evangelical revisionism

A lot of ‘young fundamentalists’ repeat the mantra that fundamentalism is a ‘subset’ of evangelicalism. This same notion is perpetrated in a PBS interview I read today.

In the article, John Green, a senior fellow at the PEW Forum on Religion and professor of political science at the University of Akron, is interviewed about ‘young evangelicals’ and politics. Green repeats the revisionist notion that fundamentalists really are evangelicals.

The terms fundamentalist and evangelical are often used interchangeably, but they’re often held as being opposites of one another. One way that one can think about this is that all fundamentalist Protestants are evangelicals. But not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are the heirs of a political and religious movement that developed in the early 20th century in reaction to the modern world, and many of the things that those people saw as bad about the world. Fundamentalism has had an enormous impact on the United States but also all around world, this idea of getting back to the true faith as opposed to the modern world which perverts and abandons the faith.

But not all people in the religious communities that were influenced by the fundamentalist movement adopted all of the particular beliefs. And most of them did not adopt the style of fundamentalists. It’s a very strident style because fundamentalists thought they were defending the true faith against its enemies.

So what we see today is a broad community of conservative Protestants, a small proportion of which adhered to fundamentalist beliefs and ideas. And then a much larger group, that are happy to call themselves evangelicals, but who agree with some of the basic religious values, but with not all of the particular doctrines, and don’t adopt the particular style of fundamentalists.

There are a number of inaccuracies in this statement. I’ll just highlight them as they appear in these paragraphs:

1. Fundamentalism is not a subset of evangelicalism. More on this later.
2. Fundamentalists are not the heirs of a movement that reacted against the modern world but rather modernism. The subtle difference of terms betrays the “fundamentalists as cavemen” stereotype.
3. “This idea of getting back to the true faith as opposed to the modern world” isn’t what Christian Fundamentalism is all about. I suspect it is not what Islamic Fundamentalism is all about either.
4. It’s not that there was a mainstream conservative Christian ‘community’ that, though influenced by fundamentalist beliefs, stood apart uneasily from fundamentalism between the late 1920s and mid-1950s — on the contrary, conservative Christianity in that period largely adopted the fundamentalist position in the fight against modernism. In the 1950s, the majority of these Christians decided to change their strategy and abandoned fundamentalism.

The last paragraph quoted above is essentially correct. The apparent common link between evangelicals and fundamentalists is that they are conservative Protestants [just don’t tell some IFBs!]. Their similarities end there. The philosophy and doctrines that distinguish fundamentalists from evangelicals mark the two groups as distinct entities.

It is understandable for evangelicals to make the assumptions they do about fundamentalism vs. evangelicalism. They are in the majority and are much more loosely defined. Those fundamentalists who want to define themselves as a subset of fundamentalism have a much more complicated set of motivations and interests. Broadly speaking, I suspect that a good deal of the motivation for this definition is the desire to minimize or eliminate the distinctions between the most conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists. There may be other reasons, including simple ignorance of the history and/or current context.

In any case, I believe it is important to realize there are two distinct groups within conservative Protestantism. One left the other, and the one that stayed can’t be said to be a subset of the one that left.

Regards
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3