As promised, I want to followup on newsletter #58’s examination of the strategy being pursued by a segment of the evangelical elite to eliminate complementarianism (male only pastorate) as a community boundary and replace it with anti-fundamentalism.
“For example, about 6-7 years ago I traveled to Moscow, Idaho and met Doug Wilson. People there told me that “Big Eva” had decided to “quarantine” him...I was actually able to see this in action, seeing a Twitter user get gently corrected for posting a criticism of Wilson.”
I would like to hear more on this. Is “Big Eva” actually united enough to discreetly pronounce and enforce a cone of silence on someone so widely known?
Evangelicalism doesn't have a central HQ. In this case, it's more the Reformed crowd centered around organizations like the Gospel Coalition. I don't know how explicit the strategy was, but it seems to be mostly followed these days.
Everyone should check out Christian Smith’s book on American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. He finds that fundamentalists live less distinctively Christian lives than evangelicals because they engage with the world less and are separatist. Evangelicals are sociologically distinct from mainliners and fundamentalists.
I think it’s important that we on the right do the work to offer our understanding of fundamentalism. Then we can make sure it doesn’t exclude us! I did my part briefly today writing about one marker of fundamentalism, including it’s evangelical variety, the doctrine of six day creation. (Sorry to any of you who hold it...)
Our (yes I am a fundy!) hold to Biblical Creation as written in God's Word stems from our emphasis on Biblical authority and inerrancy. Do you believe Jesus rose bodily from the grave? Do you find that God has revealed His nature to us in His Word? Was the command to rest on the 7th day something the Israelites were to observe? I believe our God who died and rose again could easily speak the universe into existence (without the need for 7 days BTW) and plenty of evidence shows He did so first and foremost is the Bible.
It's hard to look at this strategy and see anything other than a plan to shift the church towards the political left. Presumably Keller had something else more legitimate in mind.
Complementarians in evangelicalism have always claimed their doctrine was of only secondary importance, but acted much as if it were a 1st order doctrine. Sort of a political firewall, I suppose.
Is there some way in which Keller identifies MAGA / Christian nationalists as fundementalists? I can't think what else he would be trying to firewall off.
Nathan, especially on the last point, I think that is a correct worry. That's why I think work needs to be done to show that politically conservative evangelicals are not, as such, fundamentalists. Distinguishing evangelicalism from fundamentalism is something that has always been necessary, so I don't think we on the right should assume that the label "fundamentalist" does apply to us.
I come at the fundamentalist label from a different angle. The origin of the term is based on believing in the "fundamentals" that were denied by the modernists in the early 20th century. I definitely believe in those, and so should everyone who calls themselves a Christian.
So, if fundamentalist is to be used as anything other than a mostly empty pejorative, I think we should all positively identify as fundamentalists. On the other hand, since it is almost always used as a vacuous slander, my preference is to avoid using it entirely.
Given that the term "Evangelical" has become difficult to distinguish from irreligious conservative voters, that seems an uphill battle. If people are identifying as evangelical on the basis of politics even when they rarely attend church, fundamentalism doesn't seem to be the problem.
Seize the day! If people want to claim the label as an act of defiance, say "You're an evangelical? Good. Here's how to really stick it the powers that be." Then begin full on discipleship.
I think a lot of these comments are unable or unwilling to parse through multiple ideas in this post. I share the exact same views as Brian Hutchens, but can also admit that the church has several beliefs like “...its over-identification with Americanism, whether that be a religious promotion of a libertarian conception of the marketplace, conflating Christian morality with circa 1965 civil rights era liberalism, or an excessive devotion to the cultural values of Manhattan and other urban centers.” That get defended within an inch of their lives but have little root in scripture, and an even smaller impact in our everyday lives.
Evangelicals as a whole largely agree on the important parts of scripture, and it is a big tent. I think a lot of commenters here associate defending fundamentalism with defending the heart of the faith. Instead, most Christian criticism stems from fundamentalist positions on the role of America, interpretations on gender roles, etc.
