Charles Curtis McIntire Jr. (May 17, 1906 – March 19, 2002), 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 (now Southeastern Oklahoma State University). 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.