For most of his sixty-year career, the Rev. Carl McIntire was at the center of controversy. The best known and most influential of the fundamentalist radio broadcasters and anticommunists of the Cold War era, his many church and political enemies depicted him as a dangerous far rightist, a racist, or a McCarthyite opportunist engaged in red-baiting for personal profit. Despised and hounded by liberals, revered by fundamentalists and distrusted by the center, he became a lightning rod in the early American culture wars. In this biography McIntire is restored to his proper place as one of the mo ... More

For most of his sixty-year career, the Rev. Carl McIntire was at the center of controversy. The best known and most influential of the fundamentalist radio broadcasters and anticommunists of the Cold War era, his many church and political enemies depicted him as a dangerous far rightist, a racist, or a McCarthyite opportunist engaged in red-baiting for personal profit. Despised and hounded by liberals, revered by fundamentalists and distrusted by the center, he became a lightning rod in the early American culture wars. In this biography McIntire is restored to his proper place as one of the most consequential religious leaders in twentieth-century United States. It traces McIntire from his early twentieth century childhood in Oklahoma to his death in 2002. From his discipleship under J. Gresham Machen during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy through his fifty-year pastorate at Collingswood, New Jersey, and his presidency of the International Council of Christian Churches, McIntire emerges as the most visionary of mid-twentieth-century fundamentalists. A tireless organizer, he left an abiding mark on conservative churches on all continents and pioneeed the public theologies, interfaith alliances, and public pressurizing methods that came to cohere the modern Christian Right in the United States. His life work exposes significant continuities in conservative Christian political activism from 1930s critiques of the New Deal to the post-1960s moral values agenda. Throughout, fundamentalists under McIntire were pivotal as grassroots organizers and populist public theologians.