Christian Fundamentalism

Christian fundamentalism, also known as Fundamentalist Christianity, or Fundamentalism, refers to a movement within Christianity upholding a literal reading of the Bible or official teachings of the Church.

The movement arose in British and American Protestantism in the late 19th century and early 20th century among evangelical Christians. These Protestants, in addition to Catholic fundamentalists, reacted against modernist theology. In true Church Militant fashion of defending the Word of God, they asserted that the inerrancy of the Bible and Church teaching were essential for true Christianity and was being violated by the modernists. As an organized movement, it began in the 1920s within Protestant churches — especially Baptist and Presbyterian — in the United States. Fundamentalist Christianity is often intertwined with Biblical literalism. Many such churches adopted a "fighting style" and certain theological elements, such as Dispensationalism. The broader term "evangelical" includes fundamentalists as well as people with similar or identical religious beliefs who do not engage the outside challenge to the Bible as actively.

Fundamentalism is a movement, rather than a denomination or a systematic theology, which gained ascendance after the release of a ten-volume set of essays, apologetic and polemic, written by many well-known conservative Protestant theologians to defend what they saw as Protestant orthodoxy—covering a wide range of topics, from defenses of the Divinity of Jesus Christ, his Virgin Birth, of the historicity of Biblical narratives, Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and of Biblical inerrancy against the prevalent higher-critical theories of the day, to the falsity of theological systems such as Christian Science, "Millennial Dawnism", Mormonism, to the errors of "Romanism"—over the course of 1910-1915, called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, from which the movement receives its eponymous name. Catholic Fundamentalism stresses the need for adherence to literal interpretation of Vatican declarations, particularly those pronounced by the Pope. Since 1930, Fundamentalism has not been an organized movement, and has not had a national body or official statement of beliefs. However, both Catholic and Protestant fundamentalists have been criticized for presenting God "more as a God of judgement and punishment than as a God of love and mercy."