Insightful piece. My first presumption, when hearing that people to my left are coming for the fundamentalists, is that we're operating with the Plantinga definition and they're coming for me or people that I agree with more than I agree with Big Eva.
I'm not sure though if you answered the question for me of who, in your terms (as opposed to Big Eva's terms), is a fundamentalist. Though I can understand if there's a tactical desire here not to name names. When I think about Evangelical anti-intellectualism, for example, my first instinct is to think about ordinary people in the pews, particularly a certain type of home schooler, not about leadership figures with audiences, many of whom could be called intellectuals themselves.
If I had to think about an anti-intellectual leader, it might be someone like Joel Osteen or Paula White who isn't really accepted by anyone respected in Evangelicalism (but again, probably has some sort of audience among ordinary people on the ground that DOES overlap with more respected figures).
A lot of this calls to mind the term "Christian Nationalist". There probably are any number of bad ideas that we could choose to label "Christian Nationalism." But as soon as I heard the term being bandied about several years ago (long before Stephen Wolfe's book), I knew instantly that the label was destined to be applied to anyone who, like me, thinks the government should do more to discourage bad things and promote good things, with a knowledge of "bad" and "good" informed in part by our Christian faith.
I believe that fundamentalists have acquired the reputation of being combatively devoted to scriptural purity, anti-intellectual, and quirky because of the social dynamics associated with a devotion to scripture.
The type of person who is willing to speak the truth of scripture without compromise is likely from the beginning to be someone who is not deeply dependent on the culture for his success. Compare a guy who drives a truck for a living to a guy who's a tort lawyer. The truck driver probably doesn't care too much if his neighbors disagree with him in his viewpoints, but the lawyer cares a great deal because reputation is everything for him. The Christian lawyer has one foot in the world and another in the church. That automatically means hedging and compromising with scripture and de-emphasizing parts that aren't consistent with the zeitgeist. Since the academy is a liberal stronghold, the Christian truck driver and the academician often will feel some antipathy. As time goes on, the truck driver will continue to adhere to his Bible and increasingly have a sense of circling the wagons with other like-minded fundamentalists to protect himself and other believers from all the anti-Christian forces. Ultimately, the fundamentalist may become combative and anti-intellectual, and may somewhat confusedly identify with aspects of American life that seem support his world view. He may, for example, be inordinately supportive of Trump because he sees Trump as counter to the elites. That Trump is not particularly Christian doesn't enter into his thinking.
In essence, the strongly Biblical position of the fundamentalist is laudable, but his persona has been whittled into a kind of caricature because of the strong negative forces he's been subjected to.
Now, not all fundamentalists fit that rigid characterization, but enough do that their collective behavior colors elite Christianity's impression of the group. Those who adhere to scriptural truth and are fundamentalist in their theology but don't possess typical fundamentalist personality characteristics are less common.
With all its compromises of scripture, elite Christianity has very little to recommend it. And if the elites don't like fundamentalists, they should recognize that they are largely responsible for the fundamentalists behaving as they do.
Very much agree, intellectuals need to be known as such, but they are not as involved in reality as your truck driver is. I am not a truck driver but those of us more engaged in the world physically see things much differently. Intellectuals have options whereas for truck drivers either it is right or wrong or perhaps it is done right or done wrong with death as a possible outcome for the later. The intellectual has options, like Joel Carini above, who thinks 6 day creationists hurt his faith somehow. Really we who hold that position just embarrass him because he wants to claim the Christian faith without giving God's Word full authority. Evening and morning, day one can mean a lot of things to him. But for me any meaning that is not a 24 hour day results in absurdities for our faith.
You're right that many who wear the fundamentalist label without have flinching have personality and lifestyle traits that cause the insults (and threats) to have less force.
