MCINTIRE, Carl (1906–2002)

MCINTIRE, Carl (1906–2002), militant separatist fundamentalist and anti-Communist crusader, was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on 17 May 1906. His father, Charles Curtis McIntire, was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother, Hettie, was a teacher and librarian. Soon after McIntire’s birth, the family moved to Durant, Oklahoma, where his grandmother had been a missionary to the Choctaws. His father suffered from delusions and spent 1914 to 1919 in a mental institution, forcing Hettie McIntire to raise her four sons on her own. She sought a divorce in 1922, fearing for her own safety and that of her family, and eventually became dean of women at a college in Oklahoma. When Carl McIntire reached college age, he began to attend Southeastern State College in Oklahoma, but then transferred to Park College in Kansas City, Missouri, where he received his BA in teacher education in 1927. Although McIntire contemplated a law degree, he decided instead to study for the ministry and entered Princeton Seminary in 1928, where he was elected president of the entering class.

Princeton in the late 1920s was caught up in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and McIntire soon came under the influence of the renowned scholar and fundamentalist leader J. Gresham Machen. When the Presbyterian Church placed Princeton Seminary under a liberal governing board in 1929, Machen left to found Westminster Seminary in Chester Hill, Pennsylvania. McIntire followed his professor and graduated from Westminster in 1931. Soon afterwards he married Fairy Eunace Davis of Paris, Texas. On 4 June 1931 McIntire was ordained into the Presbyterian Church and installed as pastor of the Chelsea Presbyterian Church in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which had been decimated by the suicide of the previous pastor. Through aggressive evangelizing and outdoor preaching on the ocean boardwalk, McIntire added almost 200 members within two years. On 28 September 1933 McIntire was called as pastor to the 1,000-member fundamentalist Collingswood Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, New Jersey, a position that he would hold for the next sixty-six years.

In 1934 McIntire became a member of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, which Machen had created as an alternative to the increasingly liberal Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. The creation of a rival missions agency provoked the ire of the Presbyterian General Assembly, which brought McIntire, along with Machen and his followers, to trial for creating disorder. McIntire responded by broadcasting his evening services on a local Philadelphia radio station, giving full vent to his dispute with the Presbyterian Church. He began publishing The Christian Beacon, a weekly newspaper that chronicled his struggles, on 13 February 1936, and he continued to publish it for more than five decades.

On 15 June 1936 McIntire and the others responsible for the Independent Board were found guilty and ousted from the Presbyterian Church. Those expelled immediately formed the Presbyterian Church of America, but this new denomination was soon racked by internal conflicts. Two factions developed, one (represented by McIntire) that supported premillennial dispensationalism and another (represented by Machen) that accepted premillennialism but viewed dispensationalism with suspicion. Machen managed to hold the denomination together until his death in 1937, but soon afterwards McIntire’s followers formed the Bible Presbyterian Church, while those loyal to Machen formed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. McIntire founded Faith Theological Seminary in July 1938 to train ministers for his fledgling denomination.

All but eight of McIntire’s congregation voluntarily left the Presbyterian Church when McIntire was expelled, but as a civil court in 1938 refused to grant them ownership of the Collingswood Presbyterian Church property, they were forced to meet in a tent while a wooden ‘Tabernacle of Testimony’ was built, which served the congregation from 1938 until 1957. Denied the Collingswood Presbyterian Church name, the congregation changed its name to the Bible Presbyterian Church of Collingswood.

Ruthlessly insistent on doctrinal purity, McIntire formed the American Council of Christian Churches in 1941 and the International Council of Christian Churches in 1948 to oppose and offer an alternative to the ecumenical positions of the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. McIntire’s extreme separatism created a schism within the Bible Presbyterians that caused more than three-quarters of the denomination’s hundred churches to disassociate themselves from him in 1956. The American Council of Christian Churches followed suit in 1968. However, McIntire was far from beaten by these struggles. He continued to pastor his large Collingswood church, maintained control of Faith Seminary and the International Council of Christian Churches and reached millions more through his radio broadcasts and The Christian Beacon.

On 7 March 1955 McIntire began broadcasting ‘The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour’, a thirty-minute radio programme on WCVH in Chester, Pennsylvania. He daily excoriated the twin threats of apostasy and Communism, and his message proved popular in the Cold War era. Within five years, he was heard on 600 stations throughout the country and was receiving almost two million dollars a year in contributions from an estimated 20 million listeners. These funds enabled him to buy several hotels in Cape May, New Jersey, which he turned into fundamentalist conference centres. In addition, he assumed control of Shelton College (formerly the National Bible Institute) in 1964. He founded a secondary school in 1968 and a primary school in 1973.

McIntire worked closely with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Affairs Committee to identify suspected Communist clergymen. He also regularly attacked the National Association of Evangelicals, Billy Graham and other ‘New Evangelicals’ for their refusal to separate themselves from non-fundamentalists. His other targets included the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the Roman Catholic Church and the Civil Rights movement. He used protest demonstrations at the meetings of groups he opposed to attract publicity. In 1970 and 1971 McIntire garnered national media attention by rallying at least 50,000 people for a series of ‘Victory Marches’ in support of the Vietnam War.

McIntire’s influence waned greatly after 1971, and he faced insurmountable obstacles. In 1971 Faith Seminary was rocked by the departure of the institution’s president along with all but two of its staff and half the student body in protest at McIntire’s dictatorial style. McIntire fought the Federal Communications Commission for years over the licensing of his radio station WXUR. McIntire’s conference centres in Cape May proved unsustainable when the city decided that they did not meet the requirements for tax-exempt status. Shelton College faced twenty years of struggles over accreditation with the state of New Jersey. McIntire attempted to move the school to Florida, but financial difficulties forced a return to New Jersey, where the accreditation struggles continued until they were settled by the US Supreme Court in favour of New Jersey in 1985. By that time, the school had been reduced to a handful of students.

Despite these obstacles and a near-fatal pancreatic disorder in 1978, McIntire continued to fight Communism and ecumenism well into the 1990s. Yet his situation worsened. His wife died in 1992 and a car crash almost killed him in 1993. The Christian Beacon ceased publication soon afterwards. In 1996 financial problems forced the sale of Faith Seminary, which according to some insiders had become a money-oriented diploma mill. In 1999 the Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingswood ousted McIntire after he refused to retire. The ninety-two-year-old McIntire responded by holding Sunday services in his home. Carl McIntire died, aged 95, on 19 March 2002.

Bibliography

J. Fea, ‘Carl McIntire: From Fundamentalist Presbyterian to Presbyterian Fundamentalist’, American Presbyterians, 72, 4 (1994), pp. 253–268; E. Fink, 40 Years …: Carl McIntire and the Bible Presbyterian Church of Collingswood, 1933–1973 (Collingswood: Christian Beacon Press, 1973); C. McIntire, ‘Fifty Years of Preaching in Collingswood, N. J.’, Christian Beacon 48, 33 (1983), pp. 1–5, 7.

D. K. LARSEN

D. K. Larsen, “McIntire, Carl,” ed. Timothy Larsen et al., Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 393–395.

We should have learned something from Carl McIntire, but sad to say, we did not.