No Uncertain Trumpet: Carl McIntire and the Politicization of Fundamentalism

A Thesis Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS

By Paul Matzko May, 2010

Thesis Approvals: David Watt, Thesis Advisor, Department of History Jonathan Wells, Temple University Department of History ABSTRACT

Fundamentalist preacher Carl McIntire played an important role in the politicization of fundamentalism. His political beliefs and activism complicate the standard accountings for the rise of modern conservatism and the New Christian Right.

Hispolitics were inherited from Gresham Machen and were rooted in the nineteenth century tension between evangelical Whigs and confessional Democrats. McIntire’s libertarian political philosophy coalesced during the denominational politics of the fundamentalist – modernist controversy of the 1920s and ‘30s.He criticized theological modernists for supporting an expansion of federal government authority and being “soft” on communism. He gained national attention for his campaigns to purchases airtime on radio stations. McIntire influenced a number of prominent fundamentalist leaders, like

Billy Hargis, Fred Schwarz, and Francis Schaeffer. McIntire’s political consciousness can be used to describe the concepts of “ideological creep” and “mainstreaming.”

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….i

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………...1

2. BIOGRAPHY AND DENOMINATIONAL POLITICS……………………………….7

3. GRESHAM MACHEN AND NINETEENTH CENTURY ORIGINS……………….16

4. UP FROM THE ASHES………………………………………………………………22

5. TOTALITARIANISMS……………………………………………………………….29

6. CAPITALISM, LABOR, AND THE NEW DEAL…………………………………...34

7. LIBERTARIANISM…………………………………………………………………..39

8. MINORITY RIGHTS…………………………………………………………………44

9. A DEVELOPING POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS…………………………………51

10. DOES MCINTIRE MATTER………………………………………………………..59

ENDNOTES……………………………………………………………………………..65

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………78

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Carl McIntire's favorite sermon – first preached while a ministerial student – was drawn from 1 Corinthians chapter 14 verse 8: “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” In “The Certain Trumpet” McIntire called for true Christians to take a stand against apostasy. Theological liberals had corrupted the church and fundamentalists needed to expose the liberal heresy and proclaim the truth.

This theme underlay McIntire's lifelong battle to promote what he believed was a

Biblically-oriented Church and to defend that Church from its foes. When McIntire chose a name for his national, weekly radio program in the 1950s, it was natural for him to call it “The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour.” But although McIntire's fight against liberalism began as an interdenominational theological struggle, it quickly spilled over into public politics. Liberals, who preached that “all men are summoned to a common cause of social justice, world brotherhood, and political reforms,” threatened not only the

Church, but American society as a whole. After all, theological liberals supported a wide range of economic and social policies that smacked of Communist influence.Worse yet, liberals advocated a federal government with the power and authority to mandate these economic and social reforms. McIntire believed that liberal theologians, godless

Marxists, and a predatory State were all just different faces of a common enemy. 1

In retrospect McIntire is more famous for his political activism than for his theological beliefs, garnering national attention for his ardent anti-Communism, opposition to the civil rights movement, and support for the Vietnam War. In each case,

- 1 - however, McIntire believed that he was still fighting the same battle that had begun during the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the 1920s. The theological liberals

–or modernists – who drove him out of the Presbyterian Church of America were also

Communist sympathizers, civil rights proponents, and pacifists. Thus the story of Carl

McIntire's ministry is equal parts religious and political history. Unfortunately religious and political historians have often missed the forest for the trees, telling parallel and yet unrelated stories about religion and politics during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Political historians root the early stirrings of modern conservatism in the 1930s.

Anti-New Deal journalists like H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, and John T. Flynn were worried about the growth of the state in the New Deal social order. They feared that collectivism would destroy the American individualistic tradition bytransgressing individual rights to liberty, religion, and property. This pre-World War II Old Right had limited political influence, but their articles and books were promoted by business associations, like the National Association of Manufacturers, which feared that the New

Deal presaged the end of a free enterprise economy. Yet despite their efforts, the Old

Right made little headway limiting the growth of the State. 2

During World War II government intervention in American society and the economy reached new heights in the form of rationing, price controls, and industrial regulations. Anti-statists tolerated government agencies like the Office of Price

Administration, the Office of Defense Transportation, and the National War Labor Board during the war, but they were afraid that these agencies would become templates for social planning during the peace. Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote The

- 2 -

Road to Serfdom , a cautionary tale about the consequences of social planning, during the last several years of the war. When it was condensed by the Reader's Digest in 1945, The

Road to Serfdom became a runaway hit reaching millions of American readers. Hayek, along with other post-World War II libertarian intellectuals like Ludwig von Mises,

Henry Hazlitt, and Ayn Rand, gave skeptics of the State new ammunition, providing the intellectual foundation for the conservative revolt in the 1960s. These new grassroots conservatives shocked the Republican Party establishment by successfully nominating

Barry Goldwater for President at the national convention in 1964; Goldwater's nomination, despite his eventual defeat, is taken as the starting point for modern conservatism as an effective, national movement. 3

Not all historians find these connections between a libertarian Old Right and modern conservatism convincing. For example, there is a historiographical debate over the relative importance of Southern opposition to desegregation in explaining the rise of modern conservatism. But what is clear is that religion plays little role in either narrative.

Anti-New Deal journalists, anti-statist businessmen, and libertarian intellectuals seem to have shared a fundamentally secular worldview. For political historians, the New

Religious Right only fully enters the political stage in the 1970s as a backlash against the secularization of civic society. 4

The received narrative of the Religious Right begins just before that of the Old

Right. At the height of evangelical influence during the Progressive Era, theologically conservative Protestants were politically engaged, fighting for Prohibition and supporting laws which prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. Yet after the Scopes

Trial in 1926, evangelicals stopped politicking and retreated from mainstream political,

- 3 - cultural, and intellectual life. Fundamentalists of the late 1920s, '30s, and ‘40s (when thought of at all) were objects of derision: rural, backward, anti-intellectual, and superstitious. Fundamentalism had been relegated to a cultural and political ghetto.

Contemporary commentators drew comparisons between fundamentalism, fascism, and the Ku Klux Klan. Fundamentalism as a cultural, religious, and political movement was over, doomed to the dust heap of modernity as the Enlightenment triumphed in a glorious post-World War II liberal consensus. 5

Thus, during the 1960s and ‘70s, a great many intellectuals were astounded by the resurrection of an evangelicalismwith revived cultural reach and renewed political influence. After the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1976, sociologists and historians scrambled to explain the unexpected emergence of the New Christian Right.

Where did these evangelicals come from and how had they become politicized? The explanation that religious and political historians constructed in the 1980s and ‘90s started with the assumption that mid-twentieth century fundamentalists had been politically unaware, or at least politically anemic. Apparently, when fundamentalists left

(or were driven from) the mainline denominations, they had also left behind their political consciousness. HistorianTonaHangen has proposed that fundamentalism was a

“revivalistic, apolitical religious right.” Even the dean of evangelical religious historians,

Notre Dame’s George Marsden, argues, “The immediate origins of fundamentalism reveal almost no systematic political thought.” Marsden went on to propose that fundamentalists during this interregnum shared a bunker mentality toward culture and politics, isolating themselves “behind an ideological ghetto wall.” But the perceived threat of godless communism during the Cold War gradually lured evangelicals from

- 4 - their cultural bomb shelters. They formed alliances with conservative fellow travelers in opposition to collectivism. Finally, “in the 1970s distress over rapidly changing public standards regarding sexuality and the family” made fundamentalists “ripe for political mobilization.” If this narrative were cast as a graph with the x-axis signifying the passage of the twentieth century and the y-axis representing political engagement, it would resemble an inverted bell curve, with politically-minded evangelicals during the early and late twentieth century sandwiching politically-anemic evangelicals in the 1920s, ‘30s, and

‘40s. This shift in evangelical political consciousness is described as the politicization of evangelicalism. 6

So if a consistent problem with political histories is a failure to account for the role of religion in the rise of modern conservatism, the common flaw among religious histories is the short shrift given fundamentalist political consciousness prior to the

1950s. This paper will synthesize both perspectives through a close examination of the politics of Carl McIntire. A study of McIntire's political philosophy from the late 1920s until 1955 will show that the standard accountings for the rise of the New Religious Right are too late, too shallow, and too simplistic. Historians who buy into the received narrative have made these misguided assumptions in part because they have taken fundamentalists’ proclamations of political disinterest at face value. But to the contrary, fundamentalists during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s were vitally interested in politics, although their political engagement was circumscribed by the necessity of institutional rebuilding after being forced out of their denominations. Thus it was a lack of access to the formal political discourse rather than a lack of interest in politics that sidelined fundamentalists. Indeed, their struggle to be heard was a crucial element in their

- 5 - politicization. Many fundamentalists became politicized not as a result of their opposition to Communism, desegregation, or public secularization – though fundamentalists were engaged in each of those issues – but because of their fear of cultural, political, and theological collectivism. These themes will be explored throughout the story of

McIntire’s career.

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CHAPTER 2

BIOGRAPHY AND DENOMINATIONAL POLITICS

Carl McIntire came from a long line of ministers and missionaries. Carl's parents,

Charles Curtis and HettieHotchkin McIntire, met in college and had originally planned to travel to China as Presbyterian missionaries. Charles's ill health prevented them from going and so he accepted the pastorate at the Presbyterian Church in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Carl McIntire was born in the manse in 1906. Eight years later his father suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized. Later in life, Carl rarely spoke of his father.

Hettie divorced Charles and moved with Carl to her family's home in Oklahoma. Her father, Ebenezer Hotchkin, was a missionary to the Choctaw Nation from the 1820s till his death in 1867. He had traveled with the tribe to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. Her mother, Mary SempleHotchkin, had also gone to Oklahoma in the 1850s as a missionary to the Choctaw Nation, teaching at one of the Presbyterian mission schools. Like her mother, Hettie was an educator. After moving back to Oklahoma, she taught at

Southeastern State Teachers College (SSTC), eventually becoming the Dean of Women.

Carl attended SSTC to prepare for a career in law. There he earned a reputation as a skilled orator and was elected student body president. But during his third year he felt a call to the ministry and transferred to Park College, the small Presbyterian school in

Missouri from which both of his parents had graduated. In order to pay tuition while at

SSTC and Park College, Carl worked as a janitor during the school year and sold maps door-to-door during the breaks. Of his days as a salesman, McIntire liked to say that he had started on foot before progressing to “an old grey mare,” then a motorcycle, and

- 7 - finally a car. “It was a rough-and-tumble life,” but he had “learned people,” the “value of a dollar,” and respect for “the capitalist system.” 7

After graduating from Park in 1928, Carl headed to Princeton Theological

Seminary (PTS). He chose Princeton because he had been impressed with What is Faith? , a controversial bookby the fundamentalist Presbyterian J. Gresham Machen, and wanted to “study under a man with such knowledge.” In the book Machen defended the validity of theologically-derived knowledge and declared thattheological modernism was anti- intellectual. He believed that liberal Protestants were undermining the idea that the Bible contained absolute, doctrinal truth, thus reducing the Christian faith to a romantic gospel of personal experience and good feelings. Fundamentalists like Machen believed that the modernists were subverting Christianity and attempted to force them out of the denomination. Modernists accused the fundamentalists of disrupting the unity of the church and tried to return the favor.This controversy dominated the annual gatherings of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) throughout the 1920s. For over twenty- five years the fundamentalists and modernists battled for control of the PCUSA's legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Thus the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was equal parts theological contest and political struggle. 8

Political historians seldom categorize denominational infighting as normative politics. But Daniel Walker Howe – who has described the political battles within in the

Protestant denominations during the nineteenth century – writes,

The next step in the evolution of antebellum political history should be to define political culture to include all struggles over power, not just those decided by elections. The women's movement, the struggles for racial justice and the rights of labor, conflicts for control of churches and voluntary organizations, even power struggles among members of the

- 8 -

family – all these and more were relevant to the modernization of American life in this period . . . Traditional political history, the history of government power, will be illuminated, not obscured, by being set in such a context . . . And the broader the context in which political culture is studied, the more it will be found that religion was an important determinant of purposes and behavior.

Likewise, the next step in the evolution of twentieth-century religious and political history should be to define the denominational battles between fundamentalists and modernists as part of a broader political culture. Certainly the fundamentalists and modernists in the PCUSA were not fighting over the control of a civil government, but they were struggling to gain power over an organization that exercised its authority through the distribution of millions of dollars in funds, sanctioned church courts to discipline those who had violated its laws, and which engaged in annual electoral politics.

The fight was over the City of God rather than the City of Man, but it was nonetheless intensely political. While the difference between the fundamentalist and modernist positions was theologically delineated, the fight between the two was a no holds barred brawl for the power necessary to convict the other of doctrinal treason. 9

This controversy was rooted in the turn of the twentieth century struggles between theological conservatives, who defended the inerrancy of Scripture, and theological modernists, who had incorporated German higher criticism into their hermeneutic. The modernists believed in the essential goodness of human nature, downplayed the necessity of individual salvation, and held that the Bible was a collection of Jewish folklore, valuable in showing humankind how to live, but certainly not inerrant. Fundamentalists accused the modernists of heresy, instead affirming the sinfulness of humanity and the necessity of believing that the Bible was the inspired, perfect Word of God. At the annual

- 9 - meetings of the General Assembly, the Presbyterian legislative body, both parties attempted to pass their platforms, elect loyal party members to executive positions, and woo uncommitted centrists.

At the 1910 General Assembly the fundamentalists successfully passed a conservative doctrinal statement. This doctrinal statement was specific enough to exclude modernists yet broad enough to embrace a majority of conservative Presbyterians within a big orthodox tent. This fundamentalist resolution was reaffirmed in 1916 and 1923. But in 1924 the modernist coalition issued the Auburn Affirmation – signed by over 1200 clergymen – which “declared that the five doctrines [of the fundamentalist resolution] were not essential to the system of doctrine taught in the Scriptures and were merely theories about those facts and doctrines.” Unsurprisingly, fundamentalists were displeased to hear that what they believed were core Christian doctrines had been categorized as mere theory. Hoping to affect a compromise between the two sides, the

General Assembly of 1925 appointed a committee to recommend how best to patch up the differences between the fundamentalists and modernists. The committee’s bipartisan report pronounced that it was important to live and let live, an argument that satisfied neither side. The two factions also routinely clashed in their attempts to control the position of Moderator, the denominational executive. In 1923 William Jennings Bryan decided to run for Moderator on the fundamentalist ticket, his last national election and his last electoral defeat. The following year, fundamentalist-backed Clarence Macartney won by a margin of only 18 (out of 910) votes. In 1925 the modernist-preferred candidate, Charles Erdman, won. 10

- 10 -

While the electoral see-saw continued in the denomination, the political struggle between fundamentalists and modernists reached Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS).

In 1926, the President of PTS, J. Ross Stevenson, angered the fundamentalist faction at the school when he announced his desire to be friends with both fundamentalists and modernists. The fundamentalists, led by faculty member Gresham Machen, represented a majority of the seminary faculty and controlled the board of directors that oversaw the educational operation of the seminary. Stevenson and the modernists dominated the board of trustees, the body that oversaw the school’s financial operations. There had been no love lost between Stevenson and Machen after Machen defeated Stevenson’s plan for an ecumenical coalition in a 1920 presbytery vote. Thus, when a conservative student association chose a fundamentalist rather than a modernist for faculty advisor in 1926,

Stevenson retaliated by asking the Presbyterian General Assembly to delay Machen’s prestigious appointment as professor of apologetics and ethics. The Princeton board of directors, then controlled by the fundamentalists, had nominated Machen for the promotion, but regular procedure dictated confirmation by the General Assembly.

