Fundamentalism:
conservative movement in American Protestantism arising out of the millenarian movement of the 19th century and emphasizing as fundamental to Christianity the literal interpretation and absolute inerrancy of the Scriptures, the imminent and physical Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and Atonement. Fundamentalism came into its own in the early 20th century in opposition to modernist tendencies in American religious and secular life. In the late 20th century the movement was represented by numerous church bodies, educational institutions, and special-interest organizations. See also evangelical church.
Origins.
The roots of fundamentalism are found in the history of the American millenarian movement. In the 1830s and '40s, much excitement was generated in the United States by expectations of the Second Advent of Christ and an ensuing thousand years of peace ("the millennium"). The initially scattered interest in the subject was concentrated and built into a movement largely through the Niagara Bible Conference. Initiated by James Inglis, a New York City Baptist minister, shortly before his death in 1872, the conference continued under James H. Brookes (1830-97), a St. Louis Presbyterian minister and editor of the influential millenarian periodical The Truth. Other early millenarian leaders included George C. Needham, a Baptist evangelist (1840-1902); William J. Erdman (1834-1923), a Presbyterian minister noted for his skill as a biblical expositor; and William R. Nicholson (1822-1901), who left the Episcopal church in 1873 and became a bishop in the Reformed Episcopal denomination.
Toward the close of the century, the movement attracted leaders such as the prominent Boston Baptist minister Adoniram J. Gordon (1836-95) and Maurice Baldwin (1836-1904), bishop of Huron in the Church of Canada. The group held annual summer conferences, which generally met at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, until 1899. The millenarians associated with the Niagara Conference also sponsored public conferences in major cities beginning in 1878, such as the Bible and Prophetic Conference in New York City.
Development of fundamentalist views.
The millenarian movement began to grow within America when confidence in America's destiny first began to wane among some Protestant leaders, faced as they were with labour unrest, social discontent, and the rising tide of Roman Catholic immigration. During the late 1880s and '90s the challenges posed by the rise of liberal Biblical criticism also won many converts to the millenarian movement.
As the century drew to a close, the Protestant evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837-99) provided in his Northfield conferences an influential platform for millenarian expression. Millenarians supported foreign-missions work and influenced the surge of missionary zeal that was eventually institutionalized as the Student Volunteer Movement. Also, they found within the Princeton Theological Seminary at Princeton, N.J., a group of scholars interested in defending the authority and inspiration of the Bible.
Millenarians invited the Princeton professors to their conferences and adopted their arguments in defense of the Bible. Virtually none of the Princeton faculty adopted millenarianism, and some opposed it strongly, but both parties appreciated each other's support on the issue of biblical authority.
The high point of millenarian influence upon the conservative tradition within evangelical Protestantism occurred when millenarians cooperated with other defenders of the inerrancy of the Bible in founding the American Bible League in 1902 and in writing a series of 12 pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals. The pamphlets attacked the current theories of biblical criticism and reasserted the authority of the Bible, using the arguments developed at the Princeton Theological Seminary. The series was a summary of the previous generation's attempt to oppose biblical criticism and modernism through argument.
Almost all the leaders who had founded the Niagara Conference had died by 1914. The new generation of leaders were not as firmly attached to their denominations as were their predecessors. And their defense of the millenarian cause was more militant and uncompromising. During the last years of the 19th century, disagreements over prophetic interpretation were expressed, but James H. Brookes held the dissident factions together. Within a few years of his death, however, the Niagara Conference was abandoned, and shortly thereafter a paper war broke out between the two leading millenarian periodicals, Watchword and Truth and Our Hope, that deeply divided the movement.
The fundamentalist-modernist controversy. At the end of World War I, the millenarians, alarmed by the growth of liberalism and disturbed over what they conceived to be social degeneracy, held a number of conferences in New York City and Philadelphia that were successful enough to encourage the formation of a larger and more comprehensive organization in 1919, the World's Christian Fundamentals Association. As a result of this conference, the millenarian movement changed its name without changing its basic character. Furthermore, the 1919 conference placed planks in a platform on which the millenarian-fundamentalist movement would stand for the next 30 years.
