"White power" group plans takeover of town with the last church where OPC founder Machen preached

(Vanity) | 8/31/2013 | Darrell Todd Maurina

[darrellmaurina]

The town where J. Gresham Machen, the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, last preached before his death has shown up again in the news, this time in a horrible way.

While Machen's direct denominational influence was fairly narrow, as the key leader of the secession from the Northern Presbyterians and founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, Machen has a lasting role in American Calvinism that is far larger than the Orthodox Presbyterian Church which he founded.

In his own lifetime, however, Machen's role was even more important and went well beyond Reformed circles. As a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, he was regarded as the "intellectual leader of American fundamentalism," and was able to successfully make the case that Bible-believing Christianity is not a religion for stupid people, but on the contrary, is quite compatible with intellectual rigor and serious academic scholarship. The liberal PCUSA takeover of Princeton Seminary, which was then the last remaining theologically conservative Ivy League institution, attracted the same type of national media attention in the late 1920s that the conservative Southern Baptist takeover of liberalizing Baptist colleges and seminaries has attracted in our day.

Machen died an early death on the plains of North Dakota, trying to help small churches organize a faithful witness to Scripture. The last place he preached was at the Presbyterian church in Leith, N.D., which became OPC but has now closed. The building stands vacant today.

Unfortunately, Leith is now getting known for something else.

A group of white supremacists is buying up property trying to turn Leith into "an enclave where residents fly 'racialist' banners, where they are able to import enough 'responsible hard core' white nationalists to take control of the town government, where 'leftist journalists or antis' who 'come and try to make trouble' will face arrest."

New Neighbor’s Agenda: White Power Takeover http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/us/white-supremacists-plan-angers-a-north-dakota-town.html?pagewanted=all

If a tiny group of white supremacists can attract not just regional but national media attention for their plan to buy property and start a white-power enclave, surely somebody in the OPC or PCA has enough money to buy the last church where Machen preached, disassemble it, and move it someplace where the building will be valued and used, perhaps as a college or seminary chapel, or as a museum, or maybe as a building for a congregation which needs a building and would otherwise have to construct or buy one.

Older buildings were typically built to last, and when made out of wood they can typically be disassembled and rebuilt, and the cost for disassembling and rebuilding may be much less than new construction. It would be really nice to see this building put to use again for conservative Reformed church purposes rather than to have it in a haven of "white power" views which Machen never would have supported.

Here are some more websites with details on Machen's last preaching tour in North Dakota and on the current status of the town of Leith:

http://www.ghostsofnorthdakota.com/2007/05/01/leith-nd/

http://www.thisday.pcahistory.org/2013/01/january-1-death-of-j-gresham-machen/

http://heidelblog.net/2013/07/where-machen-last-preached/

[Eleutheria5]

Could well be a real estate pump-n-dump scheme. One white supremacist in the town tells his buddies that real estate can be had cheaply, and this is a great way to make a statement, etc. Then they come in and start buying up land and going public about what they’re doing. Then opposition groups hear about it, get their panties all bunched, and they start buying up land, and a bidding war starts. The locals sell all their worthless holdings at a good price, clear out, and let the white supremacists and their foes duke it out. If you’re stuck in a dying ass-end-of-nowhere town with real estate nobody will buy, desperation becomes the mother of genius, and you think of schemes like this.