Fundamentalist Christianity
By Martin E. Marty
Fundamentalist Christianity
is a form of Protestantism that is reactive to modernity and attempts to make a
militant defense of "the fundamentals" of Christian faith. On occasion,
observers call some Roman Catholic movements fundamentalist, but Catholicism allows
for development in doctrine, something that true fundamentalists reject. Thus Christian
fundamentalism is almost always Protestant. (The phenomenon does have its counterparts
in Judaism, Islam, and other faiths.)
Christian fundamentalists,
according to most proponents and scholars, list at least five fundamental teachings:
the inerrancy of the Bible as well as literal understandings of the virgin birth
of Jesus, of his sacrificial death, of his physical resurrection, and of his second
coming. The stress is on the word "literal." Politician William Jennings
Bryan, a pioneer lay fundamentalist, typically insisted on literalism because, he
said, Christian liberals sucked the truth out of basic biblical teachings by calling
them symbolic or allegorical.
Bryan was a major figure
in the first generation of fundamentalism, which took shape early in the twentieth
century, acquired its name from 1919 to 1920, and came to its first climax as an
agent in disputes within the Presbyterian and Baptist Churches in the northern United
States. In the course of time, fundamentalism came to be identified with the South, (Page 271) but most of its origins and many of its members were in
the North.
The word "fundamentalism"
does not appear in encyclopedias of Christianity before the twentieth century. Of
course, there were conservatisms, traditionalisms, and orthodoxies before that.
But in 1920, Curtis Lee Laws, the editor of the Baptist Watchman-Observer,
and his allies called for a new name for their new movement. They complained that
ordinary conservatives would not do "battle royal for the Lord" as some
fundamentalists would and did. Between 1910 and 1915 some conservatives published
twelve volumes called The Fundamentals, and in 1919 others formed the World's
Christian Fundamentals Association, but the new word did not come into common use
until after 1920, in Baptist, Presbyterian, and other denominational battles.
Defeated in denominational
conflicts over control of seminaries and mission boards, many fundamentalists left
their church bodies to form new seminaries and denominations. The most prominent
of these individuals was Princeton professor J. Gresham Machen, an intellectual
formulator of the movement, who in 1935 helped found the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
That body suffered schism, as fundamentalist churches often do. In 1937, a leader
of the split-off faction, Carl McIntire, formed the Bible Presbyterian Synod. Because
none of these splintering bodies approached the visibility of the more moderate
ones they left behind, most observers relegated fundamentalism to the backwoods
of the Bible Belt, and cultural elites dismissed them as hillbillies, Holy Rollers,
and rednecks. Meanwhile, the fundamentalists busied themselves fashioning Bible
colleges, publishing houses, and radio broadcasting networks.
Fundamentalists regathered
initiative by 1941, when under McIntire numbers of parties formed the fundamentalist
American Council of Christian Churches. They did so in part to anticipate the formation
of a more moderate organization in 1942, the National Association of Evangelicals.
Evangelicals, who insisted
on a literal belief in the same fundamentals, declared themselves to be offended
by the belligerence of fundamentalists, who, they thought, were driving people away
from conservative Christianity. Meanwhile, independent movements of Pentecostals
were also emerging. They, too, shared belief in the same fundamentals, but their
stress on direct experience of the Holy Spirit made fundamentalists of the Bryan , Machen, and McIntire
stripes nervous. How, they asked, could one be sure that there would be no change
in fundamentalist doctrine if people claimed to be hearing fresh messages from the
Holy Spirit?
After two more decades
of relative obscurity, fundamentalism reemerged during and after the cultural crises
of the 1960s to become a highly visible and often political force. Some fundamentalists—for
example, those led by the Jones family that created and led Bob Jones University
in Greenville , South Carolina—sternly rejected political
engagement. But beginning in the late 1970s many others did a complete about-face.
They had previously seen Christian participation in politics to be distracting and
even sinful. Now it was sinful not to be political, said pastor, television
evangelist, and university founder Jerry Falwell, a major leader of the new version.
His faction argued that the churches and the culture had become so corrupt and tainted
that only aggressive efforts by fundamentalists could withstand the evils and reform
religion and culture. They organized the Moral Majority and later the Christian
Coalition.
The resultant New Christian
Right leaders were so effective at organizing that they drew more public notice (Page 272) than had liberal Protestants in their heyday decades at
midcentury. The New Right gained credibility among many for its support of Ronald
Reagan in 1980, and it became a factor in Republican Party politics through the
rest of the century.