The leaders reiterated the creedal basis of the movement, called for the exorcism of modernism and all its associated demons (especially evolution), practically abandoned the universities and placed their faith in the more recently founded Bible institutes, denounced the unitive and cooperative spirit exemplified in the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, and threatened schism if this type of spiritual decline persisted. In spite of vigorous leadership, however, the association never prospered.
During the late 19th century, the liberal faction in the church had numbered only a few men, most of them professors in seminaries or universities. Their acceptance of higher criticism was viewed with apprehension by parishioners, the clergy, and officials of their denominations. Where legal machinery existed to examine the new teachings, as it did in the Presbyterian denomination, the verdict was given against the innovations of liberals.
Within a few decades, however, evidence for the new understanding of the Bible mounted and a new generation of seminarians had joined the liberal cause. By 1914, among the Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian denominations in the North, liberalism had gained many adherents. The battle to prevent the reception and spread of these new views had been lost. During the 1920s it only remained to be decided whether the liberals could be forced out of the denominations.
Not every Protestant denomination was affected by intellectual controversy during the 1920s, of course. In some, such as the Southern Baptist denomination, modernism had not yet become prominent. In others, such as the Methodist and Episcopal churches, modernism had gained many adherents; but the opposition did not become well enough organized to bring the issue to a focus.
Serious controversy did erupt, however, among the northern Baptists and the Presbyterians in the northern states. Within the Presbyterian church, conservatives had, with the help of the millenarians, imposed a set of essential doctrines upon the denomination in 1910, declaring the inerrant inspiration of the Bible, the Virgin Birth of Christ, and the Atonement (redemptive activity), Resurrection, and miracle-working power of Christ necessary to the Christian faith. In 1922, when a New York minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, soon to become a leading modernist spokesman, protested the activities of millenarians in foreign-mission fields in a sermon entitled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" the conservatives and millenarians in the denomination were able to force Fosdick, who was a Baptist, out of his position as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New York City.
A withdrawal of the liberals had been the solution desired by millenarians and conservatives. To avoid a schism within the Presbyterian church in the United States, a Commission of Fifteen was appointed to work out a compromise. The report of the commission took the position that the Presbyterian denomination had traditionally tolerated a diversity of opinion and rejected the right of the General Assembly to determine which were the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. The report virtually destroyed the conservatives' position.
The focus of discord within the northern Baptist denomination was in their annual convention, which functioned much like the convention of a political party. Beginning in 1920, a group of Baptists calling themselves the National Federation of Fundamentalists began holding annual preconvention conferences on Baptist fundamentals. Thus organized, they attempted to carry their views into the convention. When the tactics of the National Federation failed to make immediate progress, some of the more militant Baptist fundamentalists founded the Baptist Bible Union. Among the Baptists, however, as among the Presbyterians, divisions among the fundamentalists caused their defeat.
Displeasure with the teaching of evolution, as well as anxiety over the spread of biblical criticism, gained momentum in the 1920s. Fundamentalists, believing that the Bible could not be reconciled with the view of the origin of life put forward by Charles Darwin, opposed evolution; but not every opponent of evolution was a fundamentalist. Antievolution crusaders lobbied for legislation to prevent the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Tennessee passed such a statute, which was challenged in the courts in 1925 at the instigation of the American Civil Liberties Union. John T. Scopes, a science teacher in the small town of Dayton, offered to serve as the defendant against the charge of having taught evolution. Two of the foremost public figures of that decade, William Jennings Bryan, a Presbyterian fundamentalist, and Clarence Darrow, a defense counsel in notable criminal trials, made headlines as the assistant prosecuting attorney and the defense attorney, respectively.
Institutional development.