Normally the General Assembly's confirmation was a formality – as D.G. Hart has noted,

“in the seminary's history none of the directors' choices had been vetoed” – but this time the Assembly simply failed to vote one way or the other, thus keeping Machen from being promoted while avoiding the messiness of actually vetoing his nomination.11

Stevenson then added injury to insult, requesting that the General Assembly investigate the fundamentalists at Princeton for being “subversive of Christian fellowship.” The modernists wanted a merger of the two school boards, a move that would neuter fundamentalist influence in the operation of PTS. Accordingly, the

- 11 -

Assembly appointed William O. Thompson, a close personal friend of both Stevenson and Erdman, as chairman of the investigative committee. Unsurprisingly then, the committee recommended the merger of the two separate seminary boards. The General

Assembly voted 503 to 323 to merge the boards thus putting “the present conservative majority out of control of the institution” by replacing the fundamentalists with a board friendly to Stevenson and the modernist minority. This new unified board was also given the power to hire and fire without needing confirmation from the General Assembly; if the Fundamentalists had not chosen to leave voluntarily, their days at Princeton would likely still have been numbered. 12

The time when fundamentalists could consistently command majority support in the General Assembly was over. It is important to note that the majority of delegates in the General Assembly were neither self-proclaimed fundamentalists nor modernists.

These uncommitted moderates tended to be theologically conservative like the fundamentalists, but they were leery of church dissension and controversy. During the early 1920s the fundamentalists were more successful in attracting these independent votes, but by 1926 conflict-weary independents had shifted toward the modernists. Both

McIntire and Machen later blamed these conservative moderates for the ultimate triumph of the modernist faction. Because of their unwillingness to side with the fundamentalists,

“the battle was lost.”Clever parliamentary maneuvers by the modernists also contributed to the fundamentalist decline. John Foster Dulles, who was later to become famous as

President Eisenhower's Secretary of State, was a Presbyterian elder and gave legal counsel to the modernist leadership. When the fundamentalist faction passed resolutions to oust liberal ministers, Dulles made sure that the proposals were referred to standing

- 12 - committees which met in his own modernist-friendly presbytery in New York City.

Dulles admitted that this technique may not have been strictly constitutional, but uncommitted conservatives were willing overlook such niceties in order to forgo the inconvenience of extended General Assembly meetings. 13

Having lost the battle for control of Princeton, Machen left to found Westminster

Theological Seminary in 1929. Several faculty members and about 50 students left with him, including Carl McIntire. McIntire was a member of the conservative student organization that had precipitated the crisis between Stevenson and Machen and so was intimate with the conflict at Princeton, but as a young graduate student he had no personal involvement in the fights in the General Assembly. Even so, during his year at

Princeton and through his relationships with Machen and other fundamentalist refugees at

Westminster, McIntire (as he wrote in a letter a decade later) “saw clearly the issues that were involved” in the fundamentalist controversy. McIntire was more than just a spectator to the fundamentalist-modernist brawl.14

After graduating from Westminster in 1931, McIntire accepted the pastorate of a small church in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Two years later he moved to Collingswood

Presbyterian Church in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. McIntire asked Gresham

Machen to preach at his installation service, telling Machen that he wanted to move closer to Westminster so that he could “stand with the Truth” in the present “crisis in the

Church.” Machen gladly accepted. McIntire's opportunity to take such a stand came quickly. In 1932 and 1933, the fundamentalists had pushed for the recall of several modernist missionaries, like Pearl Buck, whom they accused of preaching the social gospel of self-help rather than a redemptive gospel based upon the total depravity of

- 13 - humankind. But the General Assembly sided with the modernists, refusing to take action against Buck or other modernist missionaries. So Gresham Machen, Carl McIntire, and other fundamentalist leaders formed the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign

Missions (IBPFM) which had strict, conservative doctrinal requirements for missionaries. 15

The modernists were not amused, accusing Machen and McIntire of fomenting discord and disrupting the unity of the church. Forming an alternative seminary was bad enough, but forming a competing missions board was going too far. The modernist- controlled executive council commissioned a review of the constitution, the Studies of the

Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., which upheld the modernist viewpoint that all Presbyterians had to contribute to the denominational mission board.

Any Presbyterian who refused to contribute to the approved mission board was guilty of an ecclesiastical crime equivalent to refusing “'to take part in the celebration of the Lord's

Supper.” A few months later, the 1934 General Assembly, functioning as the court of highest appeal, ruled that members of the Independent Board would be prosecuted if they did not leave that organization. Machen challenged the constitutionality of the whole process; how could a court of highest appeal rule on the question before a single court case had been tried? Members of the Independent Board had been declared guilty without a trial. 16

Machen realized that the modernists were next going to try and expel him from the denomination. Doing so required a guilty verdict in an ecclesiastical trial organized by the New Brunswick Presbytery, Machen’s regional church government. Machen – well aware that the New Brunswick Presbytery had come under the control of the

- 14 - modernists – attempted to transfer his membership to the more fundamentalist-friendly

Philadelphia Presbytery where he could have avoided prosecution. The Philadelphia

Presbytery voted to receive Machen, but because of a clerical accident the General

Assembly did not recognize Machen's transfer and gave jurisdiction over his case to the

New Brunswick Presbytery. The appointed commission that tried Machen and McIntire ruled that “it would not hear any evidence concerning liberalism in the church, the missions controversy, or even the legality of the 1934 mandate.” With such constraints,

Machen and McIntire were tried, convicted, and expelled from the denomination in short order. Machen and McIntire, along other fundamentalists who either left or were expelled from the PCUSA, then formed a new denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church

(OPC). Less than three years later, Machen died and without his stabilizing influence

McIntire soon split from the OPC to form the Bible Presbyterian Church. 17

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CHAPTER 3

GRESHAM MACHEN AND NINETEENTH CENTURY ORIGINS

Church historians are quick to note the differences of opinion between Machen and McIntire on Prohibition and premillenialism. Indeed, these two specific issues fueled the split between the OPC and Bible Presbyterians. While McIntire and the Bible

Presbyterians embraced Prohibition, Machen opposed the Eighteenth Amendment and applauded the Twenty-First, a position shared by his brother Arthur who was a state chair for the Association against the Prohibition Amendment. Both Gresham and Arthur believed that Prohibition was an unwarranted expansion of the federal government and a violation of states' rights. Gresham was so committed to ending Prohibition that in the presidential elections of 1928, when most fundamentalists voted for Herbert Hoover, he voted for Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate and a “wet” politician who campaigned on ending Prohibition.Machen's opposition to Prohibition was just one application of his libertarian political philosophy, a philosophy that shaped how he, and how his student McIntire, interpreted the denominational politics in the 1920s and 30s.

He was a proponent of the separation of church and state, decrying prayer and Bible reading in public schools. He opposed the formation of a federal Department of

Education, the passage of an alien registration act, and military conscription during World

War I. He even spoke out at a Philadelphia City Council meeting against a proposed anti- jaywalking ordinance. With each of these issues, Machen feared the aggrandizement of the State at the expense of individual liberties. 18

- 16 -

Machen's distrust of government power was fostered at an early age. He was raised in an affluent home in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a well-respected jurist who encouraged his sons to appreciate classical literature. His mother, known for her hospitality to members of the cultural elite like Woodrow Wilson, instilled in Gresham a rigorous belief in Calvinism and a lifelong commitment to Old School Presbyterianism.

Gresham also developed what D. G. Hart has described as a “strong identification with the South.” It was from these religious, cultural, and political traditions that Machen drew his libertarian philosophy. McIntire had a similar experience. Oklahoma, like Maryland, had cultural ties to the Old South. Both McIntire and Machen were raised in the southern

Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) which had split from the northern

PCUSA in 1861 over the issue of secession. Just as Machen's mother schooled Gresham in the Westminster Confession of Faith, McIntire's mother raised Carl on a steady diet of

“oatmeal and the Shorter Catechism.” So although McIntire and Machen later disagreed on several specific issues, they shared a common ideology rooted in their similar upbringings. 19

McIntire and Machen also belong in a broader tradition that extends back into the early nineteenth century. During the Second Great Awakening evangelicals became increasingly concerned with ensuring that Christians' outward behavior reflected their inner beliefs. These revivalists, or pietists, attempted to live disciplined, pure lives.

Historian Daniel Walker Howe has noted that the natural outgrowth of pietistic internal discipline was a desire to help others be disciplined, especially “people who were not functioning as free moral agents: slaves, criminals, the insane, alcoholics, [and] children.”

The pietists were willing to use government as a means for upholding Christian moral

- 17 - standards and managing social ills. Howe argued that Charles Finney's organized revivalism was thus “the religious precursor and counterpart” to Henry Clay's American

System since “both represented an imposition of system and direction on a formless society.” Howe further quotes Louise Stevenson:

Whiggery stood for the triumph of the cosmopolitan and national over the provincial and local, of rational order over irrational spontaneity, of school-based learning over traditional folkways and customs, and of self- control over self-expression. Whigs believed that every person had the potential to become moral or good if family, school, and community nurtured the seed of goodness in his moral nature.

Replace “Whiggery” and “Whigs” with “Modernism” and “Modernists” and you have a fairly accurate description of the modernist program in the Presbyterian Church during the early twentieth century. Modernists believed in denominational centralization, preferring unity to diversity; divisive fundamentalists were irrational, rural throwbacks.

Similarly, the Pearl Buck missions controversy concerned the modernist belief in the

“moral possibility” of humankind. People were not depraved sinners in desperate need of a suffering Savior; self-improvement, remoralized communities, and comprehensive social reforms pointed the way to salvation. 20

But although the ideological alliance between the Whig Party and pietistic evangelicals was at the “'core' of the national culture,” there was a significant “periphery” of confessional Protestants and Catholics. These confessionalists were typically members of ethnic, immigrant communities like the Lutheran Church in Missouri, Scots-Irish

Presbyterians in southern Appalachia, Irish Catholics in Philadelphia, and Orthodox Jews in New York. The confessionalists voted strongly for the Democratic Party and – firmly in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and the anti-federalists – were

- 18 - suspicious of government interference (an understandable fear for peripheral minorities).

The separation of church and state, individual rights, and the Enlightenment were core to the Democratic political philosophy. The alliance between the Democratic Party and confessional Protestants revolved around these shared beliefs. 21

Machen partook from both traditions; he was raised in a confessionalist denomination and was a lifelong Democrat. Machen also strongly identified with the confessional Protestant theological tradition. Like the Democrats, Machen's belief in

“Jeffersonian notions of civil liberty” underlay his support for the separation of church and state, a belief which also conforms to what D. G. Hart has described as “older

Calvinist ideas about the nature and mission of the church.” Machen believed that the church was a spiritual institution and should be engaged only in evangelism, administering the sacraments, and discipling believers. The church should certainly not

“intervene in civil matters” except under extreme circumstances. For this reason Machen believed that the church should not support Prohibition or other well-intended moral reforms. Machen's belief in states' rights also fits into a Democratic tradition that reached back to the anti-federalists who opposed the Constitution and pushed for a Bill of Rights.

Centralization of power in either a federal or denominational government threatened individual liberties. Set against this ideological backdrop, Machen and McIntire's expulsion from the PCUSA only confirmed their fear of centralization. 22

Machen was concerned that “the centralization of power under an arbitrary bureaucracy” would undermine the constitutional rights of Presbyterians. The modernists responded by claiming that Machen had it all backward; it was the fundamentalists who were violating the liberties of the modernists by attempting to force them out of the

- 19 - denomination. Machen, in turn, explained the difference between voluntary and involuntary organizations. An involuntary organization, like the State, had an obligation to protect the freedom of conscience of all members. But a voluntary organization, like the Presbyterian Church, had the right to exclude those who did not agree with the purpose and mission of the organization. Since Machen believed that modernists were proponents of a faith that departed from traditional Christianity, they should be honest, leave the PCUSA, and form their own denomination rather than pretending to be orthodox Christians. 23

Here the similarities between Machen and McIntire stand in sharp relief. McIntire wrote that “a man who calls himself a modernist is not a Christian” because “the things that he believes and teaches deny the very essentials of the Christian faith.” When uncertain whether someone was a Christian or not, McIntire recommended that his readers turn to Machen's book, The Virgin Birth of Christ, and ask whether the person in question truly believed in the virgin birth. Not only had McIntire adopted Machen's position on modernism, but he also echoed his concerns about the modernists' methods during the denominational politicking. Machen's closing defense at his ecclesiastical trial had focused on the unconstitutionality of the modernists' actions. He believed that the modernists had denied constitutional government and reverted to “the principle of ecclesiastical absolutism...against which the Protestant Reformation was a solemn protest.” Likewise, McIntire complained that that by “deny[ing] the liberty of a session, church member, or minister to give their money where they choose” the modernists had violated the constitution. It is no accident that one of McIntire's first overtly political books was titled Twentieth Century Reformation nor that his radio program was named

- 20 -

“The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour.” McIntire believed that the battle between fundamentalists and modernists was equivalent to the rupture between Catholics and

Protestants during the sixteenth century. For McIntire, what had begun as a Presbyterian denominational struggle had become a broader contest between two contradictory understandings of the nature of Christianity. 24

- 21 -

CHAPTER 4

UP FROM THE ASHES

Both fundamentalists and modernists attempted to form interdenominational organizations to advance their causes. In 1908 the ecumenical Federal Council of

Churches was formed in hopes that by joining together, Christian churches would be better able to affect social change. This ecumenism alarmed McIntire. He worried that the distinctions between denominations were being eroded. “They have a right to exist, and it is the tearing down of these real differences that is doing so much to undermine genuine

Protestantism.” McIntire's concern might seem out of place since many fundamentalists also formed ecumenical organizations, like the World Christian Fundamentals

Association. But McIntire made a distinction between loose fundamentalist coalitions and highly centralized modernist-controlled denominations. He feared that the modernists were trying “to build a more powerful ecclesiastical machine which they may control and use to further their ends.” The end result would be “powerful ecclesiastical machines” controlled by the modernists who would use them to silence the fundamentalists.25

The fundamentalists had cause to worry, having already lost their seminary, their denomination, and even their sanctuaries. McIntire himself lost possession of the property that had belonged to Collingswood Presbyterian Church. The civil courts consistently ruled that church sanctuaries belonged to the denominations even if completely paid for by the congregation. So on March 27, 1938 Carl McIntire preached his final sermon at Collingswood Presbyterian Church,and then marched out singing hymns at the head of a line of his supporters. For several months they held services in a

- 22 - tent at a vacant lot before building a new church three blocks away. In 1948 a Sunday school complex was added and in 1960 the present sanctuary was finished. Carl McIntire, like many fundamentalists, spent most of the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s rebuilding what had been lost, including a new school, Faith Theological Seminary. His new denomination also expanded. At the first General Synod of the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1937, there were 39 ministers. In 1946, at the ninth synod, there were 143.

