Carl McIntire
Charles Curtis McIntire Jr., known as Carl McIntire, was a founder and minister in the Bible Presbyterian Church, founder and long-time president of the International Council of Christian Churches and the American Council of Christian Churches, and a popular religious radio broadcaster, who proudly identified himself as a fundamentalist.
Youth and education
Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Carl McIntire was the oldest of four children born to Charles Curtis McIntire, a Presbyterian minister and M.A. graduate of Princeton University, and Hettie Hotchkin McIntire. McIntire's father pastored in Salt Lake City, but by 1912 he had suffered a mental breakdown and was hospitalized. He and his wife were divorced, and she raised the children alone in Durant, Oklahoma, where she served as Dean of Women at Southeastern State Teachers College. Carl McIntire completed high school in Durant and attended Southeastern State, where he became an award-winning intercollegiate debater and president of the student body during his final year. For his senior year, he transferred to Park College, Parkville, Missouri, where he received his B.A. degree before entering Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, in 1928 to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry. Meanwhile, he worked as a janitor and sold maps to farmers door-to-door in Caddo County, Oklahoma.During the late 1920s, Princeton Seminary was embroiled in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy that had disquieted the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America as well as other Protestant denominations. McIntire became a strong supporter of J. Gresham Machen, a conservative professor of New Testament. With Machen, McIntire opposed a reorganization of the seminary in 1929 that appeared to strengthen liberal elements in the church. He followed his mentor and three other professors from Princeton to the newly founded Westminster Theological Seminary, where he completed his Th.B. degree in 1931.
In May 1931, he married Fairy Eunice Davis of Paris, Texas, whom he had met when they were both students at Southeastern, and who became a high school English teacher while he completed seminary. They had three children. After the death of Fairy Davis McIntire in 1992, McIntire married Alice Goff, a church office administrator with whom he had worked for many years.
Founding of the Bible Presbyterian Church
In 1931, McIntire was ordained into the ministry of the Presbyterian Church USA, serving for two years at Chelsea Presbyterian Church, Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1933, he was called to the Presbyterian Church of Collingswood, New Jersey, near Philadelphia, the largest church in the West Jersey Presbytery. McIntire remained a resident of Collingswood for the rest of his life. The Women's Missionary Society of the Collingswood church called his attention to what they perceived as a modernist perspective in the missions study book, which had been promoted by the denomination's Board of Foreign Missions. McIntire joined the conservative side in the ongoing Fundamentalist-Modernist debate, and in 1934, at Machen's invitation, he became a founding member of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, an agency organized as an alternative to the denominational mission board that supported theologically liberal missionaries. Deeming the new board a challenge to its authority, the General Assembly demanded that the clergymen resign. After they refused, Machen, McIntire, and seven other clergymen were tried by an ecclesiastical court in 1935-36. The board members lost, and they renounced the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church, as did the Collingswood Presbyterian Church, only a tiny minority of whose members refused to support their young pastor.In 1936 McIntire joined Machen and others to found the Presbyterian Church of America, later renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The new church attracted supporters from other Reformed traditions, complicating the church's effort to define itself. A debate soon emerged in the young denomination over eschatology, Presbyterian traditions, the use of alcohol and tobacco, and the place of political activity in the church. McIntire and others left in 1937 to form the Bible Presbyterian Church, which emphasized Fundamentalist distinctives in contrast to continental Reformed positions, supporting political involvement, the Scofield Reference Bible, a premillennialist view of eschatology, and abstinence from the use of tobacco and alcohol.
In April 1938, after the Collingswood church lost a civil suit over control of its church property, the congregation walked out en masse from their impressive Gothic building and followed McIntire to a huge tent erected several blocks east on the main street at Haddon Avenue and Cuthbert Boulevard. In May 1938, the congregation moved into a wooden "Tabernacle," and in November 1957, into a neo-colonial church building with a tall, Wren steeple. The church seated more than a thousand. A Sunday School was constructed on the location of the previous tent, and the revamped Tabernacle became an activity center.
Expanding ministry
''Christian Beacon''
In February 1936, during the series of ecclesiastical trials, McIntire launched a weekly newspaper, The Christian Beacon to give greater voice to his message. The Collingswood church had already printed many of his sermons, and its church services had been broadcast over the radio in the Philadelphia region. Over the next four decades, McIntire published twelve books, and hundreds of pamphlets, booklets, sermons, speeches, and documentary portfolios. As Joel Carpenter has written, McIntire was "a gifted publicist," and his Christian Beacon was a "widely read organ of separatist opinion in which McIntire practiced his talent for sensational and aggressive religious journalism."''Twentieth-Century Reformation Hour''
In March 1955, McIntire initiated a daily thirty-minute radio program, The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, which featured McIntire's commentary on religious and political affairs. The radio program generally began with a homily from the Bible, followed by a monologue by McIntire on a wide range of subjects, including apostasy in mainline churches, liberalism in government, opposition to coexistence with communism, and cultural issues of the moment, including gambling, sex education, socialized medicine, and fluoridation of drinking water. An associate pastor of the Collingswood church, Charles Richter, known to listeners as "Amen Charlie," regularly "amened" his support of McIntire's statements. During the 1960s, the program may have been heard on as many as 600 radio stations—although McIntire's inaccuracy with numbers became legendary. In 1965, McIntire effectively purchased radio station, WXUR, Media, Pennsylvania, although it was formally owned by Faith Theological Seminary.Bible conference centers
McIntire's outreach included an interest in promoting summer Bible conferences, a common method of evangelization and Bible teaching among American Protestants during the early twentieth century. In 1941, McIntire took a leading role in acquiring and operating Harvey Cedars Bible Conference on the Jersey shore at Harvey Cedars, New Jersey. After the Bible Presbyterian denomination underwent its first split in the latter year, McIntire's organization purchased the historic in Cape May, New Jersey in 1962, and founded the Christian Admiral Bible Conference and Freedom Center. McIntire added a number of distressed properties to his holdings, becoming an unwitting preservationist as he prevented outmoded structures—the most notable being the nineteenth-century Windsor and Congress Hall hotels—from being destroyed to make room for motels. The conference itself contributed to the revival of Cape May as a summer resort. In 1971, McIntire also developed a Bible conference in Cape Canaveral, Florida.Church councils
During the 1940s, McIntire's influence expanded throughout the United States and overseas. In 1941, he helped create the American Council of Christian Churches as a conservative alternative to the liberal Federal Council of Churches. In 1948, he likewise helped to found the International Council of Christian Churches to challenge the World Council of Churches. McIntire was elected first President of the ICCC and was reelected at each World Congress until he died. He and his wife, Fairy, traveled around the world scores of times both to encourage evangelical Christians abroad and to demonstrate his opposition to the World Council of Churches.During the late 1960s, McIntire's relationship with the ACCC leadership became strained, and he secretly transferred an ACCC relief agency to the ICCC, which remained firmly under his control. McIntire "was perennially late to ACCC meetings, and then he would demand that any decisions made in advance of his arrival be undone." When ACCC leaders refused to accommodate him, he attacked them in the Christian Beacon, claiming that there was a "Baptist plot against him." After being outmaneuvered, McIntire attempted a parliamentary takeover in October 1970, which eventually led to a court order against him in 1971, and a final severing of his relationship with the ACCC.