Truth
Good Christians
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 04 April 2002
- Thou Shalt not Kill except by the million! Carl McIntire
Thou Shalt not Kill except by the million!
It was not the sound of Afghan mountains falling apart from 15,000 pound bombs heard recently, but the sound of loud trumps in heaven as the hosts welcomed a stalwart of the Christian Right to their ranks! The Reverend Carl McIntire had arrived where he always knew he would be. The son of a Presbyterian minister and grandson of Christian missionaries to the Choctaw Indians, McIntire left Princeton Theological Seminary before he graduated, protesting at liberal theology. Even in those days he knew that “liberal” meant “free” and his Christianity wanted nothing to do with that, except as a slogan:
A man who will not use his freedom to defend his freedom does not deserve his freedom.
It is not a slogan that appears in the bible, but McIntire had his own ideas and it was up to God to agree with them.
He transferred to the Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and studied under J Gresham Machen, being ordained in 1933 into the Presbyterian Church of the USA (PCUSA). In 1935, both McIntire and Machen were thrown out of the church by an ecclesiastical court for “sowing dissension within the church.” Such a problem is a minor irritation to any Christian, because there are another 20,000 or so Christian sects that they can approach with their God-given talents, and if none will accept them, they just start a new one.
The best option for these evangelical gents was to start a new one! In 1936, they formed a new Presbyterian Church of America. The PCUSA did not like the implication that these worthies were still associated with them and sued, forcing them to call themselves the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. McIntire insisted that good Christians did not drink, despite the plain use of wine by his incarnate God, Jesus, in the gospels, and caused a bitter dispute with Machen who could not stand the strain and died in January 1937, but even then McIntire was not satisfied and he and 12(!) other pastors left later in the year to form the Bible Presbyterian Church.
Well financed from some source, supposedly wealthy right wingers, McIntire continued to sow dissension within the Christian community, setting up several organizations during the war with right wing objectives, such as getting rabid right wing chaplains into the military instead of liberal ones (the American Council of Christian Churches, ACCC), and setting up an opposition to the World Council of Churches (the International Council of Christian Churches, ICCC).
In 1955, however, members of his church accused him of dishonesty, something that we all know Christians cannot be, and McIntire was enraged. He had been inflating the membership figures of the ACCC and the General Assembly of the Bible Presbyterian Church voted to leave the tainted organization. McIntire, true to his democratic record, threw his rattle out of the pram and stormed off to form a rival Bible Presbyterian Church.
McIntire now came into his own, setting up a Twentieth Century Reformation Hour of preaching which was eventually syndicated on 600 radio stations mainly in the southern and mid-western states. Favourite targets were communists, civil rights, evolution, fluoridated water, sex education, and homosexuals, but most successful Christian churches were also high on his hit list unless it was the one he had founded. That was OK! The Southern Baptists were “soggy compromisers” to McIntire, and Billy Graham was preaching apostasy!
To prove he was utterly cracked and in the same category as the Heaven’s Gate sect, he proclaimed that comet Kahoutek signalled the Parousia of Christ, and set up a panel to decide how to recognize UFO flight crew from Revelation.
The broadcasts attracted 4000 letters a day and donations of $4 million a year, showing that had Christ lived in modern America, he need not have been a poor man. With this money and additional borrowings, McIntire bought up chains of hotels and mansion houses, but his fall was coming and soon he was not paying taxes or repaying debts. Perhaps his was a secret plan to make everyone poor and be like Jesus!
McIntire had no concern for God’s own commandments such as the one that says, “thou shalt not kill,” because he advocated nuking the Soviet Union, just as that other pious Christian George W Bush advocates nuking Iraq. These Christians think the commandment is “thou shalt not kill unless thou killest millions.” McIntire was so certain he was doing God’s work in advocationg a nuclear strike that he boasted, “Thank God, I will get a view of the Battle of Armageddon from the grandstand seats of the heavens.”
The fall came when the Federal Communications Commission, in 1971, refused to renew the license of a Pennsylvania radio station broadcasting his sermons because it was not allowing a right of reply to those McIntire attacked. The result was that 200 radio stations quickly opted for caution and to retain their broadcasting license, and dropped his programme, and after a while only one New Jersey station still carried it. Deciding to try pirate radio, he set up in an old minesweeper but straight away got pulled up by the Coast Guard service. Obviously no one had a right to reply.
Now a good deal poorer, McIntire was no less undemocratic, and again falling out with his church in 1984, set up yet another one, The Bible Presbyterian Church Collingswood Synod. By now McIntire was manifestly incoherent in his sermonizing, but refused to retire on a full pension when the church elders offered it. He was 90. The elders had no choice but to evict him, and McIntire split again, holding his bizarre sermons in his own home. Meanwhile he was threatening to sue the Prssbyters to force them to reinstate him.
His god, whichever it was, intervened.
