When I was a teenage believer in the late 1960s, I knew I was a fundamentalist Christian. I don’t recall ever hearing any elaborate explanations of that term. Maybe I had heard the word explained, or maybe I just deduced its meaning for myself. But I knew that I believed the fundamental doctrines of historic Christianity: that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior, that the Bible is God’s inspired Word, and that its content is literally true.

Regarding the latter, I believed that Jesus really was born of a virgin, that He really did rise from the dead, and that the many miracles described in the Old and New Testaments, from the creation of man from the dust of the ground to the burning bush to the big fish to the fiery furnace to the feeding of the multitudes to the walk on water, all really did happen, just the way those events are described in the Bible.

I still believe all those things. However, despite my conservative theological beliefs, today I am no longer a fundamentalist.

I don’t recall that I was aware, back in those early days of my Christian walk, of any negative connotation attached to being a fundamentalist. Oh, sure, some of my non-believing adolescent peers scoffed that I really did believe in God, and Christ, and the Bible, and miracles. But they were unbelievers. What did I expect? I also knew that there were some Christians and churches that did not share the conservative beliefs that my church and I held.

But I never understood “fundamentalist” to be an intrinsically pejorative label, but just a term that accurately described someone who has a traditional, conservative faith. Today, however, I know that the term “fundamentalist” comes with a lot of religious and cultural baggage, including a lot that I vigorously reject.

To the secular media and unbelievers who don’t know better, the word “fundamentalist” today has come to describe someone who is an extremist, whose beliefs go beyond the bounds of what is considered mainstream or reasonable. Many people today seem to assume that “fundamentalists,” by definition, are kooks, cultists, members of the fringe. But that doesn’t bother me much. I see that as primarily an indication of how much our culture has moved from traditional beliefs in the last four decades. I have not moved, and I will not move now, just to keep up with the culture. I still believe in all those fundamentals. If my only concern was about being perceived as clinging to old-fashioned ideas about God and Christ and the Bible, then I would remain proud to be called a fundamentalist.

But the word “fundamentalist” has acquired a broader subtext of additional connotations: separation, exclusion, judgmentalism, intolerance, militancy, racism, hard-heartedness, arrogance. Am I all of those things, simply because I continue to believe in God, in Christ, and in the Bible? I sure hope not.

What does the word “fundamentalist” really mean? How did it originate, and how has its meaning changed over the years? And what is an “evangelical?” What distinguishes a fundamentalist from an evangelical? Which am I? Which are you?

THE FIRST FUNDAMENTALISTS
Webster’s defines “fundamentalism” as “a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching.”

The term emerged during the first two decades of the 1900s, in, for example, a series of books titled, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1909), and the World Conference on Christian Fundamentals, which convened in 1919. Fundamentalism arose to describe traditional conservative Christian doctrines and to distinguish those doctrines from liberal beliefs that were gaining popularity during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

There were at least three schools of liberal thought emerging during that period to which traditional Christians responded by declaring their adherence to the fundamentals. Those liberal schools were:

• Higher criticism: A field of biblical study, led by German theologians, in which the authorship and dating of various books of the Bible were questioned, as well as how much of the original text has survived in our modern versions of the Bible.

• Evolution: From Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859 to the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, evolution gained widespread acceptance, in direct contrast to belief in a literal creation week as described in Genesis.

• The social gospel: The belief that Christ did not come to die as a sacrifice, but rather to live as our model of love and peace. Salvation does not come through faith in the work of the cross, but by embracing and following Christ’s example. It is the job of the church is to meet the social needs of our society, and as we do, society will keep getting better and better, until the church succeeds in bringing the world to an age of peace and prosperity.

The common thread running through those three schools of thought was the questioning of the literal accuracy of the Bible.

• In higher criticism, if a Bible book wasn’t written by whom it says it was written, or wasn’t written at the time it says it was written, or if the text we have today is only an amalgamation of earlier texts which have been corrupted or lost – then the Bible is not literally true.

• If the human race is a product of evolution, ascending from the apes over millions of years, then the account in Genesis – of man being created in a day, fashioned from the dust of the ground, and the first woman being formed from his rib – is not literally true. If the creation story in Genesis is not literally true, what other stories from Genesis to Revelation also are not literally true?

• Social gospel (liberalism): Much of the New Testament must be discounted or re-interpretted to dispense with the doctrine of Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross. Although fundamentalists acknowledge that Christ instructed us to help the poor and the elderly, fundamentalists believe that the best help that a believer can offer his neighbor is the good news of salvation through faith in Christ crucified. Fundamentalists also believe that the end times will be preceded by a time of great tribulation, which will end with Christ’s Second Coming. Until that day, Christians should focus primarily on preaching the gospel and saving as many as we can, rather than focusing exclusively on solving social problems in a world that the Bible says will only get worse rather than better. (As the late J. Vernon McGee put it, the social gospel “is just polishing brass on a sinking ship.”)

In response to higher criticism, evolution, and the social gospel, Christians who believed in the Bible and its literal interpretation began to speak out in defense of the fundamentals of the faith. A fundamentalist Christian believed a few basics, including the inerrancy of the original Scriptures, the virgin birth of Christ, faith in Christ’s substitutionary death for salvation, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. Leaders of the fundamentalist movement during that period in the late 1800s-early 1900s include many names which are still familiar today: J. Gresham Machen, B.B. Warfield, Charles Hodge, Charles Ryrie, C.I. Scofield, R.A. Torrey, John Nelson Darby, Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and William Jennings Bryan.

If that was everything there is to know about fundamentalism, I would be proud to be called a fundamentalist today. Many of the names in the preceding paragraph are great heroes of the faith. However, during the 80 years since fundamentalism was first defined, the fundamentalist movement has picked up a lot of extra “fundamentals” along the way. It is all the excess baggage that causes me and many others to repudiate the label “fundamentalist” today.

In subsequent articles of this series, I will discuss the many detours fundamentalism has taken, the emergence of “new evangelicalism,” and the difference between the two. I will conclude by listing several reasons why I am not a fundamentalist today, even though I remain wholly devoted to the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

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I consulted many sources in writing this article. Here are two that I found particularly helpful:
> “The World of Fundamentalism,” Robert Wuthnow, Christian Century, April 22, 1992. Wuthnow leads the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.
> A series of lectures on American church history by Professor Terry Matthews, Wake Forest University.

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See: Part 2: “Non-Fundamental Fundamentalism and Premillennial Dispensationalism”

See: Part 3: “Prohibition: Precepts of Men Are Not Fundamentals”