Fundamentalists spent these decades constructing new affiliations, rebuilding social networks, and forming a fundamentalist subculture. While doing so fundamentalists were limited in how politically active and effective they could be. But historians have wrongly interpreted a lack of political activity with a lack of political consciousness. 26

Even though they had lost so much, fundamentalists still believed that their plight was both traumatic and triumphant. They had made great personal sacrifices when they left or were forced out of their denominations. They had become objects of ridicule in the press, their denominations contained only a very small number of congregants compared to those who remained in the mainline denominations, and most had lost their sanctuaries. Yet fundamentalists paradoxically perceived their rejection by the denominational majority as evidence of a triumph. They identified with early Christian martyrs who had been “persecuted for righteousness sake” by a wicked world system, but who were honored by God for their faith in the midst of adversity.Likewise, for the fundamentalist both success and failure could be interpreted as proof that fundamentalism had God’s approval. Of course, since fundamentalists were confident that they had the full force of divine right on their side, they were convinced that their opponents must be entirely in the wrong. Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter described the

- 23 - fundamentalist mind as “essentially Manichean,” looking “upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil.” For McIntire, it was a contest between

“tyranny versus freedom, darkness versus light, error versus truth, [and] Satan versus

Christ.” Modernists – and later, Communists and liberals as well – were not simply the opposition; they were allied with Antichrist. Fundamentalists’ ability to find success in failure and their proclivity for apocalyptic thinking ensured that the fundamentalist- modernist controversy would not end with the fundamentalists’ expulsion from the denominations. 27

Political wrangling between the fundamentalists and modernists also continued apace. Into the 1940s and 50s, the battle was carried on over the airwaves. Congress had passed the Radio Act of 1927 to regulate the chaos that had resulted from the boom in radio broadcasting over the prior decade. The Federal Radio Commission (FRC) – composed of five persons appointed by the President – granted licenses and assigned frequencies. Although the commission was supposed to be impartial, in practice the commission rewarded or punished broadcasters by not renewing the licenses of stations that aired controversial broadcasters (such as John “Goat-gland” Brinkley) or by assigning them frequencies that had limited reach or were of poor quality. The FRC encouraged stations to give free airtime to broadcasters who served the public interest by including moderate religious broadcasting. This free, or “sustaining,” airtime was given to the modernist-controlled Federal Council of Christian Churches (FCCC).

Fundamentalist broadcasters had to make do with purchasing commercial airtime. This at least gave them the advantage of broadcasting during the most popular time slots, whereas sustaining airtime was typically relegated to time slots with few listeners.

- 24 -

Fundamentalist preachers raised the funds to pay for commercial time through listener contributions. 28

But during the 1940s, under pressure from the FRC and the FCCC, networks began to ban religious broadcasters from purchasing time, thus in effect denying fundamentalists access to the airwaves (and listener contributions). The fundamentalists formed organizations, such as McIntire’s American Council of Christian Churches and

Harold J. Ockenga’s National Association of Evangelicals, and successfully lobbied the

FRC for a share of the sustaining time. Media historian TonaHangen has pointed out that fundamentalists believed that they were being forced off the air because of pressure from their theologically liberal foes. Fundamentalist evangelist Charles Fuller warned, “Let there be no radio-supported religion, any more than a State-supported religion.” The denominational fight had shifted into a political battle over access to a form of government-regulated speech. The FRC preferred that networks give airtime to the FCCC because modernists promoted a non-divisive, non-denominational message that contained little to stir up trouble. (Also, the opposition of many fundamentalists to Roosevelt’s New

Deal did nothing to endear the fundamentalist cause to a commission composed of presidential appointees.) NBC informed McIntire that “religious broadcasts should not present or even suggest elements of religious controversy, but should present those religious principles which are universal.” Thus, the modernist Federal Council was able to define acceptable radio speech as that which was “non-sectarian” and which “should only be broadcast by the recognized outstanding leaders” of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism (namely, themselves). Since the fundamentalists had a “comparatively small” national membership, their access to radio speech was restricted.29

- 25 -

The fundamentalist and modernist clash over radio broadcasting further politicized fundamentalism. Carl McIntire formed the ACCC to lobby the government bureaucracy for access to radio speech. He visited his congressmen in Washington, DC to lobby for the fundamentalist free speech position, spoke before the Senate Committee on

Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and asked his readers to write their Representatives and request support for an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934. McIntire argued that since other political interests, specifically the liquor industry, were allowed to purchase airtime, then fundamentalists should have similar access to a free radio market.

Nevertheless, McIntire’s argument that government should require private radio corporations to sell time to fundamentalists seems contradictory to his justification of protecting individual liberties. After all, the fundamentalist claim to free speech was counter-balanced by the right of private radio corporations to sell airtime at their discretion. McIntire acknowledged the right of private corporations to do as they wished, but he argued that since the government licensed stations and regulated airtime, access to radio speech was protected by the Constitution. Ultimately, McIntire did not blame the radio networks or even the government for restricting fundamentalist access to radio broadcasting. Behind each of the clashes over radio speech, McIntire saw the hand of the theological modernists. “I am just convinced tonight as I am of anything that the move through the Church Federation…to kill these broadcasts has been a move…to silence our voice.” To McIntire, the fight over access to the airwaves was a continuation of the denominational battles against modernism. But now the arena had shifted from the

General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to the Congress of the United States of

America, from denominational committees to Senate committees, and from church courts

- 26 - to the federal judiciary. 30

On March 15, 1945 nearly 15,000 people filled the Philadelphia Convention Hall to protest the decision of Philadelphia radio station WPEN to stop selling commercial time to Carl McIntire and other fundamentalist broadcasters. After the rally opened with a medley of gospel songs, “sixteen girls, dressed in white and carrying American flags, marched slowly down the aisle. The thrill was complete when these flags were massed below a huge American flag at the back of the stage.” Then Carl McIntire took the stage and decried the un-American manner in which the Federal Council of Christian Churches and the radio network had colluded in restricting the freedom of religion. On the Sunday following the rally, McIntire preached a sermon about the significance of that night. He exulted in the fact that the fundamentalists had managed to fill Convention Hall even though neither political party had done so during the national elections in 1944. He then read aloud the resolution of the newly formed Philadelphia Gospel Broadcasters, which stated that access to radio broadcasting was the right of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike. But despite the large turnout, the Philadelphia rally failed to persuade WPEN or the

FCC to reinstate commercial time for the fundamentalist broadcasters. The controversy continued into 1946 when a Knoxville station, WNOX, stopped selling commercial time to local fundamentalists. McIntire’s role in the Philadelphia rally had captured national attention and he was asked to speak to a crowd of 20,000 in Knoxville’s high school stadium. 31

A quick comparison between the rallies in Philadelphia and Knoxville shows the contrast between the cultural weight of Fundamentalism in the North and South. In

Philadelphia 14,500 was a significant crowd, but only 0.75% of the two million total

- 27 - residents. But Knoxville's turnout of 20,000 constituted 16.9% of the town's total population. Over the past decade historians trying to explain the rise of conservatism have become focused on migration patterns from the Old South to the Sunbelt. Historians like Lisa McGirr, Matthew Lassiter, and Darren Dochuk have persuasively argued that the grassroots conservatives in places like southern California were transplants from the

Old South who brought their distrust of the federal government and fear of de facto desegregation with them. McIntire's career both complicates and confirms this Sunbelt

“Southernization” thesis. McIntire pastored his entire life in New Jersey. As shown by his radio rallies, he was able to attract large crowds in the North and South alike. So politically-active fundamentalists were not an exclusively Southern phenomenon. But the comparison between the crowds in Knoxville and Philadelphia seems to be indicative of a larger trend. During the height of McIntire's radio outreach he broadcast the Twentieth

Century Reformation Hour on nearly 600 stations. The only state in the North with more than a handful of stations was Pennsylvania. Otherwise, the preponderance of stations carrying McIntire's programs were in the Old South and the Sunbelt. So although

McIntire pastored a church in the North, his largest audiences were spread across the

South and the West. 32

- 28 -

CHAPTER 5

TOTALITARIANISMS

If any single event could be identified to as the watershed moment in the politicization of Carl McIntire, the “radio rallies” would best fit the bill. But these events were the culmination of a process begun in the denominational struggles twenty years prior. McIntire accused the theological modernists of driving the fundamentalists both out of the denominations and off the airwaves. There was continuity between the denominational politics of the twenties and thirties, the radio battles of the forties, and ultimately the New Christian Right. For this argument to stand there must be proof that those three periods were linked in Carl McIntire’s mind, that he believed that in each conflict he faced the same basic foes. From McIntire’s editorials and sermons in the

Christian Beacon from 1936-1953 it becomes clear that he associated theological modernism with totalitarianism and collectivism. In McIntire’s mind, decrying fascism, combating communism, and resisting economic and social collectivism were part and parcel of the same conflict that he had first encountered at Princeton Theological

Seminary. McIntire’s fundamentalism bridged theology and politics.

When historian Randall Balmer interviewed Carl McIntire just a few months before McIntire’s death in 2002, he “asked McIntire to identify his enemies. ‘The liberals,’ he shot back. Then he sounded a note of defiance: ‘But they can't stop me!’” At the end of his life Carl McIntire made no distinction between theological and political liberalism. But his conflation of theology and politics had begun much earlier. In 1936, the first year of the Christian Beacon , McIntire included an editorial that accused the

- 29 -

Presbyterian General Assembly of acting like the Third Reich.

Anyone having the facts before him, it seems to us, cannot help but see the striking parallel between the attitude of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in its mandate of 1934…and the attitude of the German government. As goes the Church, so goes the nation. The same spirit of tyranny and lawlessness which characterized the Presbyterian Church in the USA is rapidly finding its expression in America. The spirit of dictatorship is in the air. … It is a challenge which, if not met, will mean ultimately the abandonment of liberty and democracy in America.

Prior to World War II, the Christian Beacon regularly ran editorials associating theological modernism with Nazism. Both were, in McIntire’s mind, totalitarianisms that threatened individual liberty, especially the freedom of religion. 33

On an almost weekly basis during the 1930s, the Christian Beacon covered the story of the arrest and trial of Martin Niemöller by the Nazi regime. Niemöller was a theologically conservative German Protestant pastor who protested the “Nazification” of the established Lutheran church. The Nazi persecution of Martin Niemöller reminded

McIntire of his own trial and expulsion by the Presbyterian modernists. Both the Nazis and the modernists insisted on secret trials for traitors whose only crimes were “loyalty to the Christian faith” and “standing up for the Word of God.” McIntire feared that “the

Presbyterian Church in the USA is today a Hitlerized church.” 34

In an editorial entitled “Totalitarian Church,” McIntire defined totalitarianism as any system in which “the individual exists for the service and the glory of the state.”

Proponents of totalitarianism might cite the necessity of the “common good,” but then the

“individual is not an end in himself; his end is the contribution he can make to the good of the group. This is nothing more than the nazi national socialistic idea.” But McIntire believed that this subsuming of the individual for the group lay at the root of every form

- 30 - of totalitarianism, whether fascism, Nazism, or communism. McIntire linked fascism and communism in the 1930s when sympathy for communism was still common among the

American cultural elite. But by the late-1940s even President Harry Truman could comfortably argue that “there isn't any difference in totalitarian states” whether “Nazi, communist, or Fascist, or Franco.” 35

But McIntire went a step further. In the Christian Beacon , he continually linked communism with modernism. Of course McIntire distrusted communism because he believed it synonymous with atheism, but most of his anti-Communist declarations focused on the threat of communist centralization of the government, the economy, and the church. The American “system which is built upon not only the inalienable rights of men, but the Word of God,” would give way to a communism “which denies property and individual rights.” In order to avoid detection, the communist threat to American freedom took the form of “milk and water socialism” or a “pink Communism” propagated by the modernist-controlled Federal Council of Christian Churches. The modernists in the

Federal Council were “ecclesiastical fifth columnists” who promoted a “Christian socialism” that would result in “Sovietism.” 36

The Christian Beacon regularly included full page reproductions of charts and government reports linking the Federal Council with perceived Communist-front and socialist organizations like the C.I.O.-P.A.C. and the A.C.L.U. McIntire’s alarm increased after the War when the socialist Clement Attlee was elected Prime Minister of Great

Britain. In his first address Attlee used the line “the brotherhood of man,” a phrase used by theological modernists and communists alike. McIntire believed that Attlee's choice of words was proof that “the church in England has gone modernistic, and it has gone over

- 31 - practically entirely to the whole socialist philosophy which Attlee represents.” Britain had chosen “a socialism which involves in it the same limitations of freedom and expressions of tyranny that led to and are inherent both in the economic setup under Stalin and in the

Nazi state socialism under Hitler.” McIntire felt that his suspicions about the communist sympathies of the modernists were validated by Harry F. Ward, a professor emeritus at

Union Theological Seminary, New York and a member of the Federal Council, who wrote that “the ethical base of the communist ideal and the ethical base of early Christianity were the same.” Ward went on to say “that the Soviet Union has a basically democratic regime” that Americans should emulate rather than fear. McIntire was sure that “the near- communist, modernist preachers of the Federal Council will betray Jesus Christ for the honor of Marx!” McIntire’s suspicion was not limited to American clergymen; he also accused Russian Orthodox and Protestant clergy on state-sponsored visits to the United

States of being communist stooges. 37

McIntire’s opposition to communism attracted national attention. He was able to arrange speaking tours from contacts made during the radio protests, stopping at churches pastored by graduates of the school he had founded in 1937, Faith Theological Seminary.

In April of 1948 he headlined a ten-day speaking tour of California trying to “weed communism out of the churches.” Though McIntire’s anti-communism is easy to lampoon – one of his revival campaign brochures was entitled “Stalin’s Agents in

Camden County” – he played a foundational role in stirring up anti-communism among

American fundamentalists, many of whom later attended Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-

Communist Crusades or listened to Billy Graham condemn communists as those for whom “the Devil is their god; Marx, their prophet; Lenin their saint.” Indeed, Carl

- 32 -

McIntire and fellow fundamentalist T.T. Shields “discovered” Schwarz while on a preaching tour of Australia in 1950. McIntire set up a two-month lecture tour of various

American Council churches for Schwarz later that year. The tour went well enough that

Schwarz decided to sell his Australian doctor’s office in 1953 and go into anti- communism full time. Even if opposition to communism is accepted as the initial link between the evangelical right and conservatism, the ties between the New Christian Right and reborn conservatism clearly predate the 1970s when many histories first link the two movements. 38

McIntire’s anti-communism was not in and of itself particularly noteworthy. After all, the standard narrative of the New Christian Right begins with post-World War II anti- communism. What makes McIntire’s anti-communism notable is that it predates

McCarthyism by two decades and is rooted in his distrust of collectivism and the totalitarian centralization of power. McIntire’s personal experience with denominational politics deepened his distrust of centralized power since the modernists had defeated the fundamentalists by centralizing denominational institutions. The modernists drove

McIntire and Machen from Princeton by enervating the fundamentalist-controlled board and creating a single, modernist-leaning board. Ultimately, the fundamentalists were ejected from the denomination for forming a separate missions board that was not under the control of the denomination. It is no surprise then that McIntire favored decentralized religious institutions, such as the ACCC which had no control over member denominations, as well as a decentralized civic government. 39

- 33 -

CHAPTER 6

CAPITALISM, LABOR, ANDTHE NEW DEAL

The denominational battles also confirmed McIntire as a fervent believer in individual property rights. Because the denomination owned all church property, local fundamentalist congregations lost ownership of their own sanctuaries. McIntire believed that the Bill of Rights protected an individual’s right to life, liberty, and property. For

McIntire, that right to property was the basis of a capitalistic system enshrined in

Scripture. When the Law of Moses commanded “Thou shalt not steal,” capitalism was inaugurated. Lest his readers downplay the connection between Christianity and capitalism, McIntire declared, “Jesus Christ was a capitalist.” Since McIntire conflated

Christianity and capitalism, the “conflict between a free economy and the Russian idea of controlled economy” was both a political and religious issue. McIntire believed that tyranny would triumph in America through the destruction of capitalism (thus the subtitle of his book The Rise of the Tyrant:Controlled Economy vs. Private Enterprise ).40

It should not be surprising then that McIntire was leery of the labor movement.