Fundamentalism is a reactive,
more than a reactionary, movement. If it were reactionary, it would use Protestant
tradition simply to keep its distance from anything called modern or representative
of modernity. That is not the case. Instead, most scholars see fundamentalism as
a modern movement. Its leaders and members, as they react to inimical forces, are
at home with many of the instruments and actions of modernity. They have been masters
of what to others typify modernization in technology: radio, television, the Internet,
efficient distribution of mailed messages, and the like. Rather than run from encounters
with modern movements that helped inspire them to be reactive, they have engaged
them. Thus theories of evolution, which they perceived as assaults on the faith
in the name of science, led many fundamentalists to develop what they called "Scientific
Creationism" to counter evolution in the classroom.
If fundamentalists reacted
against evolutionary accounts of the origins of the universe and of humanity, they
also reacted against evolutionary visions of the goals of history. Among these were
European Marxism and progressive American movements in politics, education, and
the like. While secular social progressives counted on humans alone to bring in
a new order, as in Marxism's "classless society," the Protestant advance
guard spoke of "bringing in the kingdom of God ."
The unfolding future
will not be a kind of utopia produced by humans, said the fundamentalists. Instead,
they prophesied imminent global catastrophe when Jesus Christ would return to enjoy
a thousand-year reign that would mean bliss for the faithful. These apocalypse-minded
fundamentalists favored teachings introduced from the British Isles at about the
turn of the twentieth century by evangelist Dwight L. Moody and others. It was this
expectation of a catastrophic end to history that helped lead earlier fundamentalists
to withdraw from politics and social activism. Believers were to concentrate instead
on keeping America strong (fundamentalists tend to favor a strong military and to
demonize enemies of the United States as "evil empires") and winning converts
quickly before Jesus came again. By the 1970s, however, many of them, without losing
faith in the sudden end to ordinary history, saw or sought opportunities to reform
the world while advancing the causes of conversion and moral living.
Political fundamentalism
in the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition did not and does not concentrate
chiefly on economic issues. On its chosen front line, "social issues"
predominate. It deals with urgencies that are close to the lives of people besieged
by modern change and confused by pluralism or religious diversity and relativism,
which find no absolutes as bases on which to live or rule.
Thus the newer political
fundamentalism reacted against U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that
ruled against officially inspired prayer and devotional Bible reading in public
schools. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court, which
ruled that a right to abortion was constitutional, then provoked the most galvanizing
reaction. Henceforth, issues dealing with sexuality, gender, conception, family
life, education, obscenity, and the like formed the agenda for activists. When identifying
villains, they pointed to "secular humanists," religious liberals, corrupting
elites in big and encroaching government, mass media, and education as Antichrist.
Fundamentalism, being
a movement or a characteristic more than a definable church body, is a term rarely
used in the names of congregations and denominations. The word does not always appear,
for example, in metropolitan telephone book advertisements and listings of churches.
Therefore it is difficult to determine how many fundamentalists there are either
in the United States or in counterpart movements that rose as products of American
missionary efforts around the world. Numbering is also difficult because many heirs
of people who had chosen the name "fundamentalist" for themselves saw
that it could create a stigma, and they did not like to be thus labeled. The leadership
of the nation's largest Protestant group, the Southern Baptist Convention, bears
all the marks that friends, enemies, and most scholars call fundamentalist. But
most of these Baptists do not like the adjective, and it must be used with care.
If one includes the Southern
Baptist Convention majority, the numerous small denominations that originated as
break-offs from more moderate denominations, many television and political movements,
and individual fundamentalists who stay in more moderate bodies, it is likely that
there are twenty million to thirty million in the United States. This very rough
estimate depends on definition, but it is a clear indicator that fundamentalism,
while smaller than the more moderate evangelicalism, is a major factor and is likely
to remain so in times of drastic change.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ammerman, Nancy. Bible Believers:
Fundamentalists in the Modern World. 1987.
Carpenter, Joel. Revive Us
Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. 1997.
Lawrence, Bruce. Defenders
of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age. 1989.
Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism
and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870
–1925. 1980.
Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott
Appleby. Fundamentalisms Observed. The Fundamentalism Project, vol. 1. 1991.
Sandeen, Ernest. The Roots
of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800 –1930. 1970.
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