Fundamentalism is a movement to return to more strict adherence to founding principles, usually in religion. In comparative religion, fundamentalism can refer to anti-modernist movements in various religions. In many ways religious fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, characterized by a sense of embattled alienation in the midst of the surrounding culture, even where the culture may be nominally influenced by the adherents' religion.
The term can also refer specifically to the belief that one's religious texts are infallible and historically accurate, despite contradiction of these claims by modern scholarship. movement, especially within Protestantism in the strict sense of the word is the group of princes and imperial cities who, at the diet of Speyer in 1529, signed a protestation against the Edict of Worms which forbade the Lutheran teachings within the Holy Roman Empire. From there, the word Protestant in German speaking areas still refers to Lutheran churches in contrast to Reformed churches, while the common designation for all churches originating from the Reformation is Evangelical.
The term, Fundamentalist, tends to have a variable meaning. Historically, and for those who use the name to describe themselves, a Fundamentalist Christian is one who holds to all of the five Fundamentals of the Faith as a bare-minimum definition of Christian faith.
In Protestantism, religious movement that arose among conservative members of various Protestant denominations early in the 20th cent., with the object of maintaining traditional interpretations of the Bible and of the doctrines of the Christian faith in the face of Darwinian evolution , secularism, and the emergence of liberal theology. A group protesting “modernist” tendencies in the churches circulated a 12-volume publication called The Fundamentals (1909-12), in which five points of doctrine were set forth as fundamental: the Virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Jesus, the infallibility of the Scriptures, the substitutional atonement, and the physical second coming of Christ.
The debate between fundamentalists and modernists was most acute among the Baptists and the Presbyterians but also arose within other denominations. In a highly publicized case, the so-called Monkey Trial (1925), the fundamentalist leader William Jennings Bryan won Tennessee's case against J. T. Scopes, for teaching evolution in the public schools. Other attempts, however, by fundamentalists in the 1920s to rid the churches of modernism and the schools of evolution failed.
According to the Reader's Digest Universal Dictionary "fundamental" means "having to do with the foundation; elemental; basic", and "fundamentalism" an "unswerving belief in a set of basic and unalterable principles of a religious or philosophical nature". The term was traditionally used for Christians who believed the Bible to be the literal truth even when it was found in conflict with modern scientific discoveries. "Fundamentalism" soon became a derogatory term.
Many fundamentalists are so caught up in doctrinal seriousness, that love, service and compassion seem scarcely to even be a part of their thinking. As one correspondent regarding a certain Christian sect's converts, "Its like they go in and surgically remove any sense of love or any sense of humour."
Derivatively, a fundamentalist Christian is a Christian who holds the Bible The Bible is the primary sacred scripture of both the Jewish and Christian religions. These scriptures are compilations of what were originally separate documents (called "books") written over a long period of time. They were later compiled to form first the Jewish Bible (Tanakh) and, with later additions, the Christian Bible.
Not many are aware that While Mormonism is not strictly classified as “Christian Fundamentalist” its belief system does contain many of the aspects of standard fundamentalism. Mormon theology is based on beliefs that can not be empirically confirmed and contradict scientific explanations (mostly archaeology)*. These aspects are found mostly in what Mormonism’s adherents believe to be their sacred scripture: The Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants.
Fundamentalist Christians support capital punishment in the belief that the death penalty is demanded by God in the Bible. If one purports to take the Bible literally, then this would appear to be correct. Perhaps the clearest injunction is found in Genesis 9:6 -- "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed." Exodus 21:14 kicks off a long litany of moral and legal prescriptions with a similar injunction -- "If a man schemes and kills another man deliberately, take him away ... and put him to death."
Fundamentalism, it is often said, is taking religion too seriously. The answer, in this view, is to take it less seriously. That conventional wisdom is wrong. The best response to fundamentalism is to take faith more seriously than fundamentalism sometimes does. The best response is to critique by faith the accommodations of fundamentalism to theocracy and violence and power and to assert the vital religious commitments that fundamentalists often leave out—namely compassion, social justice, peacemaking, and religious pluralism.
