Carl McIntire

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Carl McIntire (May 17, 1906 – March 19, 2002) was a fundamentalist radio preacher and founder of the Bible Presbyterian Church.

Contents

[edit] Education

Born to a Presbyterian minister in Ypsilanti, Michigan, McIntire was reared in Oklahoma, where his mother and grandmother were missionaries on an Indian reservation. McIntire attended Southeastern State College (now Southeastern Oklahoma State University) in Durant and graduated from Park College, Parkville, Missouri, before entering Princeton Theological Seminary to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry.

After some years of conflict between conservatives and their opponents at Princeton Seminary, J. Gresham Machen, a noted conservative professor of theology, withdrew and became instrumental in founding Westminster Theological Seminary. McIntire followed Machen and completed his education at Westminster in 1931.

[edit] Leaving the Presbyterian Church

Briefly pastor of Chelsea Presbyterian Church, Atlantic City, in 1933, McIntire was called to the pastorate of the Presbyterian Church of Collingswood, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. There he quickly became a spokesman for the conservative position during the on-going fundamentalist-modernist controversy within the mainline Presbyterian Church. Machen had also helped to organize an Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions, and McIntire became a member of the mission board in 1934. In 1936, when the Presbyterian Church, noting this challenge to its authority, demanded the resignation of the mission board members, McIntire was put on ecclesiastical trial and eventually resigned.[1]

Shortly thereafter McIntire broke with Machen and what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church largely over premillennialism (which McIntire endorsed) and social drinking (which he did not). McIntire was instrumental in founding a new denomination, the Bible Presbyterian Church and began publishing a religious newspaper, the Christian Beacon. Two years later McIntire published the first of his twelve books (heavily copyedited by faithful secretaries).

When the New Jersey Chancery Court awarded the property of the Collingswood Presbyterian Church to the denomination in 1938, the vast majority of the congregation followed McIntire from their impressive stone edifice to worship in a tent. Eventually the Collingswood Bible Presbyterian Church built a large neo-colonial building and boasted over a thousand members—although its large auditorium was rarely filled.

Becoming familiar to fundamentalists of various denominations, McIntire, in 1941, helped to organize the American Council of Christian Churches as an alternative to the liberal Federal (later, National) Council of Churches. In 1947, he likewise helped to found the International Council of Christian Churches as a fundamentalist rival to the World Council of Churches.

[edit] Fundamentalist Spokesman

Much of McIntire’s career can be traced through divisions that occurred because of his theological positions and personality. In 1956, during the period in which the Neo-evangelicalism of Billy Graham and others was dividing fundamentalists, the Bible Presbyterian Church split into two groups, and the larger evangelical faction rejected McIntire—although his fundamentalist faction kept the church name. In 1969, when McIntire was removed from the board of the American Council of Christian Churches, he and his supporters organized the competing American Christian Action Council.

In the mid-‘50s McIntire launched a thirty-minute radio program, the “Twentieth Century Reformation Hour,” which during the 1960s, may have been heard on as many as 600 radio stations. (McIntire’s statistics were rarely trustworthy.) The radio program, which lacked even musical interludes, generally featured a monologue by McIntire delivered to an assistant, the Rev. Charles “Amen Charlie” Richter, who would interject occasional “amens.” Subjects included 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 the water.

In 1963 McIntire bought a large abandoned hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, which he named the Christian Admiral and used as a Bible conference. Eventually, he also bought two historic Victorian-era hotels, Congress Hall and the Windsor, as well as a number of smaller properties in Cape May.

McIntire also took under his wing the National Bible Institute of New York City, which was renamed Shelton College and moved to a former estate in Ringwood, New Jersey (today the New Jersey Botanical Gardens).[2] In 1964, McIntire moved the college to the Christian Admiral in Cape May and then, when New Jersey refused to recognize its right to grant degrees, to the Cape Canaveral Bible Conference in Florida, a property McIntire acquired in 1971. (Shelton finally collapsed after being moved back to Cape May in 1983.)

In 1965 McIntire bought a radio station, WXUR, and became engaged in a running battle with the Federal Communications Commission over the then-applicable “fairness doctrine,” by which radio stations had to provide varied political views to keep their licenses. When the FCC refused to renew the WXUR license and the station was forced off the air in 1973, McIntire obtained the use of a World War II minesweeper and tried to broadcast outside the three-mile limit. The floating station broadcast for a total of ten hours—it was interfering with the signal of a legitimate station—but the notion of a “pirate” radio station off the United States caught the attention of the media.

McIntire also gained the public eye in the early 1970s when he organized a half dozen pro-Vietnam War “Victory Marches” in Washington, D.C. The march of October 3, 1970 was supposed to have featured South Vietnamese vice-president Nygen Cao Ky, but the Nixon administration ensured that Ky would not be present.

[edit] Personality

McIntire could combine gravitas with a populist appeal to what he called “the grass roots.” A gifted preacher when he chose to be, he seemed to prefer dabbling in politics to Bible exposition. A man who inspired listeners and easily raised money for his various ministries, McIntire had few trustworthy associates to manage the day-to-day activities of his ramshackle empire. Nor could he brook sharing power. McIntire refused to participate in fundamentalist organizations which he could not dominate, even those led by other separatist fundamentalists of the period such as Bob Jones, Jr. and Ian Paisley.[3] As he aged, McIntire's ministry arms collapsed one by one, and the buildings he had accumulated were sold or destroyed. By the time he died, at age 95, without a successor, virtually everything was gone. Even the shadow that remained of the Bible Presbyterian Church of Collingswood finally forced his resignation in 1999.

McIntire married Fairy Davis in 1931; they had three children, including the historian C. T. [Carl Thomas] McIntire. After the death of Fairy McIntire in 1992, McIntire married a long-time secretary, Alice Goff. McIntire died on March 19, 2002, in Voorhees, New Jersey.

Historian of American religion Martin Marty has called McIntire “the most consistent fundamentalist of the 20th century. Whatever he decided was the truth he followed to the very end, no matter how few friends or colleagues were left.”[4] Ironically, McIntire donated what remained of his papers to Princeton Theological Seminary, which he considered a tool of the apostasy.[5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ A brief history of the Independent Board from the IBPFM website
  2. ^ New Jersey Botanical Gardens website
  3. ^ Bob Jones, Jr., Cornbread and Caviar (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press), 191-93. Jones was exasperated at McIntire's attitude towards him especially since Jones had had BJU confer an honorary degree on him.
  4. ^ Kristin E. Holmes, "Carl McIntire, 95, firebrand pastor," Philadelphia Inquirer, March 21, 2002.
  5. ^ PTS Library Collection
  • 40 Years...Carl McIntire and the Bible Presbyterian Church of Collingswood, 1933-1973 (privately published, 1973)
  • Carl McIntire's 50-Year Ministry in the Bible Presbyterian Church of Collingswood, New Jersey (privately published, 1983)
  • Obituary, New York Times, March 22, 2002, B9.

[edit] Further reading

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