Why you should become a Bible-believing anarchist
who also believes the universe was created around 4004 B.C.
Mencken was at the heart of the Scopes Trial. His life intersects not only with William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, but also J. Gresham Machen.
H.L.Mencken wrote a blistering obituary of William Jennings Bryan, but a more favorable obituary of J. Gresham Machen. Machen was front-page news in the New York Times, but nobody today knows who he is. Mencken was probably not praising Machen as much as he was chiding liberals, whom Mencken regarded as intellectually inconsistent, if not hypocrites. Why bother pretending to be a Christian if you don't believe the fundamentals of the Christian faith? Liberals don't believe the fundamentals. They have a more naturalistic -- not supernaturalistic -- religion. Machen wrote a book entitled Christianity and Liberalism, in which he argued that "Christianity" without the
fundamentals of Christianity is not just Christianity with some theological errors, but a completely different religion from Christianity. That means the mainstream Christian religions like United Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians are not Christian churches at all.
Not Christian. Some other religion, despite "Christian" on the sign in front of the church building.
If "liberal Christianity" is not genuine Christianity, that certainly applies to more aggressive denials of the fundamentals of Christianity. Machen, a Calvinist, would trace this devolution:
Calvinism --> Arminianism --> unitarianism --> deism --> naturalism --> evolutionism --> progressivism --> racism --> eugenics --> Nazism --> World "Struggle for life" ("War" "genocide")