fundamentalism
(redirected from fundamentalisms)Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus.
fundamentalism
Fundamentalism
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)The term fundamentalist can be applied to any who read the scriptures of their religion in a literal, non-metaphorical way, as defined by accepted, conservative, orthodox authorities. In the American mind, post-September 11, 2001, the word conjures up two images. The first is the old image of the Protestant Christian fundamentalist—the "Bible-believing, virgin-birth, born-again, second-coming" image. The second and more recent image is that of the Islamic fundamentalist who seeks to attack the United States, calling it a child of Satan.
In one important respect, both images illustrate the same word. If "faith" is understood in terms of accepting a body of facts called religious doctrine (see Faith), then a fundamentalist is one who has accepted his or her tradition's "fundamental" doctrines, as put forth by someone who is considered orthodox.
In the case of Christianity, the term was coined by a series of twelve small books published between 1910 and 1915 under the name The Fundamentals. The committee assembled to put the series together identified five key doctrines they believed to be the essential core beliefs that all Christians were required to accept. Sixty-four authors contributed to the project, B. B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary being the most prominent.
The five fundamentals were said to be:
The virgin birth of Christ Jesus' deity and substitutionary atonement for sin Christ's bodily resurrection His literal second coming The authority and inerrancy of the Bible These booklets defined the kind of Christian orthodoxy that became known as fundamentalism.
Militant Islamics were given the name fundamentalists by the media shortly after their takeover of Iran in the 1970s. When the Qur'an became the law of the land, "Muslim fundamentalist" became a household term. Shi'ite Islam, the primary religion of Iran, has long housed within it a faction that reverenced martyrdom. In Sura 4:95 of the Qur'an, it says, "Not equal are those believers who sit (at home) and receive no hurt, and those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their persons. God hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight."
When "fight" is understood in terms of actual, flesh-and-blood warfare instead of spiritual warfare, when the Qur'an is read literally rather than metaphorically, the term fundamentalist is applied.
Fundamentalism
an extremely conservative tendency in modern Protestantism, directed against liberal Protestant rationalism, or what the Fundamentalists call modernism. Fundamentalism rejects any criticism of the Bible and preaches the infallibility of Holy Scripture as the “fundament” of Christianity. Fundamentalism demands that all Protestants return to blind faith in the biblical miracles, the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, and Christ’s bodily resurrection from the dead and his ascension into heaven.
Fundamentalism flourished chiefly in the southern states of the USA, especially among Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists during the second decade of the 20th century, after the publication and wide distribution between 1910 and 1912 of a series of anonymous pamphlets that stigmatized any sort of criticism or rationalist interpretation of Scripture. In the succeeding decade, Fundamentalism attacked science and opposed its authority over that of the Bible. From 1921 to 1929, Fundamentalists in a number of southern states (Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi) succeeded in having laws adopted that prohibited the teaching of Darwin’s theories on evolution in the public schools. In 1973, Tennessee amended the law to permit the teaching of Darwin’s ideas but only as a hypothesis and along with the biblical version of creation.
In 1948, in order to counterbalance the World Council of Churches, Fundamentalists reorganized the World’s Christian Fundamentalist Association (founded 1919) into the International Council of Christian Churches, comprising 140 Protestant churches from many countries. In the 1970’s, however, the Fundamentalists did not have much influence.
A. N. CHANYSHEV