Brief History
No one
person can be credited with founding Fundamentalism. Nor
does any single group comprise the history of the movement.
The label ‘Fundamentalist’ is used as both an adjective and
a noun. Accordingly, trying to understand the phenomena
requires more than knowing a few names and dates. Curtis Lee
Laws, editor of a conservative publication entitled
Watchman-Examiner is credited with coining the term
“fundamentalism.” The term ‘fundamentalism’ has its origin
in a series of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915
entitled “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.” These
booklets were authored by leading evangelical churchmen and
were circulated free of charge among clergymen and
seminarians. (5)
By and
large, fundamentalism was a response to the loss of
influence traditional revivalism experienced in America
during the early liberalizing trends of German biblical
criticism and the encroachment of Darwinian theories about
the origin of the universe, prompted a response by
conservative churchmen. The result was the pamphlets. In
1920, a journalist and Baptist layman named Curtis Lee Laws
appropriated the term ‘fundamentalist’ as a designation for
those who were ready “to do battle royal for the
Fundamentals.” Its date of birth is the Second decade of the
20th century and its birth place is The United States. Its
year of Foundation is 1920.
Its
stand was that The Bible is the sacred text of the Christian
Fundamentalists. Indeed, if there is one single thing which
binds Fundamentalists together, it is their insistence that
the Bible is to be understood as literally true. Further,
Fundamentalists see themselves as the guardians of the
truth, usually to the exclusion of others’ interpretation of
the Bible. Fundamentalism in other faith traditions
similarly proclaims guardianship of truth. The size of this
group depends on how fundamentalism is defined.
Conservatively estimated, there are at least 30 million
Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. alone. Fundamentalism
stands with Pentecostalism (6) as the most successful
religious movements of the 20th century.
Problems in
Analyzing Fundamentalism
One
can hardly read a weekly news magazine without encountering
the term ‘fundamentalist’ with reference to some group
active on the world stage. In fact, the popularity of the
term is part of the problem. Several scholars have noted the
difficulty inherent in using an imprecise term like
‘fundamentalism’ to describe groups as different as the
Christian Coalition and the Nation of Islam. Jeffrey K.
1-tadden has identified four types of fundamentalism:
•
Theological fundamentalism was the Christian theological
movement concerned with defending traditional Christian
doctrine against modern thinking.
•
Political fundamentalism is a combination of theological
fundamentalism and the personal commitments of
religious adherents to combat worldly vices.
Manifestations of political fundamentalism include much of
the activity in the temperance movement or the virulent
anticommunism of Gerald L.K. Smith. Political fundamentalism
suffered a major setback by their defeat at the
Scopes Monkey trial. (7)
•
These two types of fundamentalism melded together to combine
a caricature of culturally unenlightened individuals bent on
preserving tradition at the expense of progress. This
cultural fundamentalism was cynically portrayed by
social critics such as H.L.Mencken and novelists such as
Sinclair Lewis. William Jennings Bryan served as the
prototype for Mencken after the debacle of the Scopes trial
in Tennessee. The political activity engaged in by
fundamentalists invited comparison to other religiously
motivated groups around the world.
•
Accordingly, global fundamentalism as a phenomenon
denotes many religiously motivated politically active groups
existing in a variety of religious traditions and political
systems. (8)
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