On at least three occasions he reprinted full speeches by H. W. Prentis, Jr., the President of the Armstrong Cork Corporation (today Armstrong World Industries) and a vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, an organization formed in 1895 expressly to resist the encroachment of organized labor. Nevertheless, McIntire tried to defend the rights of both labor and business. Collective bargaining was “an extension of the right of contract” upon which the free enterprise system depended. McIntire and the

American Council even resolved to uphold “the right of a man to strike, without which he

- 34 - becomes a slave” because there was “greed and selfishness, exploitation and oppression on the part of management.” Men should be allowed to voluntarily join unions but should also be allowed to “have the privilege of staying out of the union if he desires.” McIntire sharply condemned the closed shop system because of “the right of the non-striker to work, without which he is robbed and starved.” The closed shop system justified

“stealing men’s’ wages as union dues” and would “permit a class distinction to be established” since the division between management and labor would not allow a man to

“start at the bottom and work up to the top.” General and sympathetic strikes were also denounced because they were “not a collective bargaining unit but a collective coercion of the community and the State.” In McIntire’s opinion, a sit-down strike allowed workers to hold “a man’s possessions for a ransom.” 41

McIntire believed that the modernists in the Federal Council were backing the labor unions in an attempt to replace capitalism with socialism. By telling union leaders that the profit motive was morally wrong, modernists encouraged labor activists to agitate against the free enterprise system itself. The modernists wanted to replace the “profit motive with its barbarous instinct” with the “co-operation of brotherhood.” To McIntire, this kind of rhetoric seemed eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Constitution, so much so that he quoted the relevant article in full. Indeed, a large portion of The Rise of the Tyrant was dedicated to cross-comparisons of sections of the Soviet Constitution and the FCCC's

“Social Creed of the Churches.” McIntire even attended a meeting of the Federal Council in Pittsburgh where C.I.O. representative John G. Ramsay stated his hope that the CIO and the FCCC would unite in opposition to the National Association of Manufacturers

(NAM). 42

- 35 -

As we have already noted, McIntire regularly published articles by H. W. Prentis

Jr., a vice president for the NAM. This link between McIntire and the NAM is significant because it reveals an early alliance between anti-New Deal business groups and religious conservatives. McIntire read their literature and adopted their arguments into his own political philosophy. During the late 1930s, the National Association of Manufacturers was comprised of more than 3,000 businesses, each paying dues that were used to spread a pro-free enterprise and anti-New Deal gospel. The NAM disseminated their message by hosting speakers at meetings of civic groups, publishing articles in trade journals, and distributing literature that was friendly to their point of view. So in 1945 the NAM praised Friedrich von Hayek's Road to Serfdom and gave copies to sympathetic businessmen .43

Five years earlier, the National Association began an advertising campaign, “The

Tripod of Freedom,” which proposed that “individual freedom in this country rests on a tripartite foundation.” The three legs of the tripod were representative democracy, civil and religious liberty, and free private enterprise. Remove any one of those legs, and the tripod would topple. McIntire internalized Prentis's ideas, adopting the idea of a tripod of freedom into his own political philosophy. In The Rise of the Tyrant , McIntire wrote that if you “destroy liberty...you kill private enterprise. Limit private enterprise and you massacre freedom.” Furthermore, “the problems that face us in America today - the enjoyment of our democracy, the maintenance of private enterprise, the preservation of a free economy, and the security of our liberties - are, at bottom, religious issues.” 44

McIntire and the NAM were also in agreement regarding the New Deal. The spectacle of the government paying farmers to destroy crops was matched only by the

- 36 - hubris of the “New Deal Brain Trust councils” who told Americans, “Spend yourself rich, drink yourself sober, [and] destroy food-stuffs to have plenty.” After all, agricultural subsidies had the same effect as price controls: an “increased cost of food.” Americans would pay the price even though the cost would be “added to the annual tax bill instead of to the weekly butcher bill.” The consequences would be still worse if government avoided raising taxes and instead operated under a deficit. Inflation would result, decreasing the wealth of average Americans and making the economy dependent on government expenditure. McIntire found some of the unintended consequences of the farm subsidy system laughably absurd, such as President Truman's call for Americans to save food so that it could be sent to war-devastated Europe even while American farmers were feeding over five times the requested amount to their hogs to comply with production quotas set by the Office of Price Administration (OPA). The price controls set by the OPA also encouraged the development of black markets. Just as bad were the new federal housing developments like Audubon Village in Collingswood, New Jersey “set up on the cooperative basis.” McIntire would have much preferred that government programs be replaced with private charities. If the federal Works Progress Administration

(WPA) had been run by a private organization like the American Red Cross then

“thousands of dollars could have been saved and thousands more in need could have been employed.” 45

Behind the New Deal, McIntire saw the hand of a familiar foe, the theological modernists. Benson Landis, a research editor for the National Council of Churches, had praised the New Deal as “the third American Revolution,” confirming McIntire's suspicion that the New Deal was the “embodiment of many of the ideals for which the

- 37 -

Federal Council had long striven.” Modernists and supporters of the New Deal envisioned an American economy and society founded upon cooperation rather than competition. But universal cooperation required widespread coercion. So McIntire’s opposition to the New Deal was not simply a reaction to government inefficiency and waste. He feared that New Deal central planning would create a totalitarian collectivism that would control Americans’ lives and restrict their freedoms. 46

- 38 -

CHAPTER 7

LIBERTARIANISM

McIntire's opposition to government economic control echoes that of post-World

War II libertarian intellectuals like F. A. Hayek. In The Road to Serfdom Hayek noted the inefficiencies of centralized planning, but he also decried its impact on human motivation; “the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.” Centralized, government planning "compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people.”

McIntire agreed. When government took on functions traditionally reserved for individual initiative in the private sphere, the result was a “genuine deterioration in the function of responsibility”:

When private agencies and individuals fail to take care of the poor, the government steps in to fill the gap. With money gained by taxation, plus the corruption and power of politics, society is further paralyzed and the way is paved for an enslaving collectivism. Because the feeling is created in a man that the State will take care of him, he loafs. By giving the rich the feeling that the State will take care of the poor, out of taxation, the need for them to give is removed and they hold on to all they have for their last days.

In fact, McIntire was familiar with Hayek. He had read The Road to Serfdom and found

Hayek's defense of individualism particularly insightful. Hayek criticized collectivist societies as immoral because they held that beneficial social ends justify the means used to accomplish them, even if done at the expense of individual liberties. McIntire was particularly pleased that The Road to Serfdom had disturbed the reviewer for the modernist-controlled periodical Christian Century .47

- 39 -

Yet McIntire's support for a libertarian political philosophy was more than just a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Interactions between fundamentalists and anti-New Deal intellectuals began well before McIntire's time. Journalist and social critic

H. L. Mencken had used his acerbic wit to criticize fundamentalists and Progressives alike, but he approved of Gresham Machen's “completely impregnable” defense of orthodox Christianity. Like Machen, Mencken had no use for the sentimental theology of religious modernists. Both men also shared libertarian political impulses. McIntire also had an anti-New Deal ally: John T. Flynn, a prominent newspaper columnist during the

1930s. Flynn, in his 1949 book The Road Ahead: America's Creeping Revolution , said that America was headed down a dire path toward socialism. The socialistic mindset had crept into the labor unions, the academy, and the churches. In his chapter on the church, entitled “The Kingdom of God,” Flynn condemned the ties between the modernists and various socialist and communist fronts. He ended the chapter by honoring the ACCC and

Carl McIntire for resisting this infiltration of the church. McIntire reciprocated Flynn's praise, complementing Flynn's “gifted and penetrating pen.” In fact, McIntire wrote a 29 page pamphlet, The Truth About the Federal Council of Churches and the Kingdom of

God, for the express purpose of defending Flynn from attacks by various modernist churchmen. 48

McIntire also shared the libertarians' distaste for government tariffs on foreign trade and government-protected cartels. His defense of the right of contract, and the right to bargain collectively, was drawn from classical liberals like John Stuart Mill. But the most fundamental tenet of McIntire's political philosophy was a belief in individualism over and against collectivism. McIntire believed that God sanctioned individualism

- 40 - because Christ had redeemed people from their sins as individuals. He further traced individualism through the Protestant Reformation, which established individual believersrather than the Church as the arbiters of Scripture. Ultimately, McIntire thought that the freedoms of worship, speech, and property ownership were rooted in individualism. Thus, any attack on the spirit of individualism threatened those freedoms.

In 1944 McIntire preached a four-part sermon series that was arranged around FDR’s

Four Freedoms speech. Because of his belief in individualism, McIntire embraced the first two freedoms (of speech and religion) but rejected the last two (from want and fear).

He was skeptical of claims that “when the war is over we are to have a very wonderful government” because he realized that plans for the new government to take better care of the sick and poor would require the State to expand and tax.

If the task of the State is to be the minister of God and to maintain freedom, then the State itself must stay out of the sphere of the individual. … Anything, therefore, that the State does to destroy man’s freedom the State must turn away from. Thus the State, instead of encouraging its own strength in bureaucratic development of control, must despise such thoughts and flee from them. A bureaucratic and cumbersome State cannot help jeopardizing the freedom of its citizens. The State should keep taxes from destroying the people and their property. The way to do this is for the State to refuse to enter into activities and undertake responsibilities that would involve such taxation.

McIntire feared the consequences of collectivism. Men and women who became dependent on the State would eventually “lose their own individual initiative to take care of themselves.” 49

Individual liberty lay at the heart of McIntire’s political consciousness.

Christianity and liberty were paired in his mind. “Give men the Bible, let them believe the Bible, and they become ‘free men’ in Jesus Christ and demand civil and religious

- 41 - liberty in which to live and glorify God.” A concern for individual liberties was behind each of the political stances this paper has discussed so far and is the strand that connects

McIntire’s political beliefs back to the denominational conflicts. McIntire felt that the

Presbyterian modernists had suppressed the fundamentalists’ rights to worship and property. The Federal Council had fought to keep fundamentalists off the airwaves, violating their freedom of speech. Fascism, communism, and modernism each threatened fundamentalists’ freedom of worship. At the heart of the capitalistic system McIntire defended were the “inalienable rights of men.” Even his opposition to labor unions was based upon the threat posed to workers’ freedom of conscience. 50

But despite McIntire’s distrust for an expansionist State, he did not see it as an irremediable threat to individual liberties. In fact, protecting civil and religious liberty was the proper responsibility of the State. But when the State failed to protect individual liberties or worse yet infringed upon them itself, “chaos and tyranny inevitably result.

The individual is crushed and the State becomes the end.” McIntire was wary of government infringement of individual liberties even when that intervention was justified by national security interests. He had his first direct, personal clash with “the interventionist State” in 1944-45. During the 1940s the Bible Presbyterian Church held an annual summer retreat at Harvey Cedars, a resort on the Jersey shore. While planning the retreat in 1944, McIntire found that the Office of Defense Transportation (ODT) had denied him a travel permit. The ODT coordinated supply and domestic transportation for the military during World War II and had ruled that groups of more than 50 needed to apply for permits which would only be granted on the basis of their necessity in the war effort. Bible conferences, Bible study classes, and church conventions were rarely

- 42 - permitted. In the Beacon McIntire accused ODT Chairman Joseph Eastman of displaying the “Spirit of ‘Dictator’ in Dealing with Churchmen.” McIntire, of course, believed that his meetings were vital to keeping up morale on the home front, and to make his views known he sent copies of the Beacon to every member of Congress. McIntire’s encounters with the ODT – like his clashes with the Federal Radio Commission – damaged any remaining sympathy he may have had for the regulatory State. 51

- 43 -

CHAPTER 8

MINORITY RIGHTS

McIntire believed that individual liberties were fragile because democracy was predicated upon majority rule. Without adequate protections for individual liberties, a democracy could become a tyranny of the majority. In light of the Nazi takeover of

Germany, democratic totalitarianism seemed an especially present danger to McIntire and other civil libertarians during the 1930s. In a speech reprinted by the Christian Beacon ,

H.W. Prentis Jr. said that he was “deeply concerned over the increasing tendency of government to trespass on the rights of helpless minorities under the cloak of democracy.” The expulsion of the fundamentalist minority by the modernist majority made McIntire especially sensitive to the rights of minorities. In the first of his explicitly political sermons reprinted by the Beacon ,McIntire preached,

Let us not be deceived in thinking that our security rests in the Constitution itself. On every hand we are finding that treaties, contracts, and solemn obligations are merely scraps of paper. Our constitutional guarantees are no more secure than the disposition of the majority. As long as the majority will respect the minority, the Constitution is secure, for the Constitutional limitations there protect the minority against the majorities. But let a majority arise which feels that our system is wrong, or let an element assert itself maintained by propaganda, and our constitutional liberties will become annulled.

However, McIntire’s support for individual liberties was not simply self-defense. He used the Beacon to advocate on the behalf of other minority groups. 52

Although other fundamentalist leaders, like Arno C. Gaebelein, William B. Riley, and Gerald Winrod, were anti-Semites who believed in the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , McIntire was a philo-Semite. Gaebelein, Riley, and Winrod were

- 44 - dispensational premillenialists who believed that man’s sinfulness would eventually subsume the world, setting the stage for Christ’s triumphant return to earth to set up a utopian millennial kingdom. Anti-Semitic dispensationalists often accused Jews of being conspirators in the cultural decline, some even justifying Jewish persecution as the just reward for the crucifixion of Christ. Philo-Semites like McIntire instead emphasized the chosen people status of the Jewish people. In 1938, in response to the Anschluss,

McIntire preached a sermon entitled “Why Should Christians Be Kind to the Jews?” In this sermon – a quarter of a million copies of which were distributed over the next decade

– McIntire argued that Christians had a Scriptural obligation to befriend the Jewish people. After all, “Jesus Christ was a Jew. Jesus Christ is a Jew today. When the eternal

God in the fullness of time came to assume human nature, to be made in the likeness of sinful flesh, He chose of all the nations of the world a Jewish maiden and was born of her.