I'll point out that not only does the behavior of some fundamentalists effect the impression many have of them, but the caricature has been promoted and leveraged for political purposes for about 100 years.
I don't believe the term fundamentalist will be helpful in bringing much distinction, since it has long been used as a pejorative. In the negative world, any man who lets his Christianity get in the way of what the secular world views as good will be called a fundamentalist.
Over 40 yrs. ago our pastor advised us that a group of fundamentalists was seeking to take over the SBC. I went to see him to see what I could do to help prevent that. He put me in touch with some "moderate" groups who were organized for the purpose. I started getting their literature (various publications) and soon came to realize that when they spoke of fundamentalists they were speaking of people like me. Some years later a deacon in my church, tongue-in-cheek, told me you could recognize the fundamentalists--they were the people who brought their Bibles to church with them.
Samuel, I think there’s more to it, as documented by Christian Smith in his book on American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. He finds that fundamentalists live less distinctively Christian lives than evangelicals because they engage with the world less and are separatist. Evangelicals are sociologically distinct from mainliners and fundamentalists.
I think it’s important that we on the right do the work to offer our understanding of fundamentalism. Then we can make sure it doesn’t exclude us! I did my part briefly today writing about one marker of fundamentalism, including it’s evangelical variety, the doctrine of six day creation.
Joel, you should probably be careful lifting quotes like this out of Smith, given that notions like "less distinctive Christian lives" can be, and will be, interpreted in entirely different ways by people with different agendas. Your "distinctiveness" can easily be seen by others as mere Pop-Eva faddishness with no grounding in the Word of God or eternal truths. I certainly wouldn't consider listening to pop-Christian music or buying LifeWay paraphernalia to be a sign of Christian distinctiveness.
I could just as easy quote Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, and ask you that if you keep finding yourself in agreement with the secular world, on the same questions as the secular world, for the same reasons as the secular world, how can your worldview be entirely Christ-centered? Blindly accepting the meanings that the secular world assigns to core concepts and fundamental notions is how natural law thought derails into naïve presentism.
The notion that secular scientific standards are a blank-slate null hypothesis of nature is just as much at odds with current philosophical epistemology as the old-timey fundamentalists that Mark Noll criticized in The Scandal. "Science" is just as much a product of preexisting worldview bias, group-think, and political ideology as it is an exploration of nature. I'd recommend you read Levitt and Gross's book, Higher Superstition, for a look at why "the scientific consensus" is just as malleable and untrustworthy as any other product of fallible human collective consciousness.
Thanks, Ben - I do think you're significantly misunderstanding me! I know you're in sociology, so I would want to hear your take on the sociology of evangelicals, fundamentalists, etc. In his piece, I think Aaron is affirming the sociological, and even the theological distinction between fundamentalists and evangelicals. In Smith's telling, mainliners and fundamentalists exhibit similar properties of a lack of religious vitality measured in how much their faith affects their lives - I keep searching for the book to pull out the details, misplaced it momentarily... But the evangelical faddish elements are definitely not the measure of religious vitality that Smith is using! Nor that I would use.
I'm wondering what we Aaron Renn readers would offer as an accurate depiction of "fundamentalism" that we too want to avoid, say, the overwhelming of personal life by political preoccupations, some level of dogmatism and separatism (again, not identified in the way progressives and secular people identify them), etc. What would you offer?
Your latter two paragraphs mistake me for something I'm very clearly not, so I'll let mostly let those be. However, on your last paragraph, I would recommend a less contrarian and postmodern philosophy of science. "'Science' is just as much a product of preexisting worldview bias, etc." denies the possibility of systematic empirical knowledge of the world. Rather, I would like to be able to critique errors of empirical science, like the idea that life arose from non-life or that all living things have a common ancestor, not only from biblical revelation but also from observation! In fact, I think the great merit of people like Aaron and yourself doing the sociological work is that it is empirically grounded. Keep up the good work!
