Markku Ruotsila, who teaches church history at the University of Helsinki, presents a striking thesis in this book: Carl McIntire was the ‘Barry Goldwater’ of the Christian Right. He developed a public theology that merged Reformed, dispensational and free-market themes that provided a basis for the New Christian Right. He employed mass media and organising techniques that taught conservative Evangelicals political advocacy. Indeed, McIntire was one of earliest and most consistent advocates for Evangelical political action from the 1930s on, at a time when Evangelical revivalist movements tended to stick to a more spiritual message.

McIntire had a tempestuous career, starting as a follower of J. Gresham Machen, the dissident conservative leader who left Princeton Theological Seminary in 1929. McIntire parted ways with Machen's new Church a few years later but built his ‘Twentieth Century Reformation Hour’ radio programme into an international ministry and developed a mass circulation magazine, the Christian Beacon. McIntire then founded the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) in 1939 to present a fundamentalist united front in American public life, and then founded the International Council of Christian Churches as a fundamentalist answer to the World Council of Churches. Over the course of his career, however, McIntire was more a splitter than a builder, leaving many riven institutions and relationships in his wake.

Throughout his career McIntire pursued dual points of attack: against doctrinal apostasy and against Communist subversion. He had many thousands of sympathetic listeners and readers among conservative Protestants. McIntire's height of influence came in the 1950s. While Senator McCarthy hunted for Communists in the State Department, McIntire led a campaign against Reds in the Churches. McIntire testified before congressional committees and even visited the White House, but his approach eventually seemed shrill and extreme and his welcome in Washington wore out. Eventually he came under the scrutiny of the FBI.

Emboldened by their neutralising of McCarthy, a cadre of liberal advocacy groups persuaded first the Kennedy and then the Johnson administrations to strike back at the Far Right. McIntire endured years of audits by the Internal Revenue Service for alleged violations of religious tax exemption rules. Meanwhile the Federal Communications Commission investigated his radio station and eventually revoked his licence for violating the ‘Fairness Doctrine’, which mandated that stations offer air time to opposing political views.

The civil rights movement and southern white supremacists’ ‘massive resistance’ to the federal government's enforcement of new laws gave McIntire a new front to engage in the 1960s, but his reputation became tarred with racism. Organising support for the Vietnam War gave McIntire a new burst of currency too, but once again mainstream political action and public sentiment eventually abandoned him and his cadres. These setbacks, coupled with his relentless use of the ACCC for political agitation, finally drove many of his closest fundamentalist allies away. He lost control of this key agency and its constituency when he was forced out in 1970.

In 1970s and 1980s, new issues emerged for McIntire to protest against, even though his influence was greatly diminished. He went after the public schools for mandating sex education but refusing to offer prayers, and he backed the growing Evangelical fight against abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. But McIntire also protested against sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa, which reinforced his reputation as a friend of white supremacists. So just as the New Religious Right was emerging, McIntire was in no position to lead it. Thus began a slow decline and the loss of both his health and the last of his agencies.

Even so, Ruotsila argues, McIntire's influence was considerable. At its height, his radio programme was broadcast over 600 stations. More than 600,000 subscribed to the Christian Beacon. For special campaigns McIntire's agencies cranked out hundreds of thousands of pamphlets. He organised protest rallies and parades with tens of thousands of participants. Relentless letter-writing and personal networking got him invitations to visit the White House and the Pentagon and to testify before Congressional committees. He became a gifted opportunist and agitator, knowing full well how to ‘push the buttons’ of public media and his opponents.

Ruotsila claims that much of the scholarship about the New Christian Right has not fully understood where the movement's patterns of belief and action come from. He shows direct links between McIntire and Jerry Fallwell, D. James Kennedy and Tim LaHaye, who led the Moral Majority. McIntire, the author establishes without a doubt, was the prime mover and progenitor of political fundamentalism.

Ruotsila also dispenses with the too-easy caricatures of McIntire. He digs deep into the sources and patiently follows McIntire's career, connections and communications over more than half a century. This impressive scholarship was made possible by Princeton Theological Seminary's generous archiving of the McIntire papers and by the McIntire family's gracious permission for these papers to be used. But Ruotsila doesn't stop there; he finds files at the FBI, the Billy Graham Center, the Library of Congress, presidential libraries and in a variety of denominational and regional collections. He also read through decades of the Christian Beacon and piles of occasional pamphlets. This book, then, is a scholarly tour de force, offering a calm and judicious look at McIntire's work and world. Its approach is from close in, offering the reader a fine-grained account of McIntire's thought and actions.

This approach has its problems, however, especially when dealing with someone who spent his whole career making controversial accusations. The author simply cannot fact-check every assertion and allegation, but at some points of high drama, one would think, there should be some investigation. McIntire's opponents commonly cried foul at being smeared by tangential associations, quotations out of context and false inferences. But Ruotsila's account lets some charges of questionable veracity pass without comment or investigation. He succeeds in getting very close to McIntire, but this position seems to cause an occasional lapse in perspective.

Even so, this is an important, well-constructed book. It adds a significant chapter to the rise of politicised Evangelicalism, and it establishes the importance of Carl McIntire.