Fundamentalism & Evangelicalism

The following is a paper Dr. Straub read at the Bible Faculty Leadership Summit last summer (He also read a variation at the Conference on the Church for God’s Glory last May). It appears here with light editing. The paper will appear here in four parts. -Editor

Today I wish to address fundamentalism at the beginning of the 21^st century.

The Social Shift

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, and Part 9.

To hell with the Twentieth Century!
—Billy Sunday, New York City, April 15, 1917

Ideas always precede movements. Movements (by which I mean large numbers of people sharing a common set of concerns and working together toward a common goal) grow out of ideas. As the idea turns into the movement, however, other ideas and influences get mixed in. The result is that movements rarely or never reflect purely the ideas that produced them.

The Fundamentalist Movement embodies the Fundamentalist idea only imperfectly. One of the most common mistakes in discussing Fundamentalism is to confuse the two, to speak of the movement as if it were the idea or vice versa. The idea of Fundamentalism (which we have not yet discussed) is certainly a component in the Fundamentalist movement, but Fundamentalism as a movement has also assimilated other ideas and ceded to other influences.

Attempting to tell the story of Fundamentalism, I have tried to describe some of the intellectual and social influences that shaped the early Fundamentalist movement. Fundamentalism emerged as an identifiable movement around 1920, but it came from and displayed the characteristics of an earlier American evangelicalism. I have suggested that this earlier evangelicalism was deeply influenced by at least three trends: Scottish Common Sense Realism, populism, and sentimentalism. Though not alone in succumbing to these influences, Fundamentalists certainly did evidence them.

My thesis has been that the early Fundamentalist movement was deeply influenced by Common Sense Realism, populism, and sentimentalism. Over the past several essays I have taken a digression, answering certain objections to this thesis. First, I tried to show how Common Sense Realism represented a metaphysical dream that differed substantively from the metaphysical dream of premodernity. Second, I tried to demonstrate how a genuinely historical-grammatical (literal) hermeneutic need not rely upon either Common Sense or populism. Finally, I attempted to explain the difference between congregational polity and that version of church democracy that grows out of American populism.

Because of these three influences, the Fundamentalist movement was never dedicated purely to defending the faith. To some extent, its defense of the faith always presumed and included a defense of the ideals of Common Sense, populism, and sentimentalism. In other words, the early Fundamentalists were men of their times, reflecting their own situatedness and displaying the concerns not only of historic Christianity but also of their own intellectual and social location.