Fighting Fundamentalist: Carl McIntire and the Politicization of American Fundamentalism

by Markku Ruotsila

For most of his sixty-year career, the Reverend Carl McIntire was at the center of controversy. The best-known and most influential of the fundamentalist radio broadcasters and anticommunists of the Cold War era, his many enemies depicted him as a dangerous far rightist, a racist, or a "McCarthyite" opportunist engaged in red-baiting for personal profit. Despised and hounded by liberals, revered by fundamentalists, and distrusted by the center, he became a lightning rod in the early days of America's culture wars.

Markku Ruotsila's Fighting Fundamentalist , the first scholarly biography of McIntire, peels off the accumulated layers of caricature and makes a case for restoring McIntire to his place as one of the most consequential religious leaders in the twentieth-century United States. Ruotsila traces McIntire's life from his early twentieth-century childhood in Oklahoma to his death in 2002. From his discipleship under J. Gresham Machen during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, through his fifty-year pastorate in Collingswood, New Jersey, and his presidency of the International Council of Christian Churches, McIntire, Ruotsila shows, stands out as the most important fundamentalist of his time. Drawing on exhaustive research in fifty-two archival collections-including the recently opened collection of the Carl McIntire papers and never-before-seen FBI files-Ruotsila looks beyond the McIntire of legend to discover a serious theological, political, and economic combatant, a tireless
organizer who pioneered the public theologies, inter-faith alliances, and political methods that would give birth to the Christian Right.

The moral values agenda of the 1970s and after would not have existed, Ruotsila shows, without the anti-communist and anti-New Deal activism that McIntire inaugurated. Indeed, twentieth-century American religious and political history were profoundly shaped by forces McIntire set in motion. Fighting Fundamentalist tells the overlooked story of McIntire and the movement he inspired.

414 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2015

Reviews

[JM · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've wanted to read a book on Carl McIntire for a long while, but there wasn't much to work with. I'm glad to see Ruotsila has added some study on his life.
To a certain extent, the book confirmed everything I've heard about McIntire- bitter, manipulative, extreme, and uber-political. While all of these things are true, to make much of McIntire's worst side without accounting for his positive attributes reflects poor scholarship. No one is pure evil just like no one is pure good.
Ruotsila is surely right in saying that McIntire is the Father of the Christian Right. While many may try to disavow such a maligned figure from their heritage, the formative influence that he exercised on Schaeffer and Falwell cannot be denied. While subsequent Christian political rhetoric may have been a little less opinionated on matters unrelated to social conservatism, it followed a game plan masterminded by McIntire in the 50s and 60s.
It was interesting to discover that, while McIntire maintained a unwavering public voice, his personal correspondence reveals that he was at times far less opinionated about issues that others thought. Unlike most evangelicals from the 50s to 70s, he was very sympathetic conservative Catholics, a view he picked up from Machen. Additionally, while opposing the early gay rights movement, he was surprisingly gracious to homosexuals around him, defending his lifelong friend Ed Bundy from fundamentalist backlash and being perceived by his gay grandson as accepting even though he didn't agree with on all points. Clearly, McIntire was a man who was far more complex than most cameos suggest.
While it is important to understand the nuance of his life, McIntire was truly a man who inflicted damage. His power-grabbing and heavy handed tactics led to splits in just about all organizations he associated with, from his local church to his denomination (several times over), political organizations he founded, and even personal friendships.
McIntire is a complex yet pivotal figure in American religious and political history, and I'd recommend the book to all interested in gaining a deeper understanding of him and the times he lived in.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this first scholarly biography of the fundamentalist Presbyterian Carl McIntire (1906-2002), Finnish professor Markku Ruotsila makes an excellent case that McIntire—often considered little more than a religious buffoon—was an early and influential architect of the Christian Right, a charismatic personality who politicized fundamentalism more than thirty years before the Moral Majority gained notoriety during the 1970s. Firmly based on primary research in numerous archival collections (including an exceptionally large collection of McIntire papers at Princeton Theological Seminary), Ruotsila’s book is a solid work of scholarship that goes well beyond McIntire’s quixotic marches in support of the Vietnam War to treat his larger ideas seriously.

And yet (intending no criticism of Ruotsila for not writing a book he did not choose to write), Carl McIntire is worthy of a more fully rounded biography, one that would grapple with the paradoxes of the man: a Machiavellian who was often tactless, impractical, and remarkably naïve about the consequences of his vociferous and nearly continuous protesting; a man of simple tastes, personally incorruptible, who squandered the contributions of his “grassroots” supporters while concealing the sins of loyal associates; a strident theological separatist who had few qualms about making covert alliances with those whose religious views he deprecated in public.

McIntire was rarely self-reflective, at least in public; but I remember once hearing him mention a blind man whom he had seen on a Philadelphia street corner selling pencils. When someone bought a one, the man would say, “Thank you. Jesus saves.” McIntire wondered if perhaps the blind man had done more for Jesus Christ than he had. If McIntire could have read Ruotsila’s book, he would have been distressed to discover that the chief contribution assigned his career was that of serving as a precursor to the Moral Majority—another attempt to advance religion through political means that ended ingloriously with religion subordinated to secular agendas.

[Doug Adamson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ruotsila seems to take a sympathetic but critical towards the subject. The main stress in the book is on the political aspects of McIntire's ministry, though some attention is given to personal and church questions. McIntire seems to have been a man of great ambition and great vision, energies, and accomplishments. He was also a man of great flaws and inconsistencies who undermined his own achievements and alienated many (most?) friends and allies.

A note on the book itself. There were a large number of misspellings and other editorial issues. There are extensive end-notes (85 pgs) but no bibliography.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent biography of a good, but deeply flawed individual.