her parents and then kidnapped by Russian villains. About dozens, maybe hundreds of raped Ukrainian women. Often in the eyes of children. About 15-16-year-old girls from Borodyanka who suffered terrible violence from the Kadyrovites. About the bodies of five raped young girls who were killed and left on the road. About this abomination “we will spend * hohlushek” in interceptions. Here is what I will tell you in return about the great Russian ballet.
Every time you tell me about great Russian composers, I will tell you the story of a girl in front of whom and her little brother in the basement of Mariupol, their mother died more than once. And then with the corpse of a dead mother, the children were forced to continue to hide in the basement from the shelling. About a boy from Gostomel, in front of whom Russian soldiers shot his father. And then they wanted to kill their son, but he survived. About a girl who was shot directly in the face. About a kid who ran away with his grandmother in a boat. Grandma drowned. And the boy has been wanted for almost a month. Here’s what I’ll tell you in return about the great Russian composers.
Every time you tell me about the great Russian painting, I will tell you about the peaceful Ukrainians shot in the back in the Makariv district. And before they could shoot, the orcs tied their hands. About hundreds of corpses on the streets of Bucha, Irpen, Gostomel. About mass graves in the yards of residential neighborhoods. Until recently, the mass graves of civilians were cozy and safe cities. Mass graves. In the 21st century. Here is what I will tell you in return about the great Russian painting.
Every time you tell me about the great Russian theater, I will tell you the story of a woman from the Brovary district, from whose house Russian marauders retreated and removed metal tiles. About tanks and armored personnel carriers of the “Second Army of the World,” loaded to the brim with robbers in Ukrainian homes. Stolen phones, tablets, TVs, washing machines, carpets, jewelry, bottles of alcohol, pans, clothes, toys, shoes – everything that happened to these freaks. When they got to Belarus, they sent their loot to Russia in advance. About how they stole stolen goods in Belarusian bazaars. Here is what I will tell you in response about the great Russian theater.
Every time you tell me about the great Russian cinema, I will tell you about the brutally shot horses in the stables in Kyiv region. About the animals of the zoo in Yasnogorodka, frozen by hunger and thirst. About deer skin burned after the explosion. And now the maximum savagery… About the alabai killed and eaten by the Russian occupiers. Yes, alabai. Yes, dogs. Yes, eaten. Here is what I will tell you in response about the great Russian cinema.
Every time you tell me about the great Russian literature, I will tell you about dozens of interceptions of conversations of Russian soldiers with their mothers and wives. Conversations in which there is nothing but naya. Conversations in which wives order them to steal in Ukrainian homes. Conversations where mothers laugh when their sons tell how their cousins rape hohlushek. And if all mothers are thrown out of these conversations, they will be left with “hello” and “while.” Here is what I will tell you in response about the great Russian literature.
There is no longer any great Russian culture, literature, cinema, painting, theater and ballet. There is a country of freaks, marauders, rapists and murderers. Wild people who have no place in the civilized world!
And long-suffering new Russian dissidents in the cozy apartments of Berlin, London, Larnaca, Milan, Tbilisi, Astana, Vienna and other temporary shelters, let them follow the route of the Russian ship, proudly carrying in their hands the great Russian culture!
From a Ukrainian Woman on Facebook

“Some religions, like Judaism have made many contributions to the civilised world. Others have been much less involved in Western progress. As [historian Rodney] Stark and others have demonstrated, only those religions that have had a place for reason and logic have had a real impact on science, progress and technology. The Judeo-Christian worldview certainly gives reason a good run. Thus important thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead and Robert Oppenheimer – neither of them Christian – have argued that modern science could not have developed were it not for the Christian worldview that provided the soil from which it arose. The greatest achievements of Western civilisation are mainly, but not completely, the results of the Judeo-Christian mindset.” 

To speak of Western civilisation is to speak about Christian civilisation to a very large degree. Without Christianity (and the Judaism that preceded it), the West as we know it today would simply not exist. One of the most recent commentators to make this case is Tucker Carlson. A few weeks ago he gave a speech on how Western civilisation is under attack.
He emphasised how the secular left is really at war with Christianity itself. As he said in part: “Why are they doing this? The goal is to overthrow Western civilization. What is Western civilization? It’s Christian civilization. That’s what it is.”
Entire libraries are filled with the volumes documenting how so much of the West is the product of Christianity. Some months ago, I listed twenty top books on how Christianity made our world. It included titles such as How Christianity Changed the World and What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? That piece is found here.
Christianity and Science
Simply looking at the arena of science is enough to show any unbiased observer what a remarkable contribution Christians have made here. Even non-Christians have acknowledged all this. For example, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, in America’s Real War (Multnomah, 1999) put it this way:
“Well over 90 percent of all the scientific discoveries of the past thousand years have been made in nations where Christianity is the prevailing religion. Virtually every major discovery in physics, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, electricity, nuclear physics, mechanics and just about everything else has taken place in Christian countries.”
And consider this stunning remark by the atheist blogger Tim O’Neill from a decade ago:
It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked up these strange ideas from websites and popular books. The assertions collapse as soon as you hit them with hard evidence. I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one – just one – scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents usually scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong. http://www.strangenotions.com/gods-philosophers/
Of interest, this excerpt was taken from a book review he had penned. I happen to have the book, and it could easily have been included in my top 20 listing (along with many others). I refer to the very important volume God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam, (Icon Books, 2010). It was released in America as The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Regnery, 2011).
There is so much that can be said about this crucial volume. Perhaps the best I can do here is simply quote from it, hoping that will encourage you to get a copy. In his introduction he says this:
Popular opinion, journalistic cliché, and misinformed historians notwithstanding, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages was a period of enormous advances in science, technology and culture. The compass, paper, printing, stirrups, and gunpowder all appeared in western Europe between 500 and 1500 AD. True, these inventions originated in the Far East, but Europeans developed them to a far higher degree than had been the case elsewhere….
Meanwhile, the people of medieval Europe invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace by themselves.
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