I think Aaron's comment about fundamentalism being a word for "too far to the right of me" is the only really useful definition of the term, for the same reason that other anti-rightist slurs tend to operate in that manner. In "Revisions and Dissents," Paul Gottfried talks about the absurdity of the way that Hitler and Bismarck are placed in the same category of "far right," much as we put William Miller and J.G. Machen in the same category of "fundamentalist." I doubt that any sociological or theological distinction can be drawn which gives a rigorous basis to the term at all, any more that we can really talk about a coherent "right-wing" ideology. Just as "rightism" is a catch-all category for contrarians, reactionaries, "left-behind" liberals, and rival leftist factions who fell out of favor (ie. NeoCons), Fundamentalist seems to be a category that is inclusive of theologically rigorous conservatives, obscurantists, enthusiasts, rural blue-collar traditionalists, social-Con Pentacostals, End of Times cultists, and of course, failed rivals to the current crop of Big Eva Elites.
I'm perfectly content to talk about the way we should relate to any of the above groups, but I'm not keen on dignifying the political exclusion label used by Big Eva Elites against cleavages of the Church they wish to outgroup at the present time. My personal feeling is that the extent to which the actually bad groups within the "fundamentalist" tent exist is highly blown out of proportion by people who make a living in bashing fundamentalists.
To your second point, accepting the frailties of the human mind doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of knowledge, as post-structuralists on the Left try to do, but forces us to confront our own Amor Sui and its role in perverting our interpretations of Creation. The value of postmodern critique is not using it as a battering ram against reality itself, like Derrida and Rorty, but revealing to us that our own worldviews and assumptions need to be checked before we begin to explore the world outside. Our self-love tries to bend our reason toward conclusions that are emotionally satisfying to us, to trick us into cherry-picking data or conveniently ignoring alternative interpretations. It tells us to accept the popular conclusions of our peers and high-status groups. Accepting the validity of postmodern critiques doesn't mean denying Science as the Art of Knowing, but it means we can and should deeply distrust the human institutions which are fraught with politics and personal agendas. And it means that we need to be most skeptical of all with ourselves, and ensure that each of us is being as rigorous and intentional as possible when we study things that have emotional valence with us.
Or maybe a "Fundamentalist" could simply be someone that believes what God word teaches on the Deity of Jesus Christ, the atonement for sin, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the inerrancy of scripture and in miracles . Folks that believed these things as I do as far back as the 1910s were being defined or labelled as "Fundamentalists" by those that took extreme liberty with God's word (i.e. the mainline liberal denominations).
Pretty simple, you can call me a fundamentalist. And I believe that Jesus will return for His Church/bride before judging the world after a 7 year period of extreme tribulation and then return to rule and reign over the nations for a 1000 years. But anyone can be a fundamentalist without believing that too. As long as you believe Jesus will return.
It is all good, the word / label "Christian" was also intended as an insult. If you wish to lead me in different direction from the above points, no thank you very much I will follow my Lord and His written word. I am ok with being not of this world.
“For example, about 6-7 years ago I traveled to Moscow, Idaho and met Doug Wilson. People there told me that “Big Eva” had decided to “quarantine” him...I was actually able to see this in action, seeing a Twitter user get gently corrected for posting a criticism of Wilson.”
I would like to hear more on this. Is “Big Eva” actually united enough to discreetly pronounce and enforce a cone of silence on someone so widely known?
Evangelicalism doesn't have a central HQ. In this case, it's more the Reformed crowd centered around organizations like the Gospel Coalition. I don't know how explicit the strategy was, but it seems to be mostly followed these days.
This is solid analysis, Aaron.
Everyone should check out Christian Smith’s book on American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. He finds that fundamentalists live less distinctively Christian lives than evangelicals because they engage with the world less and are separatist. Evangelicals are sociologically distinct from mainliners and fundamentalists.
