Liberal Intolerance

To most U.S. churchmen, Fundamentalist Carl Mclntire, 58, is an irritating preacher. In radio broadcasts over 617 stations, he accuses the major U.S. churches of being "infiltrated by Communists," assails Episcopal Bishop James Pike and top Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake for distorting the Bible, opposes the civil rights movement and ecumenism. Writes Pennsylvania's Episcopal Bishop Robert DeWitt: Mclntire's "attacks upon the Protestant community, the Roman Catholic Church, the United Nations, and American foreign policy have established him as a negative and divisive force."

Is that reason for trying to muzzle Mclntire? With a classic failure to be tolerant toward people or ideas they oppose, a lot of liberal groups want to mute his voice. More than 40 organizations--including the Greater Philadelphia Council of Churches, the N.A.A.C.P., the Philadelphia chapter of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, and the Roman Catholic weekly Commonweal--asked the FCC to ban the sale of radio station WXUR in Media, Pa., to Mclntire's Faith Theological Seminary in nearby Elkins Park, which trains preachers for his American Council of Christian Churches and other fundamentalist churches.

Ill at Ease. Mclntire obtained copies of the letters, which by law became a matter of public record once the FCC received them, and published a selection of them in his weekly Christian Beacon. The FCC thereupon received 900 more letters, 95% of them urging it to grant the broadcasting license to the seminary. The seminary wants to run the station as a commercial enter prise, but would allocate about five hours a day to religious programs, including Mclntire's daily "20th Century

Reformation Hour," and his appeals for funds, which last year brought in $3,000,000.

Some of the clergymen who asked the FCC to deny Mclntire's seminary a broadcasting license seemingly felt ill at ease. "I must confess that in the interest of fairness this man's point of view should be heard," wrote the Rev. Manuel C. Avila Jr. of the Springfield, Pa., Baptist Church. But Avila thought that Mclntire should not have the right to control the entire broadcasting content of a station. The complaints say that Mclntire is grossly biased and twists facts, but the FCC notes that he offers the individuals he attacks time on his programs to rebut the charges, thus meeting the agency's test of "fairness." The seminary has the legal right to purchase the station, and the FCC is expected to grant it a license within a month.

Offensive, But . . . Commenting on the outcry against Mclntire, the Minneapolis Star wrote: "It is a strange situation when religious and civil rights organizations which are in the forefront of the battle for tolerance behave so intolerantly themselves." The Protestant weekly Christian Century said that it "disagrees with 99% of what Mclntire believes and preaches. His methods are offensive, his goals disreputable and his achievements calamitous. But none of this weighs for or against Mclntire's right to own or control a radio station."

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