In view of all these reference about who and who is a
Fundamentalist Christian, I feel we need to have a look at what
Fundamentalist Christianity is about.
Fundamentalist Christianity
Fundamentalist Christianity, or Christian fundamentalism is a
movement which arose mainly within American Protestantism in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries by conservative evangelical
Christians, who, in a reaction to modernism, actively affirmed a
"fundamental" set of Christian beliefs: the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the bodily
resurrection of Jesus, and the authenticity of his
miracles.
The nature of the Christian fundamentalist movement, while
originally a united effort within conservative evangelicalism,
evolved during the early-to-mid 1900s to become more separatist in
nature and more characteristically dispensational in its theology.
Most fundamentalists have strongly opposed the Roman Catholic
Church for theological reasons; in recent years there has been
limited political cooperation between individuals in each group on
certain social issues, such as abortion and the legitimacy of
homosexuality.
The secular world's current perception of the term "fundamentalism"
is colored by shifts in meaning on two similar fronts since the
1980s. First, the term was used in a negative sense for all
Christian groups so deemed by liberal Lutheran theologian Martin E.
Marty in his five-volume Fundamentalism Project[1](although recent
social science research has raised questions about his
assessment[2]), and (2) during the holding of a number of Americans
hostage in Lebanon, some members of the press began referring to
the Islamic Hezbollah captors as "Islamic fundamentalists", and
consequently the term has increasingly come to have pejorative
connotations of extremism and even terrorism.
Personal Notes:
It appears to me, this term had been in many times misused, and as
I am convinced, fundamentalist christians are really those who
adhere to the fundamental belief & practices of christianity
and is very different from extremist. Its really about being back
to the basic fundamentals.
