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Christian Fundamentalism

Christian Fundamentalists believed modernist Protestants to be in violation of the Bible's teachings and began a movement that endures today.

Learning Objective

  • Analyze the origins of Christian Fundamentalism in late 19th- and early 20th-century America


Key Points

    • Christian Fundamentalism grew out of the late 19th and early 20th century Protestant movement in the U.S. and Britain.
    • A movement and not a set denomination, Christian Fundamentalism is rooted in new interpretations of the Bible, most notably in Dispensationalism, Princeton Theology and The Fundamentals.
    • Dispensationalism is a Biblical interpretation developed in the 1830s that breaks time into seven distinct stages (dispensations), each ending with God's punishment of humanity.
    • The Fundamentals was a twelve-volume study published in the early 20th century that promoted the inerrancy and literalist interpretation of the Bible and a belief in Creationism.

Terms

  • dispensationalism

    A Protestant evangelical theology rooted in the writings of John Nelson Darby.

  • The Fundamentals

    The Fundamentals, or The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon and later by Reuben Archer Torrey, is a set of 90 essays in 12 volumes published from 1910 to 1915 by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. They were designed to affirm and defend orthodox Protestant beliefs and are widely considered to be the foundation of modern Christian Fundamentalism.

  • Princeton Theology

    The Princeton theology is a tradition of conservative, Christian, Reformed and Presbyterian theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, in Princeton, New Jersey.


Full Text

Christian Fundamentalism, also known as Fundamentalist Christianity, or Fundamentalism, arose out of British and American Protestantism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among Evangelical Christians. The founders of Fundamentalist Christianity reacted against liberal theology and militantly asserted that the inerrancy, meaning without error or fault, of the Bible was essential for true Christianity and was being violated by modernists. As an organized movement, it began in the 1920s within Protestant churches, especially Baptist and Presbyterian branches. Fundamentalist Christianity is often intertwined with Biblical Literalism, which regards the depictions and accounts in the Bible as being literally true and factually accurate rather than allegorical or symbolic.

Fundamentalist vs. Evangelical

The broad term "Evangelical" includes both Fundamentalists as well as people with similar religious beliefs who do not engage outside challenges to the Bible with as much fervor. Evangelicals have a national organization called the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Fundamentalism is a movement, rather than a denomination or a systematic theology, and since 1930 has not had a national body or official statement of beliefs, although many fundamentalist churches since then have been represented by the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (known as IFCA International since its renaming in 1996).

Fundamentalist History

Fundamentalism has roots in British and American theology of the 19th century. One school of thought was Dispensationalism, a new interpretation of the Bible developed in the 1830s in England. It was a millenarian theory that divided all of time into seven different stages, called "dispensations," which were seen as stages of God's revelation. At the end of each stage, according to this theory, God punished humanity for having been found wanting in God's testing.

A second school of thought developed in the mid-19th century from Princeton Theology, a conservative, reformed and Presbyterian strain of Protestantism taught at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Princeton Theology provided the doctrine of inerrancy in response to higher criticism of the Bible. The work of Charles Hodge influenced Fundamental insistence that the Bible was inerrant because it had been dictated by God and written by men who took that dictation. This meant the Bible should be read differently from any other historical document, while modernism and liberalism were believed to lead people to hell in the same manner as non-Christian religions.

Princeton Seminary

Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1800s, where a school of thought called Princeton Theology developed that would be extremely influential in Fundamentalist belief. 

A third school of thought grew out of the release of a 12-volume set of 90 essays called, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. Published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles between 1910 and 1915, the essays were penned by 64 authors representing all the major Protestant denominations. The Fundamentals, as it is commonly known, gives the Fundamentalist movement its name, and sponsors subsidized the free distribution of over three million individual volumes to clergy, laymen and libraries.

Intended to defend what was considered Protestant orthodoxy, the essays in The Fundamentals cover a wide range of topics including defenses of the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the historicity of Biblical narratives, Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and Biblical inerrancy against more prevalent, critical theories of the day. They also addressed what was considered the falsity of theological systems such as Christian Science, "Millennial Dawnism", and Mormonism, as well as the errors of "Romanism".

Fundamentalists in the 1920s believed that the secularism, liberalism and immorality of the time were signs that humanity had again failed God's testing and the world was on the verge of the last stage during which a final battle would take place at Armageddon, followed by Christ's return to Earth and 1,000-year reign. One important sign of this final, prophesized stage is the rebirth of Israel, support for which has become the centerpiece of Fundamentalist foreign policy.

By the late 1920s the first two schools of thought – Dispensationalism and Princeton Theology – had become central to Fundamentalism. A fourth strand involved the growing concern among many Evangelical Christians with modernism and an increase in public criticism of the Bible. This strand concentrated on opposition to Darwinism. A fifth strand pressed the need for public revivals, a common theme among many Evangelicals who did not become Fundamentalists. Numerous efforts to form coordinating bodies failed, and the most influential treatise came much later in the 1947 book, Systematic Theology, by Lewis S. Chafer, who had founded the Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924.

Bible Colleges

Much of the enthusiasm for mobilizing Fundamentalism came from "Bible Colleges," particularly those modeled after the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Dwight L. Moody was influential in preaching the imminence of the Kingdom of God that was so important to Dispensationalism. The Bible Colleges prepared ministers who lacked university or seminary experience with intense study of the Bible, often using the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, which was the King James version of the Bible with detailed notes explaining how to interpret Dispensationalist passages.

Dwight L. Moody

Dwight L. Moody, evangelical preacher and founder of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois.

Fundamentalist movements were found in most North American Protestant denominations by 1919, with the attack on modernism in theology launched by the Fundamentalists in the Baptist and Presbyterian churches, with Fundamentalism becoming especially controversial among Presbyterians. Although Fundamentalism began in America's northern regions, its greatest popular strength was in the South, especially among Southern Baptists. By the late 1920s the national media identified it with the South, largely ignoring manifestations elsewhere.

Riley Fundamentalism

The leading organizer of the Fundamentalist campaign against modernism was William Bell Riley, a Northern Baptist based in Minneapolis, where his Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School (1902), Northwestern Evangelical Seminary (1935), and Northwestern College (1944) produced thousands of graduates. Riley created, at a large conference in Philadelphia in 1919, the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA). It became the chief interdenominational, Fundamentalist organization in the 1920s.

Although the Fundamentalist drive of the 1920s to take control of the major Protestant denominations failed at the national level, the network of churches and missions fostered by Riley shows the movement was growing in strength, especially in the American South. Both rural and urban in character, the flourishing movement acted as a denominational surrogate and aimed at a militant orthodoxy of evangelical Christianity. Riley was president until 1929, after which the WFCA faded in importance and was never replaced.

Fundamentalist Schism

The original Fundamentalist Movement split along clearly defined lines within conservative, Evangelical Protestantism as thinking on various issues progressed. Many groupings, large and small, were produced by this schism. Neo-evangelicalism, Reformed and Lutheran Confessionalism, the Heritage Movement, and Paleo-Orthodoxy have all developed distinct identities, but none of them acknowledge any more than an historical overlap with the Fundamentalist Movement, and the term is seldom used in reference to them.

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