We forget that Jesus was reared a Jew. His eyes, his hair, his hands were Jewish. He looked like a Jew. He talked like a Jew.” McIntire went on to condemn the Nazis for killing 42,000 German and Austrian Jews and then herding the survivors into concentration camps. He denigrated the charge that Jews were communists, noting that some Gentiles were communists as well and that it would be silly to condemn an entire people for the actions of a few. If any nation were to be condemned, it would be the

German people who were cursed according to Genesis 12:3 for their anti-Semitism. That curse was the loss of liberty under the tyranny of Hitler. 53

McIntire’s philo-Semitism translated into support for Zionism. He believed that

“the land of Palestine belongs to the Jews,” and so he encouraged Christians to support

Jewish return to Israel. As early as 1937 the Beacon ran articles decrying “Arab

- 45 -

Terrorists” and supporting the right of Jews to reclaim Palestine. In fact, besides articles about fascism and Nazism, no political topic received more coverage in the pre-war

Christian Beacon than reports of anti-Semitism and support for Zionism. Interestingly, like Gaebelein, Riley, and Winrod, McIntire was a dispensationalist. Yet McIntire’s philo-

Semitism was not a consequence of his belief in dispensationalism alone, but of his belief in the importance of individual liberties and minority rights. 54

Not all minorities earned such ebullient support from McIntire. His record on race was more mixed. The Christian Beacon reveals the racism common to the American cultural majority at the time. Early runs of the Beacon included a cartoon strip that used pictures of toy dolls to teach Scriptural truths. One strip featured a white doll asking a black doll, “The Bible says, ‘stand still and know that I am God,’ though doesn’t it?” to which the black doll replies in dialect, “Yassah, It do, but if yuh stands still and knows He am God, yuh will have sense enough to wait unil He tells yuh to move before movin’.”

Another issue of the Beacon ran a front page article about southern outreach ministries which included a picture of a white women teaching in a “colored” church. And in 1948

McIntire chose to photographically reproduce an article from an unknown outside source that condemned the “Federal Council’s Pro-Russian Propaganda.” While the majority of the article was dedicated to showing the Federal Council’s sympathy for the Soviet

Union, the anonymous author also weighed in on race relations. He announced his support for equal rights for blacks but opposed “intermarrying and interblending.” 55

Yet the Beacon also showed some support for integration and improved racial relations. A short article compared Jim Crow with the Nazi segregation of Jews. The

Thanksgiving issue for 1940 included a patriotic poem with the line, “I thank God for

- 46 -

America The land that knew to melt Race and color, region and clime – Goth and Jew and Celt.” Integrationist sentimentalism aside, McIntire’s first personal, public mention of race cameduring his sermon after the Philadelphia radio protest rally in 1945. McIntire ended the sermon by appealing to the hundreds of African-Americans who had been in attendance at the protest. He noted that the service of the black New Central Baptist

Church had been replaced on the air by popular music. He said, “You have just as much right on the air as we have. We are with you in this fight. You ought to be with us. I want to urge you colored people in the Philadelphia area…write to the Federal

Communications Commission with the rest of us.” Furthermore, unlike some Southern fundamentalists, McIntire had no connections with and little sympathy for the Ku Klux

Klan. When the Anti-Defamation League accused McIntire of preaching hatred, he responded by noting several editorials he had written against the Klan. Still, McIntire showed his naiveté when making the argument that the Fair Employment Practices

Commission was unnecessary because the “States in the South have made tremendous advances in eliminating lynching and meeting their other problems.” 56

Prior to the 1960s McIntire dedicated relatively few articles to questions of race, but it is possible to anticipate McIntire’s opposition to the Civil Rights movement from these scattered, early opinions. Taken at face value, McIntire’s opposition to attempts to use the State to enforce private non-discrimination was a reaction against the centralization of power and the restriction of individual rights rather than simple racism.

In an editorial entitled “States’ Rights and Human Rights,” McIntire wrote,

We are now being maneuvered into the very strange position that, in order to preserve human rights, we must centralize power. State rights are being put in opposition to human rights, while, as a matter of fact, it is the

- 47 -

reservation of the power to the several States that does more to protect human rights and individual liberty than any other one thing. The entire genius of our Constitution in separating the various states of the Union and making them sovereign states in the union with a limited federal government is to protect the human liberties of the people. The rights of the states must be preserved and protected, or the entire structure of our federal government will blend into a more totalitarian system.

This fear of totalitarianism led McIntire and the ACCC to oppose a Congressional bill that would have made the use of the post for “defamatory and false statements of any race or religion a criminal offense.” The ACCC resolution expressed its distaste for religious and racial bigotry but condemned the bill for threatening to abridge the freedom of speech and religion. After all, “the advocates of almost any religion will consider that opposition to its tenets or denial of its exclusive truth is defamatory and false.” The

ACCC justified its position saying that it was “better to have abuses of liberty than to have no liberty left to abuse.” 57

This republican rhetoric situates McIntire firmly in the tradition of classical liberalism or republicanism. Historian Mark Noll described republicanism as the belief that “the arbitrary exercise of unchecked power must by its very nature result in the demise of liberty, law, and natural rights.” The republican alternative to absolute power was the “separation of power in government rather than its concentration.” Political historians often tie the emergence of the Religious Right to the appeals of segregationists like George Wallace. But McIntire's opposition to the extension of federal civil rights legislation into the private sphere is more reminiscent of Barry Goldwater than George

Wallace. Senator Goldwater joined the NAACP, fought to desegregate Arizona public schools, and helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established the Civil Rights

Commission to protect African American voting rights. But Goldwater did not support

- 48 - the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He believed that the Act, which prohibited private discrimination by landlords and employers, would “be a grave threat to the very essence...of a constitutional republic in which 50 sovereign States have reserved to themselves and to the people those powers not specifically granted to the Central or

Federal Government.” Goldwater and McIntire believed that no matter how undesirable racism might be, the threat of a totalitarian central government was worse. 58

Thus far, this paper has explained the origins of the politicization of Carl

McIntire, outlined his political beliefs, and showed how they were unified around a discourse of liberty and individual rights. The next logical question is how McIntire acted on those beliefs. Later, during the 1960s and '70s, McIntire attracted national media attention with his political rallies and relationships with national and international political figures; but during these early years, with the exception of the radio rallies and anti-communist preaching tours, McIntire’s political engagement most frequently took the form of appeals for readers and listeners to write to their representatives. Sometimes a form letter was included in the Beacon for readers to cut out and send. On a handful of occasions, McIntire gave voting recommendations; most of these specific appeals encouraged voting for prohibition on municipal and county ballot resolutions. Readers of the Beacon were also encouraged to vote against a proposed New Jersey Constitution in

1947. McIntire felt that the new constitution would dangerously increase the power of the executive, allow civil servants to strike, and relax gambling and divorce regulations. 59

The radio controversy of the early 1940s took McIntire’s explicitly political activity to the next level. The fight over access to the airwaves led McIntire to visit

Capitol Hill on multiple occasions, to testify before several Congressional committees,

- 49 - and to found the American Council. McIntire recognized that the FCC was a “political

Commission” and a political problem required a political solution. But despite his efforts,

McIntire failed to accomplish his stated goals for any of his political positions. Congress did not pass legislation protecting fundamentalist broadcasting rights, instead enacting the Fairness Doctrine in 1949 which was used to force fundamentalist broadcasters off the air in the 1960s. Despite his lack of unqualified success, McIntire was fighting for access to political discourse because he believed that the right of access underpinned religious liberties. Fundamentalists – who felt stifled and oppressed by the liberal consensus of the 1940s-50s – thus bear some resemblance to the social change movements stirring on the left. Civil Rights groups, women’s organizations, and fundamentalists all demanded entrée to the public discourse from which they had been barred. 60

- 50 -

CHAPTER 9

A DEVELOPING POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The fight for access to public discourse fused theology and politics, two systems of belief and action that fundamentalists had once believed belonged in separate spheres.

The very first issue of the Christian Beacon published a mission statement that proclaimed, “We shall not enter in politics one whit” and announced the editor’s desire to stick to religious topics. In 1940, in an editorial criticizing President Roosevelt for sending an envoy to the Vatican, McIntire said that “politics and religion do not mix.”

And when the Beacon announced the formation of the American Council of Christian

Churches in 1941, it noted that the ACCC intended “to stay clear of the political and economic field, and confine its activities to a presentation of the evangelical faith.” Even in the midst of the 1945 radio protests, McIntire published a book that was “written on the assumption that partisan politics and religion are two different spheres of activity; and a minister, if he wishes to preach and to be an effective servant, should stay out of such politics.” 61

But McIntire felt that circumstances compelled fundamentalists to become involved in the political arena even though it was “a complete departure from the activities of the church through all the centuries.” Although “the church [was] not to be a political pressure group,” McIntire felt compelled to engage in formal politics in order “to expose the evil and deceptions in the Federal Council’s activities.” McIntire was particularly alarmed in 1945 when the Federal Council opened a lobbying office in

Washington, D.C. promising “to explain or interpret legislative and administrative acts

- 51 - and…to refer ‘interested persons to proper channels for contacts in Washington.’” Since the modernists were carrying the fight to Capitol Hill, McIntire felt that the fundamentalists had to do so as well. The Beacon reprinted a sermon by W.O.H. Garman in which the preacher denounced fundamentalists who “made the mistake of trying to live above and beyond earthly government.” Garman felt that fundamentalists’ right to practice their faith freely was threatened and so he advocated political action if “for no other reason than to safeguard our own interests.” McIntire himself, while protesting

WPEN’s suspension of commercial time, wrote that “the remedy for this situation now, in view of the public interest and the opposition to the Gospel of Jesus Christ involved, is clearly federal legislation. This, we believe, is the next step in protecting the Gospel on the air.” 62

Even though McIntire’s stream of fundamentalism had been fully politicized, it still needed to overcome a significant barrier to formal political activism: McIntire’s belief in the separation of church and state which he believed had been instituted by Jesus

Christ. When the Bible said, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's,” McIntire took it at face value. After all, “when the church goes to meddling with the state, the state will begin to meddle with the church.” McIntire was particularly alarmed at the number of parochial schools that had requested government assistance, since “in a land where men are free to worship God and where naturally there are variances of opinion, it would be impossible that the views taught, even though they were the views of the minority, or of the majority, would be satisfactory.” Inevitably someone’s freedom of religion would be violated. In fact,

McIntire commended the United States Supreme Court’s 1948 decision to strike down a

- 52 - public school program that allowed students to attend religious education classes. The atheist mother of one of the students had protested that the program, though voluntary, abridged the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Court agreed and

McIntire applauded Justice Hugo Black’s written opinion for the 6-1 majority. McIntire believed that the separation of Church and State was an “issue that concerns every citizen of the State who pays taxes, the liberals as well as the conservatives” and an issue behind which all Americans could unite in support. McIntire did not have a problem with parochial schools per se – he believed that voluntary attendance of church schools upheld the principle of individual liberty – but he opposed public subsidies for any type of religious institution because it was “wrong to compel any citizen to pay money which will be used for the support and propagation of religious tenets and doctrines with which he does not agree.” 63

McIntire defined Church and State institutionally. He did not oppose the admixture of personal faith and public politics; rather he opposed the development of the

Church into an organization for political advocacy. The Church’s “influence upon political life has always been recognized as taking place through the individuals in the churches themselves, not by the organized church or the officially approved program of the various churches.” Politicized fundamentalism had reached a serious road bump. As this paper has shown, by the 1950s McIntire had a well-developed political consciousness, but his unwillingness to politicize the institutional church left an organizational gap between a politically-energized fundamentalist grassroots and formal political involvement. The American Council partially filled this vacuum, issuing opinions on political topics ranging from the Korean War to labor legislation, but it

- 53 - avoided direct involvement in politics; the Council issued resolutions of support and opposition to specific pieces of legislation, but it did not endorse candidates or advocate comprehensive political platforms. This vacuum was filled by third party organizations like the John Birch Society and the Republican Party. Fundamentalists already familiar with religious book clubs signed up in droves for the John Birch Society (JBS), a conservative anti-Communist organization. Conscious of fundamentalists’ political potential, the leader of the JBS, Robert Welch, courted fundamentalists by describing them as “the moral salt of the earth.” The JBS provided an organizational structure for grassroots conservatism, but its conspiracy theories and alarmist rhetoric caused many of its members to leave the Society when conservatism went mainstream during the

Goldwater years. Although Goldwater’s campaign was a spectacular failure in the short term, the reinvented Republican Party eventually embraced the New Christian Right.

Fundamentalism had become politicized. 64

Perhaps it is inaccurate to describe this process as “politicization.” Many fundamentalist preachers consistently distinguished between theology and politics, trumpeting their intent to stick to the theological high road. Yet often within the same breath these leaders would then launch into a politically-charged diatribe against

Communism or labor unions. This seeming contradiction requires an Alexandrian solution; perhaps fundamentalists honestly thought that political issues were theological rather than political. Some of the issues considered apolitical by fundamentalists of an earlier generation seem distinctly political to modern day historians,but we should expect the boundaries of what is considered political discourse to shift over time. Still, not only did the fundamentalist-constructed boundaries between faith and politics shift, but the

- 54 - mental line between theology and politics also became blurred. What had once been safely relegated to the political sphere was now of theological concern and vice versa.

Politics and faith became more and more intertwined. Therefore, it may be just as accurate to describe the rise of the New Christian Right as the theologization of evangelical politics as it would be to label it the politicization of evangelicalism. 65

The politicization of evangelicals might also be described as an example of

“ideological creep.” Fundamentalists like Carl McIntire were opposed to the involvement of the institutional church in public politics. Yet over time, church-based political engagement became the norm. Churches joined lobbying groups like the ACCC or the

NAE. Communism became as frequent a sermon topic as Christ. This seeming contradiction raises an important question: why did fundamentalists embrace a political style that they had formerly condemned? It is important to remember that people do not always change their beliefs suddenly. Ideology can change gradually (thus the label

“ideological creep”) as a person is confronted by inconsistencies between their political philosophy and their lived experience. “Ideological creep” often begins when a person who ascribes to a specific tenet of political philosophy – in this case a distrust of centralized government power – encounters an issue that seems so important as to be a necessary exception to the general rule. So despite an aversion to State intervention in the private sphere, the individual is willing to expand State oversight in this one (not to be repeated) case. But all too soon, another equally important issue arises. One exception becomes two, then three, four, five, and so on. The tension between political principle and pragmatic exception creates cognitive dissonance. If the general rule is correct, why so many exceptions? To resolve that dissonance, someone may then change their political

- 55 - philosophy to fit what they know to be true from experience. In this manner, a new ideologycan gradually replace the old.

