Fundamentalism

American Protestant Fundamentalism

In the North American context, there were at least three social forces that gave rise to the movement that took the name fundamentalism: (1) sweeping economic changes with the industrial revolution, (2) restructuring of gender roles and expectations with the move from rural-agrarian to urban-industrial lifestyles, and (3) the intellectual-theological challenges arising from biblical criticism, historicism, and comparative religion. Nineteenth-century evangelicalism split into two camps, often called modernist and fundamentalist, divided over the proper relationship between religion and culture. Modernists saw religion as a part of culture that changes over time with the changing needs of a changing culture. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, saw religion as fixed and revealed once for all time. For fundamentalists, culture should be measured by, and should conform to, the truths revealed in religion. While modernists developed critical, historicized readings of the biblical texts, the opponents launched a series of booklets, The Fundamentals, defending teachings such as the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, and literal readings of the miracles described in the Bible. The books were sent to pastors and Bible teachers all over the country, and it is from those books that the movement took its name. It should be noted that while fundamentalists lay claim to a literal reading of the Bible, this is, in fact, impossible and is a rhetorical move made by fundamentalists to claim authority for their reading. Fundamentalist Protestants, for example, claim to be reading the Book of Revelation literally when they interpret it to explain present-day events. And substitutionary atonement, as another example, is an interpretation of the biblical texts. This is a very complex movement, and it brought together various strains of antimodern Protestantism. There was the populist form discussed above, but there was also an elite, intellectual form that found its home in the Presbyterianism of the Princeton Theological Seminary. Theologians such as John G. Machen, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield built a philosophically sophisticated, Calvinist theological system that rooted fundamentalism in historical Christianity and laid the groundwork for the new evangelicalism that was to develop within fundamentalism a generation later. The populist form was overwhelmingly premillennialist. In fact, the historian Ernest Sandeen saw premillennialism as the point at which the strands of fundamentalism converged. But elite fundamentalism could be postmillennialist or amillennialist. Populist fundamentalism was also revivalist in character and decidedly separatist—some forms even advocating double separation (i.e., a believer must separate not only from nonbelievers but also from believers who don't practice separatism). This strong insistence on separation, coupled with premillennialism teaching that the world is about to end any minute, made the early fundamentalists opposed to involvement in politics. That opposition to political involvement, however, began to fall away by midcentury, after which the Religious Right became the public face of American fundamentalism.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, fundamentalists began laying the groundwork for a critique of American culture that led to the view that America had a special calling from God but that the country had fallen away from its special place in history as a Christian nation. Social changes in the 1960s and 1970s (integration, changes in the status of women, the sexual revolution, and the secularization of public institutions) led to the political mobilization of American Protestant fundamentalists. They first fought the Equal Rights Amendment, the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion, and the regulation of private Christian schools and home schools. Later controversies over the rights of gays and lesbians and battles over evolution and creationism in public schools anchored their political agenda and mobilized their followers. The political power of the Christian right ebbed and flowed into the 21st century, with the movement remaking itself every decade or so.

...