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Until the end—his death at age 95 on March 19—fundamentalist empire-builder Carl McIntire was a tireless opponent of theological liberalism and political totalitarianism. No other figure in 20th-century fundamentalism so defined himself by identifying his enemies. His worldview, like that of other fundamentalists and not a few evangelicals, was unrelievedly dualistic—good versus evil, conservative versus liberal—making it impossible to countenance ambiguity, theological or otherwise, or to discern shades of gray.

In an interview for Christianity Today just months before his death, I asked McIntire to identify his enemies. "The liberals," McIntire shot back. Then he sounded a note of defiance: "But they can't stop me!"

For nearly three-quarters of a century, the irrepressible McIntire used Collingswood, New Jersey, as a launch pad for firing opinions on matters ranging from the Westminster Confession of Faith to the Communist Manifesto. At the height of his influence during the Cold War, McIntire's empire extended from Collingswood, the home of his Bible Presbyterian Church and Faith Christian School, to Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (Faith Theological Seminary), Cape May, New Jersey (Shelton College), and Pasadena, California (Highlands College).

He ran a conference center in Florida and had designs for a theme park there that would have celebrated America's military campaign in Vietnam. McIntire's radio program, 20th Century Reformation Hour, reached homes throughout North America, until his bombast and blatant violation of the fairness doctrine prompted the Federal Communications Commission to force him off the air.

McIntire's enigmatic, nearly century-long life suggests several interpretations, most of them contradictory and laced with irony. Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and reared in Oklahoma, he aspired to attend Princeton Theological Seminary, yet walked away after two years as a student there. He formed his own competing institutions, then pined for recognition from the very seminary he spurned. He strove to build an empire—a denomination, colleges, a seminary, a council of churches—but those institutions that survived are fading. And he disowned his best and most famous student, Francis A. Schaeffer.

To his critics, and they were legion, McIntire was a disruptive force, a petulant and unrelenting separatist doing damage to the cause of Christian unity. At the slightest provocation he would unleash tirades against a variety of enemies—modernism, communism, evangelicals, the FCC, Christianity Today, the United Nations, the National Council of Churches, and the World Council of Churches—all of which he regarded as the very embodiment of evil.

A consummate showman, McIntire did everything with a flourish. In 1937 he physically led his congregation in Collingswood out of its building to a new location across town. His protests at the assemblies of the World Council of Churches were so common that at the 1991 meeting in Canberra, Australia, church leaders whom he had reviled for decades came out to his solitary picket and greeted him like an old friend: "Hey, Carl, how ya doing?"

McIntire earned a reputation as the P.T. Barnum of American fundamentalism. When his radio station, WXUR, faced closure in 1973 for McIntire's defiance of the FCC's fairness doctrine, he dressed in costume as John Witherspoon. Playing the part of the early Presbyterian leader and signatory of the Declaration of Independence, McIntire conducted an elaborate "funeral" for WXUR and for freedom of speech—complete with a coffin—at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

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May 21 2002, Vol. 46, No. 6