Fundamentalism
By C.
T. McIntire
Fundamentalism is a movement that
arose in the United States during and immediately after the First World War in
order to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and to defend it militantly
against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism,
and other isms regarded as harmful to American Christianity. Since then, the
focus of the movement, the meaning of the term, and the ranks of those who
willingly use the term to identify themselves have changed several times.
Fundamentalism has so far gone through four phases of expression while
maintaining an essential continuity of spirit, belief, and method.
Through
the 1920s
The
earliest phase involved articulating what was fundamental to Christianity and
initiating an urgent battle to expel the enemies of orthodox Protestantism from
the ranks of the churches.
The series of twelve volumes called The Fundamentals (1910-15) provided a
wide listing of the enemies, Romanism, socialism, modern philosophy, atheism,
Eddyism, Mormonism, spiritualism, and the like, but above all liberal theology,
which rested on a naturalistic interpretation of the doctrines of the faith,
and German higher criticism and Darwinism, which appeared to undermine the
Bible's authority. The writers of the articles were a broad group from English
speaking North America and the United Kingdom and from many denominations. The
doctrines they defined and defended covered the whole range of traditional
Christian teachings. They presented their criticisms fairly, with careful
argument, and in appreciation of much that their opponents said.
Almost immediately, however, the
list of enemies became narrower and the fundamentals less comprehensive.
Defenders of the fundamentals of the faith began to organize outside the
churches and within the denominations. The General Assembly of the northern
Presbyterian Church in 1910 affirmed five essential doctrines regarded as under
attack in the church: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the
substitutionary atonement of Christ, Christ's bodily resurrection, and the
historicity of the miracles. These were reaffirmed in 1916 and 1923, by which
time they had come to be regarded as the fundamental doctrines of Christianity
itself. On a parallel track, and in the tradition of Bible prophecy conferences
since 1878, premillenarian Baptists and independents founded the World's
Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919, with William B Riley as the prime
mover. The premillennialists tended to replace the miracles with the
resurrection and the second coming of Christ, or even premillenarian doctrine
as the fifth fundamental. Another version put the deity of Christ in place of
the virgin birth.
The term "fundamentalist"
was perhaps first used in 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws in the Baptist Watchman-Examiner, but it seemed to pop
up everywhere in the early 1920s as an obvious way to identify someone who
believed and actively defended the fundamentals of the faith. The Baptist John
Roach Straton called his newspaper The
Fundamentalist in the 1920s. The Presbyterian scholar J Gresham Machen
disliked the word, and only hesitatingly accepted it to described himself,
because, he said, it sounded like a new religion and not the same historic
Christianity that the church had always believed.
Through the 1920s the
fundamentalists waged the battle in the large northern church denominations as
nothing less than a struggle for true Christianity against a new non Christian
religion that had crept into the churches themselves. In his book Christianity and Liberalism (1923),
Machen called the new naturalistic religion "liberalism," but later
followed the more popular fashion of calling it "modernism."
Even though people like Harry
Emerson Fosdick professed to be Christian, fundamentalists felt they could not
be regarded as such because they denied the traditional formulations of the
doctrines of Christianity and created modern, naturalistic statements of the
doctrines. The issue was as much a struggle over a view of the identity of
Christianity as it was over a method of doing theology and a view of history.
Fundamentalists believed that the ways the doctrines were formulated in an
earlier era were true and that modern attempts to reformulate them were bound
to be false. In other words, the fundamentals were unchanging.
Church struggles occurred in the
Methodist Episcopal Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and even in the
southern Presbyterian Church, but the grand battles were fought in the northern
Presbyterian and northern Baptist denominations. Machen was the undisputed
leader among Presbyterians, joined by Clarence E. Macartney. Baptists created
the National Federation of the Fundamentalists of the Northern Baptists (1921),
the Fundamentalist Fellowship (1921), and the Baptist Bible Union (1923) to
lead the fight. The battles focused upon the seminaries, the mission boards,
and the ordination of clergy. In many ways, however, the real strongholds of
the fundamentalists were the Southern Baptists and the countless new independent
churches spread across the south and midwest, as well as the east and west.
In politics fundamentalists opposed
the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools, leading up to the famous
Scopes trial (1925) in Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, a
Presbyterian layman and three times candidate for the American presidency, was
acknowledged leader of the antievolution battle.
Late
1920s to the Early 1940s
By
1926 or so, those who were militant for the fundamentals had failed to expel
the modernists from any denomination. Moreover, they also lost the battle
against evolutionism. Orthodox Protestants, who still numerically dominated all
the denominations, now began to struggle among themselves. During the
Depression of the 1930s the term "fundamentalist" gradually shifted
meaning as it came to apply to only one party among those who believed the
traditional fundamentals of the faith. Meanwhile, neo orthodoxy associated with
Karl Barth's critique of liberalism found adherents in America.
In several cases in the north
fundamentalists created new denominations in order to carry on the true faith
in purity apart from the larger bodies they regarded as apostate. They formed
the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (1932), the Presbyterian Church
of America (1936), renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Bible
Presbyterian Church (1938), the Conservative Baptist Association of America
(1947), the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (1930), and many
others. In the south fundamentalists dominated the huge Southern Baptist
Convention, the southern Presbyterian Church, and the expanding independent
Bible church and Baptist church movements, including the American Baptist
Association. Across the United States fundamentalists founded new revival
ministries, mission agencies, seminaries, Bible schools, Bible conferences, and
newspapers.
