McIntire, Carl, 1906-

Carl McIntire was born May 17, l906 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where his father, Charles Curtis McIntire, was pastor of First Presbyterian Church. By 1908, however, the family had moved west, and McIntire spent his early years in Oklahoma. Originally aiming for a career in international law, McIntire spent three years at Southeastern State College in Durant, Oklahoma. However, possibly influenced by his missionary parents, McIntire spent his senior year at Park College, a Presbyterian school in Parksville, Missouri. Here McIntire made the decision to enter the ministry. After graduation from Park College in 1927, McIntire entered Princeton Seminary to continue his theological training.

McIntire arrived at Princeton in the midst of the modernist-fundamentalist struggle. When Princeton reorganized in 1929, McIntire, already a staunch fundamentalist, followed New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen to Philadelphia, where Machen and other former Princeton faculty established Westminster Theological Seminary. McIntire graduated from Westminster in 1931 and in that same year married Fairy Eunice Davis, whom he had met while a student in Oklahoma. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), McIntire became pastor of Chelsea Presbyterian Church in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1933, however, McIntire was called to the pastorate of Collingswood Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, New Jersey, where he would spend the remainder of his professional life.

Early in his ministry at Collingswood, McIntire established the agencies and attitudes that would hallmark his lifelong career as America's militant voice of fundamentalism. In 1934, McIntire accepted an invitation to serve on the board of the Independent Board of Foreign Missions, founded some years earlier by J. Gresham Machen in an effort to insure biblical teaching in Presbyterian missions. When in 1936 the PCUSA demanded that PCUSA-ordained clergy resign from the independent agency, McIntire (along with Machen, and others) refused. The PCUSA responded by defrocking the dissenters; McIntire's church then voted to leave the PCUSA, and McIntire resigned from the Presbytery. McIntire and his congregation then joined with Machen and other deposed congregations in forming a more fundamentalist Presbyterian denomination, which they called the Presbyterian Church in America (this body later became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). By 1937, however, the new denomination itself was rife with conflict. Severely disagreeing with Machen on various matters of doctrine and practice, McIntire left the PCA and founded the Bible Presbyterian Church, headquartered then, as now, in Collingswood.

From the beginning, the Bible Presbyterian Church, militant advocates for biblical orthodoxy, took a strong stance of ecclesiastical separation, calling for separation not only from apostasy, but also from all who would have any affiliation with individuals and groups whom the BCP considered apostate. Destined, it would seem, to a life of controversy and conflict, McIntire and other separatist fundamentalists established coalition groups in opposition to similar groups organized by mainstream liberal and moderate denominations. In 1941, in opposition to the ecumenical Federal Council of Churches (forerunner of the National Council of Churches), McIntire formed the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC).

In similar protest "against the tenets of modernism" and in an effort to "proclaim the doctrines of the faith of the Reformation," in 1948 McIntire, members, and supporters of the ACCC met in Amsterdam to form the International Council of Christian Churches. This council, formed in opposition to the World Council of Churches (WCC) which was established in Amsterdam in the same year, continues to be headquartered in Collingswood, New Jersey, supported by McIntire and the Bible Presbyterian Church.

In the 1950s McIntire's extremist views again led to schism. In 1956 the Bible Presbyterian Church split; the majority of members turned away from McIntire and reorganized as the Bible Presbyterian Church, Columbia Synod. McIntire, with supporting congregations in New Jersey, California, Kentucky, and Tennessee, continued as the Bible Presbyterian Church, Collingswood Synod. At the same time, controversy over McIntire's administrative style and commitment to militancy broke out in the American Council of Christian Churches. Eventually, in l968, Council members failed to support McIntire's leadership, and in 1969, McIntire left the ACCC and subsequently formed the rival American Christian Action Council.

The seeds of the Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, the media "arm" McIntire established in the 1950s, were sown in 1936 when McIntire began publishing the Christian Beacon, a weekly paper designed to "carry religious news that didn't seem to be getting into the press." Though specific topics would vary with the news of the day, the Beacon's "one over-all subject [was] the defense of the Faith...." In the l930s and 1940s, the Beacon focused its attention on ecclesiastical modernism, especially that which McIntire and his followers saw in the National Council of Christian Churches and the WCC. In the l950s, however, McIntire's focus went beyond the WCC to what he saw as the source of its ever-increasing apostasy: Communism. Consequently, from the 1950s into the 1980s, McIntire dedicated his ministry to the militant, vociferous exposure of "Communist infiltration of religion and the inroads being made into the churches by liberal theologians who deny the basic creeds of Christian belief."