Defining Fundamentalism

Throughout history, new Christian groups have recurrently taken pejorative labels applied to them by outsiders and appropriated them as badges of honour: one thinks, for example, of the ‘Quakers’ and the ‘Methodists’. It has been the peculiar fate of the fundamentalists, however, to have had their own self-chosen designation transmuted by outsiders into a general term of abuse. Perhaps the closest parallel is the Jesuits, who did have to endure the passing of ‘jesuitical’ into general circulation as a pejorative adjective but, even in their case, no one ever dreamed of talking about ‘Jesuit’ Moslems, ‘Jesuit’ Sikhs or the like, in the way in which ‘fundamentalist’ Moslems and ‘fundamentalist’ Sikhs are routinely discussed today. Indeed, in a world in which almost all groups – whether distinguished by race, culture, gender or sexual orientation – have been afforded the right to be referred to by only their own self-chosen designations, somehow the right to impose the word ‘fundamentalist’ on groups who do not so identify themselves has been retained. This is not merely a media phenomenon. Numerous scholarly projects have been created that subsume a dizzying array of religious groups – varieties of Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs and Roman Catholic Christians as well as Protestant ones, just to name the most prominent examples – under a discussion of ‘fundamentalism’. While scholars usually ensure that a pejorative tone is kept to a minimum, the media have popularized the negative connotations of the word so effectively that those meanings easily creep into any learned discussion that is not careful about excluding them. In short, it is the intention of this study to use the word ‘fundamentalism’ in its specific, original meaning, but that cannot be done as effectively as it ought to be unless what we think we know about ‘fundamentalism’ from the term's more general use in contemporary discourse is set aside.

Fundamentalism is a movement within conservative evangelical Protestantism in the English-speaking world, especially America. In the years 1910–15 twelve edited volumes containing numerous chapters by a notable collection of conservative evangelicals were published under the title The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.