Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism

By G. M. Marsden

Fundamentalism developed its distinctive characteristics primarily in North America, and has had its widest influence in the USA where revivalist evangelicalism has been the dominant religious heritage. Although it has many missionary exports and also many parallels in anti-modernist Protestant movements in other countries, we can best understand its distinguishing features by looking at the prototypical and widely influential American developments.

The word ‘fundamentalism’ originated in the USA in 1920 as the designation that editor Curtis Lee Laws (1868–1946) used for his anti-modernist party in the Northern Baptist Convention. The term was soon used to describe a broad coalition of evangelical Protestants who fought militantly against modernist (i.e. liberal) theology and against some features of secularization of modern culture. This remains the most accurate way to use the word. Essential to being a fundamentalist is that one be 1. an evangelical Protestant; 2. an anti-modernist, meaning that one subscribes to the fundamentals of traditional supernaturalistic biblical Christianity; and 3. militant in this anti-modernism or in opposition to certain aspects of secularization. A fundamentalist, then, is a militantly anti-modernist evangelical.

The picture is complicated by a number of other broader and narrower usages. Sometimes the word is used generically to designate any religious anti-modernist, hence ‘Islamic fundamentalists’. Or opponents of Protestant fundamentalism may use the term loosely to describe almost any of the features, especially the more extravagant or anti-intellectual ones, of evangelical revivalism, such as those especially common in the American South. Such usage invites contusion of fundamentalism with revivalism generally and with several closely related movements with revivalist roots. For instance, the holiness movement, which arose in the second half of the 19th century, was distinguished especially by emphasis on experiences of outpourings of the Holy Spirit leading to lives of sinless perfection. Pentecostalism, arising in the early 20th century, was marked by stress on receiving spectacular spiritual powers. Fundamentalist anti-modernist militancy was sometimes also adopted by these groups, so that they often become fundamentalistic. Nonetheless, these movements tended to remain distinct and ecclesiastically separate. All three, however, were related by common origins to the broader and still more diverse heritage of 19th-century American revivalism and many of their traits commonly called ‘fundamentalist’ are more accurately called ‘revivalist’.

Still another broad use of ‘fundamentalism’ is that common in British parlance. There, ‘fundamentalism’ often refers to any evangelical conservatism that has a high view of the Bible and its fundamental claims. For instance, J. I. Packer defended fundamentalism in this sense in his ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (London, 1958), and James Barr in Fundamentalism (London, 1977) conflates most of the branches of conservative evangelicalism in his attack on the movement.

In America, on the other hand, ‘fundamentalism’, when used carefully, has come to refer to the more narrow phenomenon of the main groups of militantly anti-modernist white evangelicals. (American black evangelicals are often revivalist in style, fundamental in doctrine, and anti-modern in ethics; but they do not typically call themselves ‘fundamentalists’.)

The characteristics of the distinctively ‘fundamentalist’ movement can be seen best from its history. As Ernest R. Sandeen has shown in his important study, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago, 1970), one major source of fundamentalism was the premillennial prophecy movement originating from the work of J. N. Darby and others. Although in England this movement produced primarily the Plymouth Brethren who left the traditional churches, in the United States its main expressions in the late 19th century were within major northern denominations, such as the Presbyterian and the Baptist. Dispensationalism was the distinctive feature of this movement and became almost canonized in the notes of C. I. Scofield’s famous Reference Bible (New York, 1909). Many American dispensationalists also adopted the moderate holiness teachings fostered by England’s Keswick Convention.

Dispensationalism, which predicted the ruin of the church in this epoch, encouraged militancy against the rise of aggressive theological modernism in the early 20th century. In the USA, especially, where modernism was strong, dispensationalists found many allies who wished to defend the fundamentals of the faith against modernism. Among the northern Presbyterians, conservatism was strong, bolstered by the intellectual leadership at Princeton Theological Seminary. Conservative Presbyterians first developed the strategy of defending lists of fundamental doctrines. Dispensationalists also organized the publication, from 1909 to 1915, of The Fundamentals, defending traditional doctrines. Many fundamentalist groups had lists of ‘fundamental’ doctrines, though no one list was ever standard. The commonest points were the inerrancy of Scripture, the deity of Christ, his virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, Christ’s resurrection, and his second coming.

During the 1920s fundamentalists fought hard against modernist gains in the major northern Presbyterian and Baptist denominations. Smaller fundamentalist controversies occurred in other denominations, and parallel splits between conservatives and liberals took place in a number of churches in the United States and Canada. Meanwhile, fundamentalists took on a cultural as well as an ecclesiastical dimension as they attacked aspects of moral erosion after World War I. The campaign led by William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) to keep evolution from being taught in American public schools was the chief expression of such concern. The spread of evolutionary teaching was seen as undermining the authority of the Bible in American life and as fostering moral relativism. Marxism, Romanism, alcohol, tobacco, dancing, card-playing and theatre attendance were other major targets for fundamentalist attacks. Amid these conflicts, fundamentalism grew as a coalition of anti-modernist Protestants from many traditions, throughout the USA, north and south, other English-speaking countries, and their missionary outposts. At the centre of the coalition were American dispensationalists, whose fundamentalism was least tempered by other traditions.

By the 1930s fundamentalism was beginning to take a distinctive ecclesiastical expression. Increasingly the most militant fundamentalists felt that they should separate from groups which contained modernists, and form independent congregations or denominations. Most such fundamentalists became Baptist and were dispensationalist. Separatism was becoming a test of true faith.

What had been the broader militant anti-modernist coalition of the 1920s thus began to split by the 1940s. One major group in America softened its militancy and tried to retain contact with mainline denominations. Led by spokespersons such as Harold John Ockenga (b. 1905), Carl F. H. Henry, and Edward J. Carnell, they at first called themselves ‘neo-evangelicals’ and by the later 1950s simply ‘evangelicals’. Their associations with Billy Graham (b. 1918) signalled the growth of this inclusivist wing of ‘evangelical’ ex-fundamentalists. Meanwhile, militant separatists, such as John R. Rice (1895–1980), Bob Jones (1883–1968), and Carl Mclntire (b. 1906) claimed they were the only true fundamentalists. After 1960 ‘fundamentalism’ in America could be used to distinguish this separatist sub-group from the broader ‘evangelicalism’, which included ex-fundamentalists and Bible-believing Christians from many traditions.

Separatist fundamentalism continued to grow, although it probably never constituted more than 10% of America’s estimated forty to fifty million ‘evangelicals’ in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1980s, especially with the rise of Baptist fundamentalist Jerry Falwell’s (b. 1933) Moral Majority, the political concerns of fundamentalists to preserve traditionalist Christian mores in American public life had become prominent again, as they had been in the 1920s. Fundamentalist politics now also included strong support for the state of Israel, important to dispensational prophetic interpretation.

Bibliography.

G. W. Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism in America (Greenville, SC, 1973); G. M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York, 1980); C. A. Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism: Seven Biographical Studies (Philadelphia, 1976).

Source: 

Ferguson, S. B., et al., editors. 1988. New Dictionary of Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.