Fundamentalist badger people who have gone astray mercilessly back onto the right track. Many fundamentalists use bullying tactics to get the errant person back on track, and may even use punishment, shaming, shunning to get the deviant back on track. Other fundamentalists rely on group pressures to persuade the deviant back to the right path, and most fundamentalists, use modelling behaviour to illustrate how one should stay on the right path.
Fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of a religious text (Bible, Koran, etc.), and reject anything outside that evidence.
Fundamentalists don't get literal about selling their possessions and giving to the poor (Luke 18:22), giving their shirt when someone asks for their coat (Mat 5:40), not to lay up earthly treasures (6:19), or anything else that Christ taught. They are only literal about the allegories and trivial corruptions such as Paul's version of religion.
Fundamentalist beliefs of any description are founded by definition on a refusal to grapple with complexity. Purely reductionism and borne usually of a stubborn prideful refusal to seek education and understanding, any attempt to crack through the concrete of dogma indicates to the fundamentalist only the possibility of attack - and therefore the fear of defeat. Religious fundamentalism for instance crumbles the moment any literary and historical analysis of the Bible takes place...instead of dealing with the issues of faith involved, it is easier to simply label education a satanic tool of disruption and refuse to partake in the forbidden fruit of knowledge.
Fundamentalism cannot be dismissed simply as extremism. It is a force as powerful as communism once was, and it represents a not dissimilar reply to injustice and bewilderment. The more fundamentalists are repressed, the more they feel excluded. Their rejection of dialogue is based on the conviction that they are not understood" (Theodore Zeldin. An Intimate History of Humanity)
A devout Fundamentalist was thrilled and happy whenever he found something in the Bible that contradicted logic, because it provided him an opportunity to prove that he believed the Bible on faith, not on logic and reason. Fundamentalists are proud to believe that they subject their personal judgment to the judgment of God.
Fundamentalism tries to insure itself by arbitrarily proposing a supreme authority, which is not God, but the text. True, the text is from God, but one suspects that if God arrived on earth and contradicted the text, "he" might get short shrift!
Fundamentalism is not something alien, "out there," to be feared and guarded against. It is something that can well up within any of us, because it results from very human conditions: faith and fear.
Fundamentalist are addicts. And like other addicts, they do not respond to logic or sound arguments. Like other addicts, in order to feel good, they must believe that their made-truth is the only reality, and they must, therefore, defend that truth against any outside influence. Like other addicts, anyone who threatens to keep them from believing their made-truths is seen as a threat to their own good feelings - or in other words, to be opposed to their brand of made-truth is to be a threat to their personal value as humans, and thus they will attack with ferocity anyone who even questions their veracity. If you don't believe as they do, you are considered "lost." If you oppose their political positions, you are considered "blinded by the Devil." And if you have the gall to argue against their made-truths, you will be called nothing short of "demon possessed" or a "tool of Satan."
Unfortunately the closed and narrow belief system of Born Again Fundamentalism can have a devastating and crippling effect on those who have chosen to adhere to its dark age dogma, doctrines and mentality.
It is not common sense which motivates the reasoning of an unbending religious fundamentalist; it is a distorted viewpoint which declares that everyone else is wrong and that his or her religion is based on fact, rather than faith.
Fundamentalist movements can be both positive and negative in their consequences for broader society. They can turn the downtrodden and disillusioned into productive, forward looking individuals and give them purpose in life. A fundamentalist revival movement can serve as a check against negative tendencies in society as a whole, and can eventually serve as a focus for beneficial directed social change. On the other hand because such movements often objectify the larger society as Other and oppressor, they can produce participants who are defiant of civil authority, and difficult to predict or control. They often operate on the edge of the law creating automatic tension with the society in which they exist.
Fundamentalism is not a characteristic of only one particular religion. The word really describes a particular type of world view springing from sets of axioms that are claimed to be beyond refutation or argument.
Whether Christian or other religion, fundamentalism is by nature absolutist. It does not easily accommodate contrary positions, if it accommodates them at all. Probably its most definitive characteristic is that its canon is closed, not merely in the sense that there are no more sacred writings to be had, but in the sense that the canon, read only literally, reveals truths that cannot be expanded, modified, undermined or overturned under any circumstances.
