While Fundamentalists themselves may trace their roots back through the Middle Ages to the N.T., fundamentalism per-se arises at the end of the 19th ct.

• F. are "keepers of both the Christian heritage of the first century and the American heritage of the Puritans and the Founding Fathers," though, she points out, the sense of religious mission associated with the Puritans disappears within a century of the founding of Plymouth. " ...but its symbolic place in the American religious identity remains. The idea that this nation has a special mission and therefore enjoys God's special providence continues to be a central theme in American 'civil religion' (Bellah 1967)." (17)

(At the time of the Constitution, however, our rhetoric derived more from deism than from some version of Protestantism. 17f.)

But, the majority were Protestant, forming a "Protestant empire." The first and second "Great Awakenings" then insured the importance of Evangelicalism in American culture.

These days of Protestant hegemony are the golden age Fundamentalists long for. They perceive that before about 1870 their view of religion prevailed in this country; and in this perception they are not entirely wrong. (18)

"They are also not entirely wrong in perceiving that about a century ago [i.e., after the Civil War] things began to change. A variety of forces began to alter the rural, homogeneous, Protestant character of American life." (18) These include:

• "Science, technology, and business were taking over where tradition, prayer and faith had left off."
• streams of European immigrants, arriving with Catholic and Jewish traditions
  --> religious pluralism was becoming a fact of American life
• "Old assumptions (mostly Protestant) were replaced by new dogmas of industrialism, historicism, and secularism....Religion gradually became compartmentalized in the private, family, and leisure spheres, leaving political, scientific, and economic affairs to the secular experts." (18)
• "an intellectual revolution" as well, i.e., marked by:
  • In the human sciences, psychology and sociology began to question the nature of human responsibility, destiny, and free will. In the natural sciences, Charles Darwin's ideas began to change the way scholars viewed the physical universe. In political science, Karl Marx's ideas led people to look for the hidden meanings in religion, politics, and philosophy. And in theology itself, scholars began to analyze biblical material as if it were ordinary ancient literature that reported events that might also be explained in natural, human terms. From every direction, the world was changing. It was no longer what is used to be or even what ordinary people thought it to be. (18f.; cf. Carmody and Carmody, ch. 7)
    Such secularism, notice, included the shift in public education from "...church dominated curriculum to one that prepared students for an industrialized and democratic society." (David Middlemas, "The Rise of Modern Fundamentalism and its Attack on Secular Humanism" [Springfield, MO: Senior Seminar Paper, Philosophy Department, Drury University, 1991], 11)

As Ammerman presents it, it is the absorption of these new views within more "liberal" religious traditions that proved to be the last straw:

• It was, then, when the world was changing that Fundamentalism began to emerge. For many religious people, the new ideas and strange ways of life seemed too different to ever be reconciled with what they knew of Christianity. If nothing else was sacred, at least religion should be. When, in the late nineteenth century, some denominations began to liberalize their views of doctrines such as the virgin birth, human depravity, the resurrection, and life after death, conservative groups began to fight back....At least in part, Fundamentalists are right in claiming to be the preservers of beliefs that once characterized most Protestants.

Over against these developments, the "Fundamentals" emerge as basic claims of faith. These include "the Five Points":

• 1) Divinely inspired scriptures which were inerrant in the original writing;
  2) Christ's virgin birth and deity;
  3) Christ's substitutionary atonement;
  4) Christ's resurrection, and
  5) Christ's personal pre-millennial and imminent second coming.
  (See Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Controversy in the Twenties (Vanderbilt University Press, 1969; Middlemas, 14)

More generally, James Barr characterizes fundamentalism as marked by:

• 1) a strong emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible;
  2) a strong hostility to modern theology and to the methods, results and implications of modern critical study of the Bible, and
  3) an assurance that those who do not share their religious viewpoint are not really "true Christians" (Fundamentalism [Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1978], in Middlemas, 4).

The social and political results of this theological reaction are predictable. In addition to the essentially conservative mores stressed by Fundamentalists (racial segregation, the subordination of women, etc.), cf. the anti-democratic conclusions -- which follow necessarily from a stress on humanity as sinful (Augustine, Luther) -- expressed by at least some of the Fundamentalist attacks on modern democracy (see Middlemas, 15).

But if Fundamentalism is conservative in its reaction against these elements of modernity, it is also evolutionary in the sense that it adopts new beliefs and practices, e.g.:

• premillennialism (esp. J. N. Darby's view of history known as dispensationalism, which stresses, among other things, the Rapture, and issues in great interest in determining the date of Christ's return);
• the revival. (19)

Further note the major split during WW II -- between Fundamentalists who become "separatists" (i.e., unwilling to work with other Christian groups who disagree with their views) and adopt right-wing politics as part of their creed, vs.
new Evangelicals who are more willing to form coalitions with other Christians and whose politics are not necessarily conservative (consider Rev. Jim Wallace of Sojourners as a contemporary Evangelical!) (23f.)

Finally, notice the large split represented by Christian feminists on the one hand (see Carmody, 180ff.) and Christian fundamentalists, on the other. How would you "map" these two groups of contemporary Christians on the following grid?

Preliterate	Agricultural
experiential unity	"swap"
Oral tradition	Literate - Text/Law
egalitarian	hierarchical
Prophetic	Apocalyptic
(gender equality) communitarian pacifism disobedience to hierarchical authority as first "virtue"	(patriarchy) hierarchy / individual vs. group warfare (killing of enemy as inferior) obedience to hierarchical authority as first "virtue"