Christian fundamentalism is relatively new.

[arely staircase]

This is a good Salon piece on the religious right. Again I am on my phone and don't have the cut/paste of test down well.


http://www.salon.com/2013/11/02/how_the_religious_right_won_birth_of_the_fundamentalists_in_our_modern_times/

[gopiscrap]

1. good article

[JEFF9K]

2. All of these fundamentalists "add" to the Bible. ...

Which the Bible doesn't allow! Yet they purport to believe in Biblical inerrancy!!

[arely staircase]

3. one of the best definitions of a fundamentalist, which I actually heard from a fellow episcopalian

Someone who believes every word in the Bible is literally true except "wine."

[rug]

4. It clearly roots the phenemenon in its proper time.

Fundamentalism is a paradox. Its partisans—of any faith—call for the return to an imagined arcadia in which God’s voice boomed plainly from scripture. Yet as a historical phenomenon, fundamentalism is wholly modern. It is a set of reactions against the aftershocks of the Enlightenment and the evolution of global capitalism: the breach between faith and reason, the rise of the secular public square, and the collapse of traditional social hierarchies and ways of life. Creatures of modernity, fundamentalists have happily availed themselves of modern technology. Fundamentalists ranging from separatist Baptist preachers to Al Qaeda propagandists have demonstrated a genius for employing the latest media and political (or military) weaponry to spread their message and accomplish their aims. To fundamentalists, history, too, is a technology: a trove of data to be strategically deployed.

Nowhere have the uses of history been clearer than in the clashes between conservative and progressive evangelicals for control of their denominations throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the Southern Baptist Convention, many conservatives would have objected to the “fundamentalist” label as a Yankee epithet, a synonym for a barefoot bumpkin sorely lacking in southern grace. But if their self-perception was not fundamentalist, many of their goals and tactics were. The decisive battles over the meaning and role of the Bible in modern society did not, primarily, unfold in the form of dueling proof texts or Sunday pulpit ripostes, but in skirmishes for control of the machinery of intellectual authority: seminaries, missions boards, denominational presses, and authorized church history. The personal magnetism of gurus was not sufficient to stanch the secularist tide. Just as thousands of volunteers at Billy Graham’s crusades worked to settle new converts into local churches before their enthusiasm could evaporate, conservative activists knew that the fervor wandering sages left in their wake would fizzle unless channeled into institutions and sustained by an infrastructure built to teach and train future generations.

[AnnieBW]

5. Actually, no

Religious fundamentalism has been around since at least the Renaissance. Look up Savonarola, Torquemada, and other crazies.

[arely staircase]

6. as a widespread belief

And none of the people you mentioned would fit the definition.

[JNelson6563]

7. Sorry, not fundies.

Think more along the lines of the puritans, the pilgrims.

Fundamentalism is not a Catholic thing, very far from it.

Julie

[arely staircase]

8. ecactly

One can argue, correctly imho, that those people were fanatics but they were not fundies.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

9. I know a woman who could be thought of as a Catholic fundamentalist.

Last edited Sun Nov 3, 2013, 07:59 AM - Edit history (1)

She believes, for example, that the first eleven chapters of Genesis is an accurate account.

OTOH, last May, we had on DU a man who I would describe as a true Catholic fundamentalist, georges641. Georges seemed to believe that every belch issuing from a papal throat was to be taken as the Word of God. He defended Paul VI's encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae, while admitting that he had not read it. He flatly refused to believe that Catholic doctrine on faith and morals had ever changed, even when I gave him specific examples of changes (for example, the first explicit condemnation of slavery as immoral in and of itself came in 1888 -- before then, slavery was seen as morally acceptable). That's fundamentalism, Catholic style: Unthinking acceptance of teachings, refusal to accept the legitimacy of any sort of dissent from anything a pope or bishop had to say.

I think my real problem with georges was that he believed that thinking for oneself, in matters of faith, was wrong. He clearly rejected 1 Corinthians 13:11, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. Now that I am a man, I have put away childish things." His belief that Catholic doctrine had never changed can only be maintained by denying history (IOW, by lying to yourself) or by keeping yourself deliberately ignorance (willful ignorance is condemned in Catholic moral theology).