Abstract
For most of the Cold War, the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC) was the single largest international organization of self-designated fundamentalist or “Bible-believing” Christian churches and parachurch organizations.1 From its creation in 1948 until the emergence in 1975 of the rival World Congress of Fundamentalists, it was the only one of its kind, the sole worldwide information-sharing, coordinating and collaborative agency of fundamentalist Protestants. With nearly four hundred member denominations (by the mid-1980s) in Western Europe and in the Americas, in Southeast Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa and a claimed membership of 55 million, it maintained offices in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and in Collingswood, New Jersey in the United States. On a semi-annual basis, it held international, national and hemispheric conferences, and it published some 34 periodicals in 16 languages in 89 countries, maintained contact with key political decision-makers on all four continents and fostered an extensive network of informants and collaborators, some behind the Iron Curtain.2
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Notes
ICCC press release, 18 September 1985, Box 212, Carl McIntire Manuscript Collection, Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey; Reports and Messages Eight World Congress ICCC Cape May, New Jersey June 13–25, 1973 (Collingswood, NJ: n.p., 1973), pp. 40–3; Jutta Reich, “Twentieth Century Reformation”: Dynamischen Fundamentalismus nach Geschichte und Erscheinung (Marburg/Lahn: N. G. Elwert Verlag 1969), p. 119.
For a summary of McIntire’s career, see Markku Ruotsila, “Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the Christian Right”, Church History 81 (June 2012), pp. 378–407.
The organization is not even mentioned in Dianne Kirby (ed.), Religion and the Cold War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and mentioned only once or twice, only in passing, in each of the following:
David Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia” since 1881 (Cambridge University Press, 2007);
William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011);
Jason Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Carl McIntire, Russia’s Most Effective Fifth Column: A Series of Radio Addresses by Carl McIntire (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1948).
See Harold C. Fey and Stephen Neill (eds), A History of the Ecumenical Movement, vols 2 and 3 (Geneva: WCC, 2004 [1970]).
See John Bolt, A Free Church, a Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper’s American Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001);
James D. Bratt (ed.), Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
McIntire, Author of Liberty (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1945), pp. 26–7, 38–9;
McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant: Controlled Economy vs. Private Enterprise (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1945), pp. xiii, 12–28, 47–8, 181–7.
See A. Warnaar, Jr, “The Welfare State from the Christian Point of View”, Reformation Review 4 (October 1956), pp. 36–44;
Gustaf Beiling, “The Christian’s Responsibility as Citizen”, Reformation Review 3 (July 1956), pp. 233–7.
See Markku Ruotsila, The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism: Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008), pp. 27–32, 171–80.
Hedegård, “Redaktionellt”, För Biblisk Tro 19.4 (1955), pp. 145–7.
Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 12–15, 27–37.
McIntire, The Battle of Bangkok: Second Missionary Journey (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press [1950]), pp. 69–71.
See Erling Jorstad, The Politics of Doomsday: Fundamentalists of the Far Right (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970), pp. 93–6f.
McIntire, “Communism: Threat to Freedom”, Christian Beacon (29 March 1962), p. 2; McIntire, The Double Talk of the State Department (Collingswood, NJ: Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, 1965), pp. 1–4; McIntire to “Dear Radio Friend”, 2 April 1969, Box 73, Billy James Hargis papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
The Testimony of the ICCC, pp. 9–10; Billy James Hargis, My Great Mistake (Green Forrest, AR: New Leaf Press, 1985), pp. 49–60; Hargis, “Remembering the 1950s Bible Balloon Launches”, Christian Crusade (September 1998), pp. 15–18.
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Ruotsila, M. (2014). Transnational Fundamentalist Anti-Communism: The International Council of Christian Churches. In: van Dongen, L., Roulin, S., Scott-Smith, G. (eds) Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388803_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388803_16
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