This concept of “ideological creep” helps to explain the fundamentalist transition from political disengagement to political activism. Fundamentalists, though suspicious of centralized government power, were willing to make exceptions regarding certain issues that they thought were integral to orthodox Christianity and the American way of life. For example, many fundamentalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century supported government-enforced Prohibition. They felt that the dangers of the consumption of alcohol were so severe that government coercion was necessary to prevent it. These fundamentalists had granted an exception to their general distrust of government power. Conversely, McIntire felt that the threat of government centralization so threatened the freedom of religion that fundamentalists needed to lobby for their individual rights. Even though a preacher who wants “to be an effective servant should stay out of...politics,” there were “deep, abiding principles” with which “a preacher must deal!”McIntire’s initial exception for the sake of “principles” was followed by another, and yet another, until he had become a prominent political activist, all the while protesting his lack of interest in politics. 66

Fundamentalists in the generation after McIntire also had to negotiate this fine line between religious separatism and political engagement. Jerry Falwell, the outspoken

Baptist pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church, once advocated a strict separation of church and state. He famously stated that he “would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else — including the fighting of communism, or participating in the civil rights reform.... Preachers are not

- 56 - called to be politicians, but to be soul winners.” But by 1979, he had come to believe that political issues like abortion were so important that the church could no longer stand on the sidelines. So Falwell formed the Moral Majority, the flagship organization of the

Religious Right during the 1980s. The key element in the evolution of Falwell's political philosophy appears to have been an appeal to exceptional circumstances. Falwell opposed the intervention of the Church in affairs of the State, but some things, like abortion, were so important that he felt that he had to make an exception. As the number of exceptions grew, he eventually discarded his original conception of the separation of Church and

State altogether. 67

Fundamentalists were not the only ones dealing with “ideological creep.” Anti-

New Deal conservatives had harshly criticized the expansion of the State. But during the

1950s many conservatives began to believe that the threat of global Communism necessitated a permanent expansion of the military and increased intervention by the

United States in foreign affairs. But an enlarged military required a concomitant growth in the federal budget and an expanded State. Historian Don Critchlow has noted the dilemma: “As conservatives weighed the threat posed by what they saw as an expansionist Soviet Union set on world conquest and the defeat of the United States, they concluded that the struggle against Communism required ideological and political compromise of their principles.” Even the National Association of Manufacturers, which during the 1930s and 40s had been strongly anti-statist, decided to throw its support behind the Cold War military-industrial complex. Likewise, fundamentalists became politically active as they were confronted with crises that they believed required a political solution. Waves of politically active fundamentalists made this transition during

- 57 - successive fights over Prohibition, the New Deal, the Cold War, desegregation, and abortion. Thus it is misguided to look for “the” cause of the New Christian Right. It had as many causes as it had participants. 68

Two distinct currents ran through the New Christian Right. Social conservatives – who were rallying against a perceived decline in American morals, as evidenced by the secularization of public schools and open homosexuality – were the inheritors of the nineteenth century pietist tradition. A libertarian streak also prevailed among evangelicals, many of whom were suspicious of government restrictions on churches, religious charities, and Christian schools. Between these two currents – and often in the minds of individual fundamentalists – there was a tension between their willingness to use the State to legislate social behavior and their simultaneous fear ofan expanding

State. This tension was certainly present in Carl McIntire's political philosophy. On the one hand, McIntire, like his mentor Gresham Machen, was a confessional Presbyterian who emphasized the importance of personal liberty and individual rights. On the other hand, McIntire separated himself from Machen because of Machen’s refusal to support

Prohibition. Furthermore, although McIntire was a Calvinist in soteriology, he was not reformed in his eschatology, instead embracing dispensationalist premillenialism, a theological current closely associated with nineteenth century pietism. His fight against the modernists in the denominational political battles made him suspicious of centralized authority, whether in the Church or the State. Yet his fear of a conspiracy between modernists and Communists drove him into the public political arena.

- 58 -

CHAPTER 10

DOES MCINTIRE MATTER?

Until recently, McIntire’s role in most religious histories has been limited to that of radical provocateur. The story of mid-twentieth century evangelicalism typically flows through Billy Graham, Fuller Theological Seminary, and the National Association of

Evangelicals. McIntire, when mentioned, is a right-wing outlier not considered representative of mainstream evangelicalism. It is true that McIntire purposefully separated himself and the ACCC from more moderate new evangelicals whom he accused of compromising with liberalism. But focusing on that self-imposed distance ignores the fact that many of McIntire's political viewpoints were shared by the evangelical mainstream. Harold J. Pew, a devout Presbyterian and founder of the Sun Oil

Company, used his fortune to fund both fundamentalist and conservative political organizations. He provided funding for Billy Graham's evangelistic campaigns, the evangelical magazine Christianity Today , and the John Birch Society. Pew was concerned that the liberal theology of modernist ministers was reflected in their economic and social philosophies as well. He gave money to help start the evangelical Fuller Theological

Seminary, because “when a minister is sound in his theology, he is also sound on his economic and social philosophy.” Like McIntire, Pew criticized the National Council of

Christian Churches because what the NCCC was advocating would “inevitably lead us into Communism.” Pew went so far as to estimate that a third of National Council members were Communists, Socialists, or “Pinks.” Even Carl Henry, the theologian who laid the intellectual foundations for new evangelicalism, accused the NCCC of being

- 59 - infiltrated by communists.During the 1940s and 50s, McIntire's political beliefs were squarely within the evangelical mainstream, even if his methods were unconventional. 69

McIntire also mentored a number of influential fundamentalists and evangelicals.

Anti-Communist preacher Billy James Hargis was a member of the ACCC. In 1953

Hargis and McIntire traveled to West Germany and launched over a million balloons bearing anti-Communist pamphlets and gospel tracts over the Iron Curtain. Hargis was a vocal proponent of the John Birch Society and an equally ardent opponent of civil rights legislation which banned private discrimination. In 1963 he encouraged conservative politicians, such as Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater, to leave their respective parties and “start a conservative party!” This was a sentiment common among grassroots conservatives in the early '60s who were frustrated with the politically moderate

Republican establishment. But when Goldwater was nominated as the Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1964, Hargis gave him his complete support (and, as a result, lost his tax exempt status with the IRS). 70

Goldwater also earned the favor of Fred Schwarz, the Australian medical doctor who founded the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. As mentioned earlier in this paper,

McIntire had launched Schwarz’s careerby introducing him to a network of other fundamentalist anti-communists. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, Schwarz traveled the country lecturing on the dangers of communism to audiences of thousands. Schwarz even headlined a weeklong conference in 1961, the “All-Southern California School of Anti-

Communism,” which featured John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Pat Boone, and Roy Rogers.

During this time period, Schwarz became an ally of Bob Wells, the pastor of the largest church in Orange County. Both Schwarz and Wells were tied to McIntire – Wells was part

- 60 - of McIntire's American Council – and were also members of the California Free

Enterprise Association. The Association invited Schwarz and Wells to speak at regular meetings all over southern California. It also distributed literature and published articles by Ludwig Von Mises, Russell Kirk, and Leonard Read. Like McIntire, Schwarz and

Wells had allied themselves with secular libertarian intellectuals who shared their distrust of centralized government power. 71

But the most influential person that Carl McIntire mentored was Francis

Schaeffer. Schaeffer first met McIntire while attending Westminster Theological

Seminary. His future wife, Edith Seville, had encouraged him to study with Gresham

Machen – on one of their first dates, Edith and Francis had read Machen's Christianity and Liberalism together – but in 1937, when McIntire split from Machen's Orthodox

Presbyterian Church, Schaeffer followed McIntire and transferred from Westminster

Theological to Faith Theological Seminary. After graduation Schaeffer pastored a church that was a member of McIntire's American Council of Christian Churches. McIntire praised Schaeffer's writing ability and sent him to Amsterdam in 1948 to report on the proceedings of the World Council of Churches as a correspondent for the Christian

Beacon. Despite the praise of his elders, in the early 1950s Schaeffer began to question his faith. After two years of intense inner doubt, Schaeffer had confirmed his belief in fundamentalist doctrine, but he believed that fundamentalists, although engaged in the defense of orthodoxy, had become devoid of Christian love. Thus in 1955 he leftthe Bible

Presbyterian Church to start a Christian youth retreat called L'Abri in Switzerland. L'Abri became a center of counter-cultural Christianity, influencing a generation of evangelical intellectuals like OsGuiness and Nancy Pearcy. During the '60s and '70s, Schaeffer

- 61 - became a much sought after speaker at many American evangelical colleges. He became increasingly concerned by the trend toward public secularization. So in 1981 he wrote A

Christian Manifesto , which became a rallying point for many New Christian Right activists in the 1980s and '90s. For example, Pat Robertson and Randall Terry – the respective founders of the Christian Coalition and the anti-abortion group Operation

Rescue – each cite Schaeffer's Manifesto as a significant influence on their political activism. 72

It may seem incongruous to compare Schaeffer with Carl McIntire. After all,

Schaeffer left McIntire's Bible Presbyterian Church and shed the “fundamentalist” label.

But journalist Michael Hamilton has shown the lingering fundamentalist mindset which set Schaeffer apart from more moderate evangelicals like Billy Graham.

If Graham represents evangelicalism's smooth center, Schaeffer represents its crushed-glass edges. … While Graham appealed to the majority in the middle, Schaeffer attacked the middle for failing to see the direction it was headed. It is no accident that his strongest impact has been among those who have a bone to pick with the middle class -- dropouts, intellectuals, and … formerly respectable citizens who have begun to perceive the American judiciary as a refuge for scoundrels.

Hamilton's contrast between evangelicalism’s “center” and “edges” is reminiscent of

Daniel Walker Howe's description – discussed earlier in this paper – of the tension between a pietist “core” and a confessionalist “periphery” in nineteenth century

Protestantism. Schaeffer, like his mentor McIntire, should be studied in relation to a stream of politically conscious evangelicalism that predates the New Christian Right by over a century. 73

McIntire's co-belligerents – Hargis, Schwarz, and Schaeffer – each played significant roles in the development of politicized evangelicalism, yet historians have

- 62 - relegated McIntire to a footnote in the history of the New Christian Right. Media Studies professor Heather Hendershot has proposed that evangelicals distanced themselves from

McIntire to prove that evangelicalism belonged in the political and cultural mainstream.

Ironically, in so doing, evangelicals copied secular intellectuals, who in the first half of the twentieth century constructed the narrative of modernity as the tension between the forward-looking products of the Enlightenment – Progress, Science, and Rationalism – and reactionary, backward fundamentalism. By constructing fundamentalism as a dangerous other, modernist intellectuals like H. Richard Niebuhr, Richard Hofstadter, and

Talcott Parsons were able to normalize their own belief system. Similarly, from the 1970s on, evangelicals in the New Christian Right sought to normalize evangelicalism. Thus it was necessary to disassociate their movement from McIntire. Hendershot pointed out,

He [McIntire] represents an outburst of reactionary fundamentalist fervor, confirming whatmany liberals already believe about fundamentalists: they are kooks.The New Christian Right—or “conservative evangelicalism”— as representedby forces such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Paul Weyrich, and James Dobson,has bought into the narrative Harding describes. The narrative enables them to paint their own political endeavors as conservative but not extremist .

Likewise, diplomatic historian William Inboden has equated new evangelical treatments of fundamentalism as that normally reserved for “an embarrassing eccentric uncle.” 74

As Lisa McGirr has noted concerning conservatism and the John Birch Society, political movements often marginalize embarrassing radicals in order to show how reasonable and mainstream they are by comparison. The same “mainstreaming” process also led both conservatives and liberals to blame the excesses of anti-Communism on one man, Joseph McCarthy, which allowed both parties “to bury the worst extremes” of the anti-Communist witch hunts. Yet, while mainstreaming is a rational response for political

- 63 - groups, historians should be held to a higher standard. It is unfortunate that many evangelical historians, a category in which I belong, have constructed the fundamentalist narrative as a simple “teleological narrative of progress” from anti-intellectual, rigid fundamentalism to sophisticated, culturally-nimble new evangelicalism. Attempts to normalize new evangelicalism have distorted the historical record and silenced Carl

McIntire's “Certain Trumpet,” something that modernists, communists, and liberals alike were unable to do. 75

- 64 -

ENDNOTES

11 Corinthians 14:8 (King James Version); Carl McIntire, “A Certain Trumpet,” (sermon, Collingswood Presbyterian Church, Collingswood, NJ, October 1, 1933). Five years later, in 1936, McIntire preached this sermon at his inauguration after being installed as pastor of Collingswood Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, New Jersey.

2Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). See chapter one for Critchlow's treatment of the early Right. Many of the anti-New Deal journalists, like Nock, were initially progressives before becoming more libertarian during the 1930s. This political conversion seems intriguingly reminiscent of neo-conservatism during the 1970s, a reaction against Lyndon Johnson's Great Society; For more on Mencken, see Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); For more on Flynn and opposition to the New Deal see John E. Moser, Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Tradition of American Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 2002); For Nock, see Michael Wreszin, The Superfluous Anarchist: Albert Jay Nock (Providence: Brown University, 1972); Richard Tedlow, “The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations During the New Deal,” The Business History Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 24-45.

3F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents , ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 11, 18-19; For more on Rand, see Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); For a detailed study of the conservative revolt in its California hotbed, see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

4Two of the more recent monographs that subscribe to the “conservatism as racist reaction” school of thought: Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). For a discussion of the debate over the role of race, see Robert Norrell, “Modern Conservatism and the Consequences of Its Ideas,” Reviews in American History 36 (2008), 456-467; Jerome Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) 98-128. Himmelstein, a sociologist, used the phrase “moral traditionalism” to describe the fundamentalist reaction to public secularization. Himmelstein downplayed the importance of anti-Communism and support for capitalism in the New Religious Right; See also Paul Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s American Protestantism,” Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s , ed. Bruce Shulman and Julian Zelizer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 29-51.

5The consensus school of historians rose to prominence post-World War II. Consensus historians and political scientists interpreted fundamentalism as a “Revolt

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Against Modernity,” a reaction to the progressive values of Enlightenment rationalism that had become common currency among the American cultural elite. This backlash against modernity combined with status anxiety to create a fundamentalism that was hostile, backward, and anti-intellectual. See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974), 117-136. See also Uta Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76. For the sociological perspective see Seymour Lipset, “The Sources of the Radical Right,” in Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 307-72. Alan Brinkley has noted that consensus historians were equally dismissive of political conservatism. Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Review , 99 (April 1994): 411.

6TonaHangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 20; George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 205, 208, 210-11, 241. Though Marsden attempted to counter or complicate the consensus take on Fundamentalism, he still employed the psychological anxiety theory and the “paranoid style” of Richard Hofstadter; Scott Flipse, “Below-the-Belt Politics,” in David Farber et al., eds., The Conservative Sixties (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). Flipse provides the standard narrative of the New Christian Right – that it was a response to Roe v. Wade ; Darren Dochuk, “Evangelicalism Becomes Southern, Politics Becomes Evangelical: From FDR to Ronald Reagan,” in Mark Noll et al., eds., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present , 2 nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Darren Dochuk offers an alternative explanation for the politicization of evangelicalism. He posits that evangelicals were politicized in response to “the social chaos created by wartime mobilization and the political initiatives undertaken by an expanded government to remedy this condition.” Dochuk is right to note that government expansion alarmed many evangelicals, but his timeframe is tardy. Gresham Machen and McIntire were concerned about the growth of government much earlier.

7Robert Mulholland, “Carl McIntire: The Early Radio Years (1932 to 1955)” (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University, 1984), 17; n.a., “Carl McIntire: Man of Wrath," Trenton Evening Times (July 15, 1969); Lawrence Lucas, “A Study of Carl McIntire: Leading Fundamentalist Minister and Conservative Political Spokesman,” (MA thesis, Glassboro State College, 1971), x, 16. Lucas's thesis has little historiographical value. But it is interesting that in Lucas’s interviews with McIntire, McIntire did not mention his father's mental illness; Stephen D. Crocco and Robert Benedetto, “Carl McIntire: Creeds, Councils, and Controversies,” American Theological Library Association Proceedings (2004): 2, http://libweb.ptsem.edu/collections/exhibits/mcintire/McIntire.aspx

8D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 63, 94; Hart's biography of Machen is head and shoulders above the

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competition, especially his interrogation of how Machen thought and what he believed; Gresham Machen, “What Fundamentalism Stands for Now,” New York Times (21 June 1925). Machen did not like the label of fundamentalism, finding it “distasteful” because it implied membership in “some strange new sect,” but he acceded to it in the sense that he was certainly opposed to modernism which made him a fundamentalist “of the most pronounced type.”; Carl McIntire, Modern Tower of Babel (Collingswood, New Jersey: Christian Beacon Press, 1949), 166-167.

