Fundamentalism

Christian Fundamentalism

Although The Fundamentals was launched within Pentecostalism, fundamentalism was by no means limited to this group. Similar ideas appeared in other denominations, articulating religion, dogmatism, and reactionary politics. One of the first impacts of Protestant fundamentalism occurred in 1925, in the trials against Darwinism and evolutionary theory in the United States. Fundamentalists argued that evolutionary theory contradicted the doctrine of creation as told in the holy scripture. Although they lost this cause to liberals and their evangelical impetus became more restricted, they took this occasion to establish new institutions, schools, seminaries, publishing houses, and journals, using the mass media to express their ideas and to combat mainline Protestantism.

Different from the first Pentecostal fundamentalists, the generation after World War II criticized the sectarianism, separatism, and anti-intellectualism of their antecessors. However, they did not question biblical inerrancy, the emphasis on mass conversion, and the use of mass media. As part of their political strategy, they founded the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to congregate small denominations, Pentecostal and “neo-evangelical” groups, as well as to oppose the mainline Federal Council of Churches, which later became the National Council of Churches (NCC).

The impact of modernism was felt also within Catholicism. Modernism had already been criticized by Pope Pius IX in 1864 and by Leon XIII in the document Testem Benevolentiae from 1899. But after 1920, the conservative reaction included a radical critique of Catholic liberal movements that supported the New Deal. At this point, despite the Protestant majority, there was already a peculiar form of Catholicism within the American tradition. Father Francis Talbot, one of its conservative leaders, had even declared that true Catholics were the bastion of resistance to non-American progressivism and called for an adhesion to the “Constitution and traditional Americanism” that made the country what it was before 1914. During the 1960s, the term fundamentalist was used to identify those who wanted to return to traditional liturgies and rejected the changes approved during the Vatican II Council.

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