Fundamentalism is a movement that arose in the United States during and immediately after the First World War in order to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and to defend it militantly against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other isms regarded as harmful to American Christianity. Since then, the focus of the movement, the meaning of the term, and the ranks of those who willingly use the term to identify themselves have changed several times. Fundamentalism has so far gone through four phases of expression while maintaining an essential continuity of spirit, belief, and method.
Phase I - Through the 1920s
The earliest phase involved articulating what was fundamental to Christianity and initiating an urgent battle to expel the enemies of orthodox Protestantism from the ranks of the churches
The series of twelve volumes called The Fundamentals (1910 - 15) provided a wide listing of the enemies, Romanism, socialism, modern philosophy, atheism, Eddyism, Mormonism, spiritualism, and the like, but above all liberal theology, which rested on a naturalistic interpretation of the doctrines of the faith, and German higher criticism and Darwinism, which appeared to undermine the Bible's authority. The writers of the articles were a broad group from English speaking North America and the United Kingdom and from many denominations. The doctrines they defined and defended covered the whole range of traditional Christian teachings. They presented their criticisms fairly, with careful argument, and in appreciation of much that their opponents said.
Almost immediately, however, the list of enemies became narrower and the fundamentals less comprehensive. Defenders of the fundamentals of the faith began to organize outside the churches and within the denominations. The General Assembly of the northern Presbyterian Church in 1910 affirmed five essential doctrines regarded as under attack in the church: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, Christ's bodily resurrection, and the historicity of the miracles. These were reaffirmed in 1916 and 1923, by which time they had come to be regarded as the fundamental doctrines of Christianity itself. On a parallel track, and in the tradition of Bible prophecy conferences since 1878, premillenarian Baptists and independents founded the World's Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919, with William B Riley as the prime mover. The premillennialists tended to replace the miracles with the resurrection and the second coming of Christ, or even premillenarian doctrine as the fifth fundamental. Another version put the deity of Christ in place of the virgin birth.
The term "fundamentalist" was perhaps first used in 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws in the Baptist Watchman - Examiner, but it seemed to pop up everywhere in the early 1920s as an obvious way to identify someone who believed and actively defended the fundamentals of the faith. The Baptist John Roach Straton called his newspaper The Fundamentalist in the 1920s. The Presbyterian scholar J Gresham Machen disliked the word, and only hesitantingly accepted it to described himself, because, he said, it sounded like a new religion and not the same historic Christianity that the church had always believed.
Through the 1920s the fundamentalists waged the battle in the large northern church denominations as nothing less than a struggle for true Christianity against a new non Christian religion that had crept into the churches themselves. In his book Christianity and Liberalism (1923), Machen called the new naturalistic religion "liberalism," but later followed the more popular fashion of calling it "modernism."
Even though people like Harry Emerson Fosdick professed to be Christian, fundamentalists felt they could not be regarded as such because they denied the traditional formulations of the doctrines of Christianity and created modern, naturalistic statements of the doctrines. The issue was as much a struggle over a view of the identity of Christianity as it was over a method of doing theology and a view of history. Fundamentalists believed that the ways the doctrines were formulated in an earlier era were true and that modern attempts to reformulate them were bound to be false. In other words, the fundamentals were unchanging.
Church struggles occurred in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and even in the southern Presbyterian Church, but the grand battles were fought in the northern Presbyterian and northern Baptist denominations. Machen was the undisputed leader among Presbyterians, joined by Clarence E Macartney. Baptists created the National Federation of the Fundamentalists of the Northern Baptists (1921), the Fundamentalist Fellowship (1921), and the Baptist Bible Union (1923) to lead the fight. The battles focused upon the seminaries, the mission boards, and the ordination of clergy. In many ways, however, the real strongholds of the fundamentalists were the Southern Baptists and the countless new independent churches spread across the south and midwest, as well as the east and west.
In politics fundamentalists opposed the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools, leading up to the famous Scopes trial (1925) in Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, a Presbyterian layman and three times candidate for the American presidency, was acknowledged leader of the antievolution battle.
I love your knack for understatement!