9Daniel Walker Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System,” The Journal of American History 77, no. 4 (March 1991): 1235-1236.

10 The 1910 statement had five doctrinal planks: the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the authenticity of Christ’s miracles, and the inerrancy of the Bible; C. Allyn Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism: Seven Biographical Stories (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 151-52, 181, 208. Using terminology more familiarly used to describe a national political convention, Russell reported that Bryan lost on the third ballot.

11 Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism , 152-55. Stevenson’s blocking of Machen’s appointment is similar to the games played by the Speaker of the House of Representatives when awarding or withholding prize committee assignments. The fundamentalist chosen by the student association was Robert Dick Wilson who was chosen over Charles Erdman. Erdman had been the faculty advisor for the entire twenty years previous; Machen's vocal opposition to Prohibition also did nothing to endear him to Stevenson and denominational leaders like Charles Erdman who were ardent Prohibitionists; Hart, Defending the Faith , 120-21.

12 D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith , 121, 126. Thompson was the President of Ohio State University and the Moderator of the PCUSA in 1926. Like Stevenson and Erdman, Thompson was also a proponent of Prohibition. “Furthermore, his first act as moderator had been to assert "approval and sympathy with the Eighteenth Amendment and the enforcement of the Volstead Act.”

13 John Foster Dulles was also the defense counsel in Harry Emerson Fosdick's church trial in 1924. The fundamentalists won the battle by ousting Fosdick, but they had made an influential enemy. Most work on Dulles focuses on his career as Secretary of State. For more on Dulles's early years, see Ronald Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York: The Free Press, 1982); I chose to use the terms “fundamentalist” and “conservative” throughout the paper to distinguish between those clergymen who were both theologically conservative and militant from those who were theologically conservative but never consistently aligned with the fundamentalist party and stayed within the denomination once the fundamentalists were forced out; Carl McIntire, The Rise of The Tyrant: Controlled Economy vs. Private Enterprise (Collingswood, New Jersey: Christian Beacon Press, 1945), 206.

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14 Carl McIntire to Peter Stam, Jr., n.d. Carl McIntire Collection, Presbyterian Church of America Historical Center, St. Louis, Missouri. http://www.pcahistory.org/documents/mcintireauto.pdf

15 Carl McIntire to J. Gresham Machen, August 22, 1933, file 1933-34 General Correspondence Ma-Me, Gresham Machen Papers, Westminster Theological Seminary Library, Glenside, Pennsylvania; n.a., “Pastor to Assail Pearl Buck Here: Machen Will Speak at Point Breeze Church,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (20 May 1933); Disgusted by the controversy, Buck resigned from the mission board anyways in 1933. Despite Machen's vehement opposition in 1933, Buck wrote him a tribute after his untimely death in 1937. Pearl Buck, “Tribute to Dr. Machen,” The New Republic (20 January 1937); For more on Buck as well as a glimpse into the mindset of theologically liberal missionaries during the 1930s, see Grant Wacker, “Pearl S. Buck and the Waning of the Missionary Impulse,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture , 72, no. 4 (December 2003): 852-874.

16 Hart, Defending the Faith , 153; Carl McIntire to Addison B. Collins, September 29, 1934, file 1934 General Correspondence L-Mac, Gresham Machen Papers, Westminster Theological Seminary Library, Glenside, Pennsylvania.

17 Ibid., 154; Some fundamentalists were less willing to attribute the invalidated transfer to clerical error. For a detailed fundamentalist account of the proceedings, see http://www.americanpresbyterianchurch.org/machen%27s_trial.htm ; The new denomination was initially known as the Presbyterian Church of America, but a civil court ruled that the name was too similar to that of the PCUSA.

18 D. G. Hart, “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist? J. Gresham Machen, Cultural Modernism, and Conservative Protestantism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 612-13, 616-17; Hart, Defending the Faith , 45-46, 136-137. As noted earlier, Machen's opposition to Prohibition earned him enmity from modernists and fundamentalists alike; I use the label “libertarian” for sake of clarity even though its use is anachronistic. Machen would have been more likely to think of himself as a “classical liberal.” But it was during this time period that being “liberal” stopped meaning identification with the classical liberal tradition traced back through Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Jackson. The label was co- opted by social liberals like Leonard Hobhouse, Lester Frank Ward, and John Maynard Keynes. For a brief analysis of the evolution of “liberalism,” see William Novak, review of Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America, by James Henretta, Law and History Review 24, no. 1 (Spring 2006).

19 Hart, Defending the Faith , 12-14. Machen believed that the Civil War was primarily a struggle over states' rights. Hart, “When is a Fundamentalist a Modernist?”, 616-617; Carl McIntire to Peter Stam, Jr., n.d. Carl McIntire Collection, Presbyterian Church of America Historical Center, St. Louis, Missouri; McIntire's grandfather may

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have been a provisioner for the Confederate Army operating in Oklahoma and Arkansas; n.a., Who is Carl McIntire? A Testimony to Christ and a Witness for Freedom (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1968): 2.

20 Howe, “The Evangelical Movement,” 1220-1221, 1223; See also Robert Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Voting, Values, Cultures,” Religion and American Politics , eds. Mark Noll and Luke Harlow (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2007): 145-168; Louise Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830-1890 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986): 5-6, qtd. in Howe, “The Evangelical Movement,” 1233.

21 Howe, “The Evangelical Movement,” 1226, 1229.Howe borrowed the “core” and “periphery” conceptualization of nineteenth century American political culture from Ronald P. Formisano; Carl McIntire, Twentieth Century Reformation , 3rd ed. (Collingswood, New Jersey: Christian Beacon Press, 1946): 208-209. McIntire particularly admired the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod for their stand against theological modernism.

22 Hart, “When is a Fundamentalist a Modernist?,” 614; Hart, Defending the Faith , 145-46, 156-157. During a 1933 debate between Machen and Robert Speer, the modernist head of the PCUSA Board of Missions, Speer bragged that his great-great-grandfather had voted for the Constitution at the Convention in 1787.

23 Hart, Defending the Faith , 112-113; The idea that modernists were not orthodox Christians was the thesis of Machen's 1923 book Christianity and Liberalism .

24 Gresham Machen, n.d , file 1935-36 Appeal to the Synod of New Jersey, Gresham Machen Papers, Westminster Theological Seminary Library; McIntire, Twentieth Century Reformation , 4-5, 46; Carl McIntire, September 29, 1934, file 1934 General Correspondence L-Mac, Gresham Machen Papers, Westminster Theological Seminary Library.

25 McIntire, Twentieth Century Reformation , 8-9.

26 n.a., “Militant Pastor Yields His Church,” Philadelphia Bulletin (28 March 1938). McIntire claimed that 1200 of the 1275 members of the church left with him; For the full story of how fundamentalists rebuilt their institutions and organizations during the 1930s-1950s see Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); See also George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1987) ; Because of the anti-denominationalist sentiment prevalent among fundamentalists, their new networks often coalesced around Bible colleges. See Chapter 10 in Virginia Brereton, Training God's Army: The American Bible School, 1880-1940 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990): 139-154; Lucas,

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“A Study of Carl McIntire,” 52, 55, 84. The Bible Presbyterian Church split several times after the mid-1950s because of McIntire's inability to play second fiddle. ACCC general secretary John Millheim described McIntire's leadership style thus: “Let us reason together and do it my way.”

27 Matthew 5:10; The “honor roll” of faith is in Hebrews 11; Hofstadter, Anti- intellectualism in American Life , 135; McIntire, The Rise of The Tyrant, 217-218.

28 The Christian Beacon 10, no. 5 (8 March 1945): 4; CB 6, no. 32 (18 September 1941): 1. Even so, McIntire complained that “it is not American that outstanding Gospel preachers who proclaim the message of God’s grace which made America great and free should be compelled to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for radio time, while it is given free to others.”; The process by which preachers like Carl McIntire and Charles Fuller annually raised millions of dollars in mostly small contributions may have prepared evangelicals to donate in similar fashion for politically conservative causes during the 1970s and 80s.

29 Hangen, Redeeming the Dial, 25-26, 130. Redeeming the Dial is an excellent overview of Fundamentalists’ use of the radio from the 1920s-1950s; See also Douglas Carl Abrams, Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001); For an overview of Fundamentalist broadcasting during the 1960s and 1970s that focuses on Carl McIntire see Heather Hendershot, “God’s Angriest Man: Carl McIntire, Cold War Fundamentalism, and Right-Wing Broadcasting,” American Quarterly 59, no. 2 (June 2007): 381. McIntire’s radio station WXUR was forced off the radio by the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, a use of government fiat power to ensure that both sides of controversial political issues be presented on the radio or television. McIntire’s “case forced examination of competing speech interests, and the Fundamentalist radio audience lost to the majority, who found Fundamentalist speech repugnant. Any serious examination of American media and legal history, then, must consider McIntire’s case as an example of censorship in the name of fairness”; For an exhaustive look at McIntire's early radio ministry, see Mulholland, “Carl McIntire: The Early Radio Years,” 110.

30 CB 11, no. 11 (25 April 1946): 4; CB 12, no. 21 (3 July 1947): 1. McIntire’s language in his appeals to his readers is reminiscent of the salutation from a Pauline epistle: “This urgent appeal is to you, a lover of Christ, to write letters now to your Senators and to your Representatives…”; CB 10, no. 37 (18 October 1945): 1; CB 10, no. 11 (19 April 1945): 3; The manner in which religious and political elites restricted fundamentalist access to speech in order to maintain the consensus evokes Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. See Antonio Gramsci, Joseph Buttigieg ed., Prison Notebooks (New York City: New York University Press, 1992).

31 CB 10, no. 8 (29 March 1945): 3; CB 11, no. 12 (2 May 1946): 4.

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32 Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein, Danger on the Right (New York: Random House, 1964): 111-112. Forster and Epstein were representatives of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and decidedly hostile toward McIntire. Still, they visited his offices and saw a map that McIntire kept to keep track of stations broadcasting his show. They reported 577 stations in total, including these specific counts: MA 2, CT, 3 NY 4, SC 17, MS, 19, GA 19, AL 20, CA 23, PA 24, FL 26, TX 27; The percentages were calculated from numbers given by the US Bureau of the Census. Campbell Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990,” Population Division Working Paper 27 (June 1998), http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html

33 Randall Balmer, “Fundamentalist with Flair,” Christianity Today (21 May 2002), http://www.ctlibrary.com/ct/2002/may21/7.52.html ; CB 1, no. 13 (7 May 1936): 4; CB 2, no. 20 (24 June 1937): 4.

34 CB 3, no. 1 (10 February 1938): 4; McIntire, The Rise of The Tyrant, 155; Carl McIntire, Author of Liberty (Collingswood, New Jersey: Christian Beacon Press, 1946), 71; Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 178. Ribuffo argued that one of the distinctions between the Old and New Right was that the Old Right had ties to fascism and anti-Semitism although the foes of the Old Right “often exaggerated both its power and its Axis connections.” McIntire’s strident opposition to fascism and anti-Semitism place him outside the Old Right so defined. Thus I propose that historians should avoid the facile, clean distinction between the Old and New Rights. During the 1930s fundamentalist fellow travelers like Gerald B. Winrod and Carl McIntire could sometimes embrace contradictory political beliefs; McIntire also distrusted Mussolini and published a number of articles critical of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

35 McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant , 155; William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 64; For a scholarly discussion of the links between communism and fascism, see James A. Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, California: Stanford University, 2009). Gregor argues that fascism and communism share a common intellectual heritage.

36 CB 2, no. 44 (9 December 1937): 4; CB 2, no. 21 (1 July 1937): 1; CB 6, no. 15 (22 May 1941): 6; CB 6, no. 28 (21 August 1941): 2; When I first approached this paper, communism, in my mind, was the Goth kid wandering around the high school cafeteria with a t-shirt that read “Don’t Blame Me; I voted for Trotsky.” While today it is hard to take the post-War anti-Communist hysteria seriously, it is vital that we attempt to enter into the mindset of the time. A more resonant contemporary example might be the anti- Islamic furor post-9/11, though by 2009 even that mindset has started to become alien.

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37 CB 5, no. 27 (15 August 1940): 3-6; CB 11, no. 29 (29 August 1946): 1; CB 6, no. 28 (21 August 1941): 6; CB 10, no. 26 (2 August 1945): 1; CB 11, no. 22 (11 July 1946): 1; CB 11, no. 23 (18 July 1946): 1; CB 6, no. 35 (9 October 1941): 4. McIntire’s reflexive distrust of communism caused him to caution his readers in 1941 at the beginning of the US involvement in World War II, “If Hitler is stopped in Russia, and Russia comes forth victorious, Russia is going to say, ‘Our men died. We gave the major support. Now we must determine the set-up in Europe.’” The Yalta Conference certainly would have been more exciting had McIntire been in attendance; Until the Soviet archives were opened beginning in the 1990s, it was common for academics to make fun of McIntire’s communist paranoia. But recent archival research has begun to uncover the extent of Soviet control of the Orthodox and Protestant churches in Russia. Some ecumenical leaders have even apologized for dismissing McIntire’s allegations out of hand. See Richard Mouw, “You’re Right, Dr. McIntire!” Christianity Today (21 May 2002).

38 CB 13, no. 11 (22 April 1948): 1; CB 13, no. 1 (12 February 1948): 4; Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason: Dumbing Down and the Future of Democracy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 96; McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 61, 103-105. McGirr also mentions Bob Wells, an Orange County pastor and anti-communist, who was a member of McIntire’s ACCC. McGirr has written about the impact of evangelical anti- communists on the development of conservatism in Orange County, CA, yet she was able to devote only a few pages to a topic that deserves its own monograph.; “Crusader Schwarz,” Time (9 February 1962), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,938304-2,00.html (2 May 2009); Toronto Baptist Seminary, where T. T. Shields was president, awarded McIntire an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 1949. Bob Jones University followed suit with a Doctor of Letters in 1953. Mulholland, “Carl McIntire: The Early Radio Years,” 19.

39 McIntire made no mention of McCarthy in the Christian Beacon through 1953 though the House Un-American Activities Committee garnered some attention. McCarthy’s Roman Catholicism may have discouraged McIntire from being a big fan.

40 CB 3, no. 43 (1 December 1938): 3; McIntire, The Rise of The Tyrant, vii.

41 CB 11, no. 14 (16 May 1946): 1; While researching this topic I discovered that McIntire’s stance on labor appealed to my primary school educated grandfather who was a meat cutter who attended the Bible Presbyterian Church of Collingswood. My grandfather had debilitating asthma and blamed the union closed shop system for keeping him from easily finding full-time employment. Before I knew about this personal connection I had been prepared to include in the paragraph this phrase: “This fine distinction was probably more popular with the small business owners in McIntire’s largely middle-class congregation.”; CB 12, no. 10 (17 April 1947): 1; CB 2, no. 21 (1 July 1937): 1; McIntire, The Rise of The Tyrant, 70; McIntire, Author of Liberty , 84, 139.