During this period the distinctive
theological point that the fundamentalists made was that they represented true
Christianity based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and that de facto
this truth ought to be expressed organizationally separate from any association
with liberals and modernists. They came to connect a separatist practice with
the maintenance of the fundamentals of the faith. They also identified
themselves with what they believed was pure in personal morality and American
culture. Thus, the term "fundamentalist" came to refer largely to
orthodox Protestants outside the large northern denominations, whether in the
newly established denominations, in the southern churches, or in the many
independent churches across the land.
Early
1940s to the 1970s
Beginning
in the early 1940s the fundamentalists, thus becoming redefined, divided
gradually into two camps. There were those who voluntarily continued to use the
term to refer to themselves and to equate it with true Bible believing
Christianity. There were others who came to regard the term as undesirable,
having connotations of divisive, intolerant, anti intellectual, unconcerned
with social problems, even foolish. This second group wished to regain
fellowship with the orthodox Protestants who still constituted the vast
majority of the clergy and people in the large northern denominations,
Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian. They began during the 1940s to
call themselves "evangelicals" and to equate that term with true
Christianity. Beginning in 1948 a few called themselves neoevangelical.
Organizationally this spilt among
largely northern fundamentalists was expressed on one hand by the American
Council of Christian Churches (1941), which was ecclesiastically separatist in
principle, and on the other by the National Association of Evangelicals (1942),
which sought to embrace orthodox Protestants as individuals in all denominations.
The term "fundamentalist" was carried into the 1950s by the ACCC as
well as by a vast number of southern churches and independent churches not
included in either body. It was proudly used by such schools as Bob Jones
University, Moody Bible Institute, and Dallas Theological Seminary, and by
hundreds of evangelists and radio preachers. The International Council of
Christian Churches (1948) sought to give the term worldwide currency in
opposition to the World Council of Churches.
The term "fundamentalist"
took on special meaning in contrast with evangelical or neoevangelical, rather
than merely in contrast with liberalism, modernism, or neo orthodoxy.
Fundamentalists and evangelicals in the 1950s and 1960s shared much; both
adhered to the traditional doctrines of Scripture and Christ; both promoted
evangelism, revivals, missions, and a personal morality against smoking,
drinking, theater, movies, and card playing; both identified American values
with Christian values; both believed in creating organizational networks that
separated themselves from the rest of society.
However, fundamentalists believed
they differed from evangelicals and neoevangelicals by being more faithful to
Bible believing Christianity, more militant against church apostasy, communism,
and personal evils, less ready to cater to social and intellectual
respectability. They tended to oppose evangelist Billy Graham, not to read Christianity Today, and not to support
Wheaton College or Fuller Theological Seminary. Instead they favored their own evangelists,
radio preachers, newspapers, and schools. Fundamentalists tended to differ
greatly among themselves and found it difficult to achieve widespread
fundamentalist cooperation.
Meanwhile people in North America
and Great Britain who were neither fundamentalist nor evangelical tended to
regard both as fundamentalist, noting their underlying similarities.
Late
1970s and the 1980s
By
the late 1970s and in particular by the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan for the
American presidency, fundamentalists entered a new phase. They became
nationally prominent as offering an answer for what many regarded as a supreme
social, economic, moral, and religious crisis in America. They identified a new
and more pervasive enemy, secular humanism, which they believed was responsible
for eroding churches, schools, universities, the government, and above all
families. They fought all enemies which they considered to be offspring of
secular humanism, evolutionism, political and theological liberalism, loose
personal morality, sexual perversion, socialism, communism, and any lessening
of the absolute, inerrant authority of the Bible. They called Americans to
return to the fundamentals of the faith and the fundamental moral values of
America.
Leading this phase was a new generation
of television and print fundamentalists, notably Jerry Falwell, Tim La Haye,
Hal Lindsey, and Pat Robertson. Their base was Baptist and southern, but they
reached into all denominations. They benefited from three decades of post World
War II fundamentalist and evangelical expansion through evangelism, publishing,
church extension, and radio ministry. They tended to blur the distinction
between fundamentalist and evangelical. Statistically, they could claim that
perhaps one fourth of the American population was fundamentalist-evangelical.
However, not all fundamentalists accepted these new leaders, considering them
to be neofundamentalists.
The fundamentalists of the early
1980s were in many ways very different people from their predecessors, and they
faced many different issues. But they continued important traits common to
fundamentalists from the 1920s through the early 1980s. They were certain that
they possessed true knowledge of the fundamentals of the faith and that they
therefore represented true Christianity based on the authority of a literally
interpreted Bible. They believed it was their duty to carry on the great battle
of history, the battle of God against Satan, of light against darkness, and to
fight against all enemies who undermined Christianity and America. Faced with
this titanic struggle they were inclined to consider other Christians who were
not fundamentalists as either unfaithful to Christ or not genuinely Christian.
They called for a return to an inerrant and infallible Bible, to the
traditional statement of the doctrines, and to a traditional morality which
they believed once prevailed in America. To do all this, they created a vast
number of separate organizations and ministries to propagate the fundamentalist
faith and practice.
Bibliography. G W Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism in America; R Lightner, Neo Evangelicalism; L Gasper, The Fundamentalist Movement, 1930-1956;
J Falwell, E Dobson, and E Hindson, eds., The
Fundamentalist Phenomenon; G M Marsden, Fundamentalism
and American Culture; C A Russell, Voices
of American Fundamentalism; N F Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918-1931; E R Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism; J I Packer,
"Fundamentalism" and the Word
of God; James Barr, Fundamentalism.
Source: Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary of Theology.
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