What is Fundamentalism?

Exploring a religious psychology

Photo by Mehdi Sepehri on Unsplash

(A ten-minute read.)

I just finished watching a series on Hulu called Under the Banner of Heaven, which is based on a book by the same name, written by Jon Krakauer, that details the true story of a woman in Utah who, along with her little baby, was brutally murdered by her Mormon Fundamentalist brothers-in-law. I had read the book when it originally came out back in 2003, but had forgotten much of it in the intervening years, so becoming reacquainted with the storyline was a riveting experience.

The story is a tragedy, to be sure. And it gives significant insight into not simply the fundamentalist wing of Mormonism, but the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in general (though I would stop short of presuming that Krakauer’s book and the TV series based on it would completely stand up to historical scrutiny). But my foray into this piece of history is just one of a string of encounters I’ve had recently with fundamentalist religion.

I also recently read a book by my friend, Michael Campbell, that grapples with my own denomination’s fundamentalist history, entitled, 1922: The Rise of Adventist Fundamentalism (a full book review of Michael’s book is forthcoming). Eighteen months ago I also read perhaps the seminal work on the history of Christian fundamentalism in America, Fundamentalism and American Culture, written by George M. Marsden, one of the foremost experts on the history of Christianity in America. The book was originally published in 1980, but then updated and republished in 2006, in the wake of a resurgence of Christian fundamentalism that rose to prominence during George W. Bush’s presidency. It was once again updated and expanded in January of this year, to cover the period through the end of the Trump presidency.

These three editions of this classic work, stretching over forty years and covering three different periods of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, demonstrate the ongoing relevance of this religious phenomenon. It indicates that fundamentalism continues to be a source of not only academic fascination but also of political concern. Even on a popular level, as the Hulu series indicates, fundamentalism has, to some degree, captured people’s imaginations.

I don’t know if it’s simply because I wasn’t really tuned into the topic before, but I never really knew fundamentalism was much of a thing until a few years ago. That could also be because fundamentalism wasn’t much of a thing for a long while, and it truly only made a resurgence in recent times (after surfacing here and there over the last 40 years). It may also be because I was a fundamentalist—or currently am, as my Jewish Rabbi-friend told me a few weeks ago when we were discussing the topic—and didn’t even realize it.

But whatever the case may be, my real concern in this piece is to answer a simple—though somewhat complex—question: what is fundamentalism?

I’d like to wrestle a bit with the definition of fundamentalism, hoping that somehow such an exercise will implicitly prove fruitful in your own understanding of religion.

The Fundamentalists

From a historical perspective, fundamentalism has a pretty straightforward story. In the early twentieth century, many conservative Christians in America experienced considerable anxiety as they sensed a progressive shift within Protestantism (what would technically be labeled a “modernist” shift). Gaining steam in the 1880s, and building even more momentum as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, Christianity in America experienced significant upheaval, especially revolving around the question of religious authority.

There are lots of moving parts with this history, but to reduce it to an overly-simplistic explanation: Darwin was in and the Bible was out.

These conservative Christians finally decided they weren’t going to lose the fight sitting down. So over the first few decades of the twentieth century they started holding conferences and publishing books that declared their theological agenda with unequivocal clarity, driving their religious stake in the ground and indicating the core religious commitments they weren’t willing to compromise on. They called them “the fundamentals.”

Specifically, these religious commitments were five-fold: they insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible (that is, the Bible contained no errors whatsoever in anything), the divine nature of Jesus, the virgin birth of Jesus, his resurrection, and his return.

With this historical explanation established, some have been tempted to paint all conservative Christians with the fundamentalist brush. After all, just about every evangelical in America basically affirms these five theological concepts—as would I. To be sure, there would be some considerable nuance with the first idea—that of biblical inerrancy—and that is perhaps where the rub lies with evangelicals who don’t consider themselves fundamentalist and those who do. I get that nuance and I do think it’s an incredibly important one.

But an average evangelical who doesn’t fully affirm the inerrancy of Scripture is still a lot closer to a fundamentalist as it relates to the authority of Scripture than to a progressive Christian who believes the Bible has only human origins.

I say this because I believe, following Marsden’s lead, that what truly separates a fundamentalist from a non-fundamentalist is much more fundamental than that. Recognizing this allows us to see that fundamentalism pre-dates its official historical origins and that it also exists within other religious (or even non-religious) movements.