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42 McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant , 4, 58-59, 61-62, 69-70. The first plank of the “Social Creed” called for the “subordination of speculation and the profit motive to the creative and cooperative spirit.” McIntire quoted from Article 4, Chapter 1 of the 1936 Constitution of the USSR.

43 John Soffer, “The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism,” The Business History Review 75, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 776, 781. The NAM is perhaps best known for one of its members during the late-40s: Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society; Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy , 15.

44 Tedlow, “The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations during the New Deal,” 34, 37; McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant , xi; Prentis and McIntire also spoke to some of the same civic groups, like the National Society of Magna Charta Dames.

45 CB 2, no. 20 (24 June 1937): 3; CB 1, no. 5 (12 March 1936): 5; McIntire, Author of Liberty , 167-170. McIntire crunched the numbers to point out that the $2 billion given in agricultural subsidies in 1946 was equivalent to half of the total federal budget in 1929; McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant , 16, 48; Hart, Defending the Faith, 143. Machen also shared McIntire's distaste for New Deal programs. When FDR requested support for Social Security legislation from prominent clergymen, Machen responded by writing an op-ed for the New York Tribune in opposition; McIntire, Twentieth Century Reformation , 144.

46 McIntire, Twentieth Century Reformation , 147.

47 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom , 48-49. These quotes are from Hayek's preface to the 1956 edition; McIntire, Author of Liberty, 33, 144; McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant , 25-26, 146. McIntire quoted from Chapter Ten, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” which is page 166 of the edition used in this paper; McIntire sold The Road to Serfdom in his church bookstore.

48 Hart, Defending the Faith , 4. Machen and Mencken were also both from Baltimore; Hart argues that Machen was a true modernist like Mencken, while those called “theological modernists” were actually Victorian sentimentalists. For his full argument, see Hart, “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist?,” 605-633; See note 2 for John Moser's biography of Flynn. A short synopsis of Flynn's life is also provided by Moser on his website. http://personal.ashland.edu/~jmoser1/flynn.html ; John T. Flynn, The Road Ahead: America's Creeping Revolution (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1949): 113-114, 119. Flynn, like McIntire, singled out Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam for especial criticism, noting that Oxnam pooh-poohed claims that Stalin had allowed millions of peasants to starve during the collectivization of Ukrainian farms; Carl McIntire, The Truth About the Federal Council of Churches and the Kingdom of God (Collingswood, New Jersey: Christian Beacon Press, 1950): 3.

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49 McIntire, Author of Liberty , 121; McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant , 190-191; CB 1, no. 26 (13 August 1936): 4; CB 3, no. 43 (1 December 1938): 2; CB 11, no. 18 (13 June 13 1946): 1; CB 11, no. 10 (13 April 1944): 3.

50 CB 2, no. 1 (11 February 1937): 6; CB 2, no. 21 (1 July 1937): 1.

51 CB 2, no. 31 (9 September 1937): 4; In 1962 McIntire looked for a new venue for the annual conferences and purchased the Admiral Hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, renaming it the Christian Admiral; CB 10, no. 4 (1 March 1945): 1, 3; For an account of Joseph Eastman and the ODT see Robert D. Cuff, “United States Mobilization and Railroad Transportation: Lessons in Coordination and Control, 1917-1945,” Journal of Military History 53, no. 1 (January 1989): 33-50.

52 CB 4, no. 32 (14 September 1939): 2; CB 2, no. 43 (2 December 1937): 3. This was a Thanksgiving sermon in which McIntire was expressing his thankfulness to God for the American system.

53 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture , 210; CB 3, no. 38 (27 October 1938): 3; McIntire, The Truth About the Federal Council of Churches, 2; KJV Genesis 12:3 – “I will…curse him that curseth thee.”; CB 13, no. 9 (8 April 1948): 1. McIntire took umbrage when the Anti-Defamation League accused him of anti-Semitism. The accusations appear to have been based on guilt by association because McIntire cooperated with at least one anti-Semitic Fundamentalist. See Chapter Six, Forster and Epstein, Danger on the Right .

54 CB 11, no. 39 (7 November 1946): 4; CB 2, no. 35 (7 October 1937): 1.

55 CB 1, no. 52 (4 February 1937): 7; CB 5, no. 22 (11 July 1940): 1; CB 3, no. 48 (5 January 1939): 2; CB 13, no. 26 (5 August 1948): 5.

56 CB 5, no. 41 (28 November 1940): 8; For an example of a southern Fundamentalist with ties to the Ku Klux Klan see Daniel L. Turner, Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 75 th Anniversary Edition (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 2001). Turner’s book is an institutional apology, but he still points out that Bob Jones Sr. had the support of the KKK in his evangelistic campaigns and that Bibb Graves, the Governor-elect of Alabama and member of the Klan, spoke at the school’s ground-breaking ceremony in 1927; CB 13, no. 9 (8 April 1948): 1; CB 13, no. 25 (29 July 1948): 1.

57 CB 9, no. 14 (11 May 1944): 1; It may be noteworthy that during the 1930s-50s McIntire never protested actions to discourage State discrimination against blacks. While it is clear that McIntire was ambivalent about race at best, that silence implies that his justification for opposing State-enforced private anti-discrimination measures was honest.

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58 Mark Noll, One Nation Under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 38; Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy , 50; Barry Goldwater, “Senator Barry Goldwater, Congressional Record (1964 June),” Congressional Record 103, no. 6 (June 17, 1964).

59 CB 10, no. 7 (22 March 1945): 1; CB 3, no. 39 (3 November 1938); CB 12, no. 36 (16 October 1947): 1.

60 CB 10, no. 37 (18 October 1945): 1; Intellectual historians may here recognize echoes from the idealized Habermasian public sphere. Fundamentalists were denied access to the public sphere because their speech failed the acid test of Enlightenment rationality; It is ironic that Carl McIntire, an arch anti-communist, was censored in like manner as leftist groups, some of which were sympathetic to Communism. For example, see the treatment of Josephine Baker in Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

61 CB 1, no. 1 (13 February 1936): 1; CB 4, no. 49 (11 January 1940): 6; CB 6, no. 32 (18 September, 1941): 4; CB 10, no. 21 (28 June 1945): 1.

62 CB 11, no. 11 (25 April 1946): 4; CB 10, no. 41 (15 November 1945): 1; CB 12, no. 5 (13 March 1947): 4; CB 11, no. 19 (20 June 1946): 1; CB 10, no. 16 (24 May 1945): 3.

63 CB 6, no. 35 (9 October 1941): 3; CB 6, no. 43 (4 December 1941): 4; McIntire, Author of Liberty, 27. KJV Matthew 22:21; CB 13, no. 7 (25 March 1948): 4. The Supreme Court case was McCollum v. Board of Education, School District 71 (1948); CB 12, no. 7 (20 March 1947); CB 12, no. 2 (20 February 1947): 1; CB 11, no. 15 (23 May 1946): 6; McIntire’s support for the rights of atheists in the public school system may seem incongruous, but he also backed the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to choose not to salute the American flag in public schools. Even though he considered the JW’s a cult, he defended their First Amendment right; Mulholland, “Carl McIntire: The Early Radio Years,” 73.

64 CB 11, no. 31 (12 September 1946): 4; McGirr, Suburban Warriors , 105. Historian Lisa McGirr has touched on that story, but more work is needed to fully explain this phenomenon.

65 CB 11, no. 1 (14 February 1946): 4. This issue of the Beacon marked the paper’s tenth anniversary with an editorial titled “Purpose Unchanged.” Since the paper “never endorsed any political candidate or political parties,” it had “stayed out of politics.” McIntire defined politics as partisanship. Thus so long as he did not back a particular politician or party he believed that he was had not transgressed the political boundary; Jerome Himmelstein described this fundamentalist conflation of theology and politics: “The civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate progressively blurred the line between morality and politics.” I agree with Himmelstein, but I argue that this blurring

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began much earlier during the denominational politics of the 1920s-30s. I also prefer to use the term “theology” instead of “morality” because McIntire would have been more likely to use that term and, at least in theory, morality is predicated upon theology. What a person believes about their God informs their moral order. See Himmelstein, To the Right, 125.

66 Lynn Dumenil, “The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy: Antistatism and Education Reform in the 1920s,” The Journal of American History 77, no. 2 (September 1990): 508; McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant , xi-xii.

67 Michael Duffy, “Jerry Falwell, Political Innovator,” Time Magazine (15 May 2007); For a detailed examination of fundamentalist rhetoric, see Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University, 2000).

68 The Cold War expansion of the military and the State precipitated a split between libertarians and conservatives who up until this point had been fellow-travelers. The most famous debate between a libertarian and a conservative regarding the proper role of government in the Cold War was between Russell Kirk and Frank Meyer. Both were editors of the magazine National Review . Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy , 22-26; Soffer, “The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism,” 776.

69 Hart, Defending the Faith, 137-138. During the 1930s Pew had donated money to the Sentinels of the Republic, an anti-Prohibition and anti-statist organization which counted Gresham Machen as a member; Philip Jenkins, The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999): 179; Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 83, 98.

70 Douglas Martin, “No Headline,” The New York Times (22 March 2002); Forster and Epstein, Danger on the Right, 74-75, 107; James Morris, The Preachers (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973): 291.

71 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 100-102; One fourteen year old kid, Gary North, was so impressed by Schwarz's lectures that he donated $100 of his hard-earned savings to the CACC. North later worked as a Congressional staffer for Ron Paul, wrote articles for libertarian advocacy groups like the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (now the Intercollegiate Studies Institute) and the Foundation for Economic Freedom, and was a founder of Christian Reconstructionism along with his father-in-law R. J. Rushdoony. See Gary North, “It All Began With Fred Schwarz,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north145.html (16 December 2002); For Wells, see Dochuk, “Evangelicalism Becomes Southern,” Religion and American Politics, 310-311.

72 Schaeffer's move from Westminster to Faith is an ironic parallel to McIntire's move with Machen from Princeton to Westminster. Both were third year students;

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Michael Hamilton, “The Dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer,” Christianity Today 41, no. 3 (3 March 1997); Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008): xi, 7, 13. 73 Hamilton, “The Dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer.” For the Daniel Walker Howe reference, see note 21.

74 Heather Hendershot, “God’s Angriest Man: Carl McIntire, Cold War Fundamentalism, and Right-Wing Broadcasting,” American Quarterly 59, no. 2 (June 2007): 385, 390.

75 Jenkins, The Cold War at Home, 3; Temple University’s David Harrington Watt is currently writing a book for release by Cornell fleshing out the transformation of the definition of fundamentalism from militantly orthodox American Protestantism to global religious fanaticism. He taught me about the idea of “fundamentalism as a dangerous other” and for that, and a thousand other acts of kindness, I owe him more than I can express in words.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I have included only those sources directly cited in my thesis. Additional works dealing with tangential topics can be found in the endnotes. ……………………………………………………………………………………………… Balmer, Randall. “Fundamentalist with Flair.” Christianity Today (21 May 2002).

Benedetto, Robert and Stephen Crocco. “Carl McIntire: Creeds, Councils, and Controversies.” Proceedings of the American Theological Library Association (2004).

Boyer, Paul. “The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s American Protestantism.” In Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s , edited by Bruce Shulman and Julian Zelizer, 29-51. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Carpenter, Joel. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism . New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Critchlow, Donald T. The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Dochuk, Darren. “Evangelicalism Becomes Southern, Politics Becomes Evangelical: From FDR to Ronald Reagan.” In Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present , edited by Luke Harlow and Mark Noll, 297-325. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Duffy, Michael. “Jerry Falwell, Political Innovator.” Time Magazine (15 May 2007).

Dumenil, Lynn. “The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy: Antistatism and Education Reform in the 1920s.” The Journal of American History 77, no. 2 (September 1990): 499- 524.

Epstein, Benjamin and Arnold Forster. Danger on the Right . New York: Random House, 1964.

Flipse, Scott. “Below-the-Belt Politics.”In The Conservative Sixties , edited by David Farber and Jeff Roche, 127-141. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.

Flynn, John T. The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution . New York: The Devin- Adair Company, 1949.

Goldwater, Barry. Speech. Congressional Record 103, no. 6 (17 June 1964).

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Hamilton, Michael. “The Dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer.” Christianity Today 41, no. 3 (3 March 1997).

Hangen, Tona. Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Hankins, Barry. Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America . Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008.

Hart, D. G. Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

____. “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist? J. Gresham Machen, Cultural Modernism, and Conservative Protestantism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 605-633.

Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents . Edited by Bruce Caldwell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Hendershot, Heather. “God’s Angriest Man: Carl McIntire, Cold War Fundamentalism, and Right-Wing Broadcasting.” American Quarterly 59, no. 2 (June 2007): 373- 396.

Himmelstein, Jerome. To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism . Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life . New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974.

Howe, Daniel Walker. “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System.” The Journal of American History 77, no. 4 (March 1991): 1216-1239.

Inboden, William. Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Jacoby, Susan. The Age of American Unreason: Dumbing Down and the Future of Democracy. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.

Jenkins, Philip. The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945-1960 . Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

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Lucas, Lawrence. “A Study of Carl McIntire: Leading Fundamentalist Minister and Conservative Political.” Master’s thesis, Glassboro State College, 1971.

Machen, Gresham. “What Fundamentalism Stands for Now.” New York Times (21 June 1925).

____. Papers.Westminster Theological Seminary Library, Glenside, Pennsylvania.

Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Martin, Douglas. “No Headline.” The New York Times (22 March 2002).

McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

McIntire, Carl. “A Certain Trumpet.”Sermon, church service at Collingswood Presbyterian Church, Collingswood, NJ, October 1, 1933.

____. Author of Liberty . Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1946.

____. Modern Tower of Babel . Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1949.

____. Papers. Presbyterian Church of America Historical Center, St. Louis.

____. The Rise of the Tyrant: Controlled Economy vs. Private Enterprise . Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1945.

____. The Truth About the Federal Council of Churches and the Kingdom of God . Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1950.

____. Twentieth Century Reformation . 3 rd ed. Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1946.

Morris, James. The Preachers . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973.

Mulholland, Robert. “Carl McIntire: The Early Radio Years (1932 to 1955).” Master’s thesis, Bowling Green State University, 1984.

Muow, Richard. “You’re Right, Dr. McIntire!” Christianity Today (21 May 2002).

Noll, Mark. One Nation Under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America . New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

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Norrell, Robert. “Modern Conservatism and the Consequences of Its Ideas.” Reviews in American History 36 (2008): 456-467.

Ribuffo, Leo. The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.

Russell, C. Allyn. Voices of American Fundamentalism: Seven Biographical Stories . Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.

Soffer, John. “The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism.” The Business History Review 75, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 775-805.

Stevenson, Louise. Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830-1890 . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Tedlow, Richard. “The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations During the New Deal.” The Business History Review 50, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 24- 45.

The Christian Beacon . Collingswood, New Jersey. Accessed at Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

Who is Carl McIntire? A Testimony to Christ and a Witness for Freedom . Collingswood, New Jersey: Christian Beacon Press, 1968.

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