Transnational Fundamentalist Anti-Communism: The International Council of Christian Churches

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