“Fundamentalists were evangelical Christians,” Marsden therefore explains, “who in the twentieth century militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed. Militant opposition to modernism was what most clearly set off fundamentalism from a number of closely related traditions.”

Did you catch that? In this definition, fundamentalism is not defined so much by the content of one’s beliefs as by the attitude with which one holds those beliefs. Fundamentalists, according to Marsden, were “militant” in their attitude towards those with a progressive agenda. They “militantly opposed” the shifting culture around them, which, according to their view, was moving away from its Christian foundations. Elsewhere, Marsden, playing off Jerry Falwell, somewhat-humorously quipped that a fundamentalist is simply “an evangelical who is angry about something.”

The point here is that fundamentalism is an attitude not a theology—or, as David French put it recently in a podcast, fundamentalism is a psychology not a theology.

And what is that psychology? It’s one of militancy toward those one deems religiously and theologically threatening. Or, putting it in more positive terms (since my Rabbi-friend said my explanation wasn’t very generous), fundamentalism views its primary task as one of guarding and protecting truth—or doggedly guarding and protecting a particular religious life. This is its main agenda.

Thus, the psychology of fundamentalism, positively, is protectionism; negatively, it’s militancy as it seeks to eliminate threats to its religious outlook and agenda.

All sorts of behaviors follow as a result of this psychology and this agenda, I’d submit—and, to some degree, those who may not display much “anger” or “militancy” nevertheless might display other fundamentalist characteristics. I’d therefore submit that, with this sort of “protectionism” as the background, fundamentalism also expresses itself in these four other postures: separation, dogmatism, literalism, and control.

At the risk of painting in very broad strokes, let me briefly explain each:

Separation. In order to guard and protect their religious turf, and eliminate the possibility of being negatively influenced, fundamentalists separate from others. They separate from “the world.” They separate from other religious people who don’t align with their theology and teachings. They don’t read, listen to, or fellowship with those not of their tribe. They very much have an “us vs. them” attitude.

Dogmatism. Fundamentalists see very little gray. Most of life is black and white. There is little nuance. As David French put it, there is a flattening of values. All matters are of equal consequence and importance. Thus, for example, what a woman wears is as important as whether Jesus was truly the divine Son of God.

Literalism. As I might return to in the future, the word “literal,” when speaking of religious texts, is a bit of a slippery term that may not be all that useful. But in this context, I simply mean that fundamentalists tend to read their religious texts without regard to context or the recognition that interpretation is inevitably taking place whenever we read literature. They often pluck texts from their context and just apply them indiscriminately, supposing they apply to all times and all places (of course, the great secret here is that no one truly applies every text to all times and all places, as I’ve never seen a fundamentalist walking around, following Jesus’s command to pluck one’s eye out if it causes one to sin, with only one eye). The sort of “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” mantra epitomizes this posture.

Control. This posture perhaps stands behind these other postures, but in an attempt to protect one’s theology and religious life, which is the basis of one’s security, fundamentalists seek to control as much as they can. This manifests in many different ways, some more obvious than others, but there is heavy emphasis on outward conformity that is compelled by the use of shame, guilt, and judgment.

This is just a very brief overview of how I’d define and see fundamentalism playing out. Most likely, there is a bit of a fundamentalist continuum. We often think of the really extreme forms of fundamentalism, like the Under the Banner of Heaven story reflects, but it seems to me that there are softer, less militant forms of fundamentalism as well, where people can have a pleasant demeanor and yet interpret their sacred texts in very literalistic, context-less ways, and possess a subtle exclusivist attitude where they believe they are a part of God’s chosen people on earth because they believe the right things and others don’t.

If it wasn’t obvious, I don’t consider myself a fundamentalist. I’m not sure if I ever was one, but I definitely don’t consider myself one now. To be sure, I broadly affirm many of the theological values that fundamentalist Christians might affirm (like the authority of Scripture or the belief that Jesus was actually God and born of a virgin), and, for this reason, non-Christians (or perhaps very progressive Christians) might simply paint me with the same brush. But I don’t think that’s fair or accurate.

I’d also submit, as mentioned above, that fundamentalism, if it is understood as a psychology rather than a theology, comes in all sorts of religious flavors. There are, therefore, Islamic fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, progressive Christian fundamentalists, secular, atheistic, and agnostic fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is, essentially, a dogged commitment to a core set of fundamentals, wherein a person is very closed-minded about counter-perspectives and acts with aggression, subtle or obvious, towards them.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.