Religious fundamentalism is one of the methods by which people seek to maintain a particular version of a religious story, along with its accompanying beliefs and rituals. They believe they have found (or been given) the best, most potent possible version of a particular story. Usually too, fundamentalist teachings - no matter the religion - will insist upon a literalist interpretation of their particular story.
By insisting on a strictly literal reading of a story, you effectively limit the number of questions which can be asked about it. By reducing the amount of time spent wondering or "reading between the lines," you help to ensure that alternate interpretations (and hence, modifications) have a more difficult time arising.
When a person becomes a religious fundamentalist, the spiritual component becomes larger and larger until it dominates all others. At that point, everything in their life is seen through the lens of an overwhelming truth. Their relationship with the divine comes first. Relationships with the people who have loved them run a distant second. Losing someone to religious fundamentalism is a deep loss. They're no longer in your world. They're gone"
Overview The Jewish Bible (Hebrew Bible or Tanakh) consists of the five books of Moses (the Torah or Pentateuch), a section called "Prophets" (Neviim), and a third section called "Writings" (also Ketuvim or Hagiographa). The term "Tanakh" is a Hebrew acronym formed from these three names. Though the Hebrew Bible is predominantly in Biblical Hebrew, it has some small portions in Biblical Aramaic.
To be infallible, historically accurate, and decisive in all issues of controversy that the Bible is believed to directly address; which was the central issue for which the Christian Fundamentalist movement has contended.
Jeffrey K. Hadden has identified four types off fundamentalism. First, 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.
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 phenomena denotes many religiously motivated politically active groups existing in a variety of religious traditions and political systems.
Fundamentalism is incompatible with Christianity. Christianity is the religion of freedom. It is the religion of tolerance and diversity. Christianity is a religion for all peoples in all cultures in all times. Fundamentalism is dedicated to cultural homogeneity and fixed behaviour patterns, to unchanging traditions and conventions for governing social interactions.
Christianity is not about going to other lands and cultures and teaching the natives to wear western style clothing and to fill out the front of their offering envelopes. Fundamentalism is about condemning sin when you see it and taking a stand for what is "right." Christianity is about caring for the sinner as much as the saint, it is about understanding the factors that contribute to destructive behaviour and leading those who have destroyed themselves, their families, and their friends to healing and forgiveness. Fundamentalists would have us believe that they are the guardians of Christian fundamentals but they are not. The are the guardians of their own position, culture, and power.
We have a minister who is a religious fanatic," says a Baghdad University dean. "Every day I get a call from his office to remove a certain book that his campus spies have seen. Or to help a student who is a member of his religious group. It is the same people from the Baath Party, but now they are a religious group."
The strain of fundamentalism known as "dispensationalism," argues that the world will soon be destroyed: "God knows it will happen. He knew it from the beginning. But, God kept His plan secret from all the billions of people who lived before us. But now … He has revealed the plan … we must move through seven time periods, or dispensations – one of which includes the terrible battle of Armageddon, where new and totally destructive nuclear weapons will be unleashed and blood will flow like mighty rivers.
A rise of religious fundamentalism is terrorizing the Iraqi academic community, and threatening to roll back the gains in academic freedom made by university presidents and their advisers from the United States since the end of the war. Fundamentalism is wrong...no matter what your beliefs are or where you are from.
A book written by author Edward T. Babinski was recently removed from the shelves of the Anderson County Public Library in South Carolina (Babinski's home state), due to complaints from patrons. The book contains nearly three dozen first-hand testimonies from former fundamentalists who have become liberal Christians, agnostics or atheists. According to Babinski, 'I've tried to get the local newspaper to interview me since writing my book, but they never had the time. Sales have been slow. Now, miracle of miracles, the book is being mentioned in newspapers, television and radio. God bless those Christians!'"
Fundamentalism is "not so much an ideology as it is an attitude, an attitude of intolerance, incivility and narrowness," Shurden said. "It is an attitude that says, 'We have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and we are going to impose it on you and control the system so that you will have to knuckle under to it.'