I think it’s important that we on the right do the work to offer our understanding of fundamentalism. Then we can make sure it doesn’t exclude us! I did my part briefly today writing about one marker of fundamentalism, including it’s evangelical variety, the doctrine of six day creation. (Sorry to any of you who hold it...)
https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcarini/p/this-sunday-in-the-church-calendar?r=k9yk0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Our (yes I am a fundy!) hold to Biblical Creation as written in God's Word stems from our emphasis on Biblical authority and inerrancy. Do you believe Jesus rose bodily from the grave? Do you find that God has revealed His nature to us in His Word? Was the command to rest on the 7th day something the Israelites were to observe? I believe our God who died and rose again could easily speak the universe into existence (without the need for 7 days BTW) and plenty of evidence shows He did so first and foremost is the Bible.
It's hard to look at this strategy and see anything other than a plan to shift the church towards the political left. Presumably Keller had something else more legitimate in mind.
Complementarians in evangelicalism have always claimed their doctrine was of only secondary importance, but acted much as if it were a 1st order doctrine. Sort of a political firewall, I suppose.
Is there some way in which Keller identifies MAGA / Christian nationalists as fundementalists? I can't think what else he would be trying to firewall off.
Nathan, especially on the last point, I think that is a correct worry. That's why I think work needs to be done to show that politically conservative evangelicals are not, as such, fundamentalists. Distinguishing evangelicalism from fundamentalism is something that has always been necessary, so I don't think we on the right should assume that the label "fundamentalist" does apply to us.
I come at the fundamentalist label from a different angle. The origin of the term is based on believing in the "fundamentals" that were denied by the modernists in the early 20th century. I definitely believe in those, and so should everyone who calls themselves a Christian.
So, if fundamentalist is to be used as anything other than a mostly empty pejorative, I think we should all positively identify as fundamentalists. On the other hand, since it is almost always used as a vacuous slander, my preference is to avoid using it entirely.
Given that the term "Evangelical" has become difficult to distinguish from irreligious conservative voters, that seems an uphill battle. If people are identifying as evangelical on the basis of politics even when they rarely attend church, fundamentalism doesn't seem to be the problem.
Seize the day! If people want to claim the label as an act of defiance, say "You're an evangelical? Good. Here's how to really stick it the powers that be." Then begin full on discipleship.
I think a lot of these comments are unable or unwilling to parse through multiple ideas in this post. I share the exact same views as Brian Hutchens, but can also admit that the church has several beliefs like “...its over-identification with Americanism, whether that be a religious promotion of a libertarian conception of the marketplace, conflating Christian morality with circa 1965 civil rights era liberalism, or an excessive devotion to the cultural values of Manhattan and other urban centers.” That get defended within an inch of their lives but have little root in scripture, and an even smaller impact in our everyday lives.
Evangelicals as a whole largely agree on the important parts of scripture, and it is a big tent. I think a lot of commenters here associate defending fundamentalism with defending the heart of the faith. Instead, most Christian criticism stems from fundamentalist positions on the role of America, interpretations on gender roles, etc.
Insightful piece. My first presumption, when hearing that people to my left are coming for the fundamentalists, is that we're operating with the Plantinga definition and they're coming for me or people that I agree with more than I agree with Big Eva.
I'm not sure though if you answered the question for me of who, in your terms (as opposed to Big Eva's terms), is a fundamentalist. Though I can understand if there's a tactical desire here not to name names. When I think about Evangelical anti-intellectualism, for example, my first instinct is to think about ordinary people in the pews, particularly a certain type of home schooler, not about leadership figures with audiences, many of whom could be called intellectuals themselves.
If I had to think about an anti-intellectual leader, it might be someone like Joel Osteen or Paula White who isn't really accepted by anyone respected in Evangelicalism (but again, probably has some sort of audience among ordinary people on the ground that DOES overlap with more respected figures).
A lot of this calls to mind the term "Christian Nationalist". There probably are any number of bad ideas that we could choose to label "Christian Nationalism." But as soon as I heard