"As we stand here in 2010 there is no such thing as a fundamentalist movement."

[Jason] The very fact that he wrote the post highlights the point that the movement does exist.

Say a man is a new Pastor of XYZ Baptist church in Minnesota. The church is unaffiliated.

How does the man unite with the fundamentalist movement? How does a church? What’s to join?

@Jobk

Wow. Quite the treatise…

Your point seems to be that there shouldn’t be a movement any more… there’s no unity of thought or purpose… you’re probably right. My point is simply that there is a movement. It is, to a significant extent based on the historical ideas and figures, yet the point is that it is.

@Jim Peet

Good question.

I would point out that there never was anything to “join” specifically. To “join” generally meant to identify with, agree with (to a certain extent or on a certain issue), and perhaps to support (by supplying students, sharing pulpits, etc.).

I would think the self-identification is the key thing. If someone identifies himself as being largely at home in the company of X institution, and most other people in X institution think of themselves as Fundamentalists, then he will probably think of himself as a Fundamentalist. This kind of “joining” will express itself in subtle ways (what books he considers to be friendly to his thinking, what websites he visits, what colleges he recommends) and not so subtle ways (what men fill his pulpit, what colleges get platform time throughout the year, etc.)

My suggestion is that even if we say we’re not a Fundamentalist or part of any movement, if we feel most comfortable in the company of X institution, we probably are a part of that movement to one degree or another.

I would offer Sharper Iron as evidence. Within less than a year of the emergence of SI, a new sub-movement had been created and a name coined: “Young Fundamentalists.” Though this has been tossed around a lot, the fact is, it is often the best way to communicate certain things about who I am to others. Yet I still haven’t received my membership card in the mail… ;)

[JobK] The fact is that the fundamentalist movement began as a reaction to theological liberalism subversively infiltrating major denominations. (Also, the movement was necessary because of the existence of “denominationalism” in the first place, hence the author’s call to return to the importance of the local assembly, and allowing local assemblies to fellowship and cooperate with whoever the Lord leads them to.) Once A) the theological liberals were exposed with their beliefs and agenda known and B) they succeeded in taking over a number of denominations and institutions, there were two primary reactions by professed Bible-believers. Evangelicals primarily decided to remain in the affected denominations and institutions to try to preserve, reform, and be represented in them, and when necessary created their own institutions. Fundamentalists walked out and created their own denominations and institutions. And so the old mostly liberal institutions and the newer evangelical and fundamentalist institutions, or movements if you will, developed along their own lines, fighting their own battles (which were quite often and probably predominantly internal).

The bolded portion is NOT true. That is not at all how things happened. Some moderates stayed in the liberal-dominated denominations. For the most part, those moderates have never left those denominations and have their own way of viewing themselves. Sometimes they call themselves the “renewal wing” or the “evangelical wing” of XYZ denomination, but they are not generally what is known as Evangelicals or the Evangelical movement today.

Many people pulled out of the denominations during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. At that time Fundamentalist and Evangelical was basically synonymous. These groups formed their own denominations, schools, etc.

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, a new movement emerged, New Evangelicalism. To over-simplify, the New Evangelicals repudiated the militancy and rigid separatism of the Fundamentalists and created the divide that exists to this day.

This is an important distinction. The Evangelicals as we know them today did NOT start out “staying in” the denominatons, other than a relatively small handful. I think your viewpoint of both Evangelicals and Fundamentalists is largely incorrect which moots your conclusions. You are just too far off in your understanding of the history.

I think JobK is right insofar as a group that believes the same things is not quite a movement. In the narrower sense of the term, it becomes a movement when they respond in a largely unified way to changing conditions, when there is a common cause rooted in a present need, usually a major change they are either effecting or fighting to resist or reverse.
So Jason is probably also right that movements of one sort or another are inevitable eventually among people who believe the fundamentals of the faith (if there are enough of them around!). They will find themselves, willingly or not, thinking in similar ways about what’s happening around them. Occasionally, something big enough happens that they are stirred together to respond to it.
(I suspect that ‘movements’ are always reactive in large part.)

So is there a “young fundamentalists” movement? There is certainly reaction of an increasing number of people with fundamentalist backgrounds to certain things within the old movement they are sick of. Whether that reaction becomes a movement (vs. a brief kerfuffle) or not only time will tell.

[Aaron Blumer] I think JobK is right insofar as a group that believes the same things is not quite a movement. In the narrower sense of the term, it becomes a movement when they respond in a largely unified way to changing conditions, when there is a common cause rooted in a present need, usually a major change they are either effecting or fighting to resist or reverse.

The question of “What is a movement” comes up often amongst homeschoolers, because it is often referred to as ‘the homeschool movement’, and yet even from its inception, it was something practiced by small pockets of people here and there, from conservative Christians to Grape-Nut crunching hippies. And yet it was labeled a ‘movement’, and homechoolers are still referred to as such, which carries with it the implication that homeschoolers are cohesive and organized. That could not be further from the truth. The only thing that homeschoolers can agree on is that parents should be free to home educate. The only time we can get together on anything is when this freedom is threatened. Otherwise, you’ve got the conservative Christians, the pagans, the atheists, the GLTBers, the agnostics, the Catholics… and amongst them you have the Charlotte Mason crowd, the Montessori crowd, the Classical crowd, the unschoolers, the eclectic…

I’m not changing the topic- just providing an example from my own experience- because defining something as a movement, a community, an association, a circle, a camp… it’s like playing Whack-A-Mole.

According to dictionary.com, I think this is the meaning you are talking about:

a diffusely organized or heterogeneous group of people or organizations tending toward or favoring a generalized common goal: the antislavery movement; the realistic movement in art

movement. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/movement (accessed: March 12, 2010).

Note these key parts of the definition:

“diffusely organized or heterogeneous group” - this does not mean tight organization, organizational structure, or any kind of formal agreements between people or groups.

“tending toward or favoring a generalized common goal” - this does not mean all in the diffusely organized or heterogeneous group are at the same spot in the journey, are 100% in lockstep, or even have the same motivations or tightly focused and defined goal

By definition, the idea of a movement is really just an observation that there are a lot of people tending in the same direction.

So there is a young fundamentalist movement, whatever label you attach to it. I’d say there still is a fundamentalist movement as such, although it does seem to be an increasingly diffuse bunch and the common goal is becoming less clear to see.

But it doesn’t matter much, anyway. Who cares if fundamentalism is or isn’t a movement?

What matters is if the ideas expressed by people in or out of the movement have value or not.