Fundamentalism is only vaguely definable. The religious fundamentalist movements have few beliefs in common with each other. There are literally thousands of differing beliefs as free thinking people in all religions, who emphasize basics in religion, react to things within their religion or the world that they hope to rectify or emphasize. There are very basic (fundamental) things which they hold true, which are unique to each of them, and they hold rigidly to these beliefs. Generally they don't twist beliefs, but emphasize some aspect of their religion, or feel led in a different direction by their interpretation of some religious writing. But as different as each is, they all have the same dangerous vulnerabilities. Fundamentalist thought has similarities regardless of whether it is in law, constitution, nationalism, news journalism, or in religions such as Islam/Muslim, Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, or whether speaking Farci, English, or Arabic.
Fundamentalists are black and white thinkers. For example, the Bible is absolutely, totally inerrant (even though the Bible does not posit this of itself). God's grace cannot possibly extend to one prayerful godly lady who happens to worship currently in a Mormon church. God's grace could not possibly save Hitler in the last seconds of his life. Christians who do not subscribe to the five/ten 'fundamentals' cannot possibly be Christians. People who are not fundamentalists will agonize in hell forever etc. etc.
Christian fundamentalists interpret the Bible as the inerrant, factual, and literal word of God. Though each of these terms can be argued as to what exactly the terms mean, it is in any case clear that fundamentalism rejects any modernist critical interpretation of the Bible. They reject most modern scientific findings in biology and geology, or at least greatly reinterpret them to "fit" their view of the Bible. Most believe, for example, that the world was created in seven 24 hour days simply because that is what the Genesis account says. Most fundamentalist also believe that the earth (and the universe) is no more than a few (less than ten) thousand years old based on the genealogies in the Bible. Any findings by science that seem to refute this argument are simply discarded and seen to be "obviously wrong" since it disagrees with the Bible. In other words, "if it disagrees with the Bible (the fundamentalist view of the Bible), then it is wrong and probably straight from Satan."
Fundamentalist" is a term sometimes used to refer to anyone who is intolerant of other's beliefs. Fundamentalism is "not so much an ideology as it is an attitude, an attitude of intolerance, incivility and narrowness," says Walter Shurden, professor of Christianity and director of the Centre for Baptist Studies at Mercer University. "It is an attitude that says, 'We have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and we are going to impose it on you and control the system so that you will have to knuckle under to it.'" As anyone who has ever attended a meeting of two or more activists can attest, that attitude can be found at all points on the political and religious spectrum.
In the two periods of Western history, the term Fundamentalism was used for those followers of Christianity who were narrow-minded, anti-development, violent in their views and strictly following a beaten path. During the medieval age, the term was used for a brief period in Europe, but could not get popular. Then towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, those Christian Evangelists were named fundamentalists, who believed in the literal interpretation of Bible, who strictly adhered to basic Biblical faiths and believed the virgin birth of Jesus by Mary the chaste and unmarried. They also believed in the ascension and bodily resurgence of Jesus (Simultaneously), they opposed many a scientific theories on religious grounds. Particularly, they rejected Darwin’s theory of Evolution and did not want it to be taught in the educational institutions. This group surfaced like a movement.
Fundamentalists have taught us to read the Bible as if it is divinely inspired truthfulness turned it into something different than a book. Not all fundamentalists would necessarily describe the Bible in that way but some would. Practically speaking though, in the way many fundamentalists approach the Bible, its unique truthfulness has given them license to run wild. In their secret hearts they seem to be saying, "The Bible is so true that I don't have to interpret it." "The Bible is so true that each word is not just meaningful; it is super-meaningful." "The Bible is so true that my theology is unquestionably right."
Fundamentalism seems to be growing around the world. Under the mantle of religion, Oversure fundamentalist leaders claim special authority, allegedly derived from God (via the Koran, the Bible, or other means). They then define morality for their followers in accordance with their particular version of Truth. Allegiance to this system becomes equated with finding a "true" religion that meets the person's spiritual needs.
All religions are based on fundamentals and all have their fundamentalists. They have their own texts, stories, doctrines, symbols and practices. Some are formed in antiquity, others are early in recorded history and some are quite recent. Fundamentalists are found everywhere.
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