During the 1930s and 1940s, fundamentalists gradually withdrew from conflict and from the national spotlight. During this period the institutional structure of modern fundamentalism developed. Some fundamentalist Presbyterians and Baptists broke away from their denominations to form new churches, such as the Presbyterians, led by J. Gresham Machen, who in 1936 formed the Presbyterian Church in America, or the Baptists, who left the Northern Baptist Convention to establish the General Association of Regular Baptists. Some remained within congregations of the larger denominations. But most fundamentalists joined a congregation of one of the smaller sects that had remained faithful to the creed of biblical literalism and premillennialism, such as the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Plymouth Brethren, and the Evangelical Free Church, or one of the many independent Bible churches and tabernacles that arose during that period.
Much of the structure of modern fundamentalism is provided by Bible institutes and Bible colleges. Many of these schools, such as the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Ill. or the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Calif., in addition to teaching their students, publish periodicals, broadcast from their own radio stations, hold conferences, and maintain a staff of extension speakers. They operate very much like denominational headquarters, providing a bond between otherwise isolated congregations. In the arts and sciences the strongest bastion has long been Wheaton College, a scholarly college in a suburb of Chicago.
There is also a series of organizations for fundamentalists paralleling the professional and business organizations of American society. Doctors, scientists, athletes, social workers, historians, businessmen, nurses, students, and others may join groups designed especially for their interest or vocational area. Chapters of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ exist on hundreds of university and college campuses to provide religious support similar to that provided by organizations of the major Protestant denominations and Roman Catholics. The American Scientific Affiliation holds meetings and publishes a journal in which the compatibility of science with the Bible and with a Christian worldview is emphasized.
Paralleling the ecumenical bodies of Protestantism are the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) founded in 1941 and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) founded in 1942. The ACCC was (until 1969) virtually the voice of one man, Carl McIntire, who spoke against larger ecumenical bodies, such as the National Council of Churches, and against the alleged dangers of communism. The NAE operates as a coordinating body for its members but implements no programs of its own.
The most significant influences upon the fundamentalist and evangelical churches in America since World War II have been the prosperity of the postwar decades, the religious revival of the 1950s, and the alleged threat of communist subversion. The new public image of the fundamentalist during this period was perhaps best exemplified by the evangelist Billy Graham.
The issue of communism that preoccupied the American public during the 1950s closely resembled the traditional concerns of fundamentalism?-namely, biblical criticism and evolution?-which fundamentalists believed came from abroad, seemed to spread uncontrollably and subversively, and tended to undermine Christianity. The anticommunist activities of the mid-20th century virtually duplicated the history of the antievolution crusade of the 1920s. The evolution controversy itself resurfaced in the 1960s when creationists (those accepting literal interpretations of the biblical Creation account in Genesis), dismayed by the emphasis on evolutionary theory in biology textbooks, sought again to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools. In the 1970s creationists campaigned for the mandatory teaching of Genesis whenever evolutionary theory was taught. This was followed by an attempt to mandate the teaching of so-called "creation science," or "scientific creationism," which presumed to present creationism and evolutionary theory as alternative scientific models. All of these movements were successfully challenged in the U.S. courts on constitutional grounds. The fundamentalist creationists gained some ground in conservative areas, and the issue generated a broader controversy concerning the rights of parents to determine what their children are taught. Also during this period the so-called Moral Majority, a fundamentalist citizens' organization under the leadership of Baptist minister Jerry Falwell of Virginia, crusaded against legalized abortion, homosexual rights, and the women's Equal Rights Amendment and crusaded for school prayer, increased defense spending, and a strong anticommunist foreign policy.
Fundamentalist beliefs have not changed significantly since the time of the Niagara conferences. The greatest theological excitement in the history of modern fundamentalism was generated by the theology of Karl Barth, whose emphasis on biblical authority was seen by many to reflect fundamentalist concerns.
Though fundamentalists are not notably ascetic, they do observe certain taboos. Most fundamentalists do not smoke or drink alcoholic beverages and usually do not dance or attend movies and plays. At most Bible institutes and fundamentalist colleges, these practices are strictly forbidden. Worship practices may vary from denomination to denomination but are usually nonliturgical and heavily influenced by revivalism. A sermon with congregational singing and prayer are common elements of fundamentalist services.
Ernest R. Sandeen
source: Fundamentalism. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved May 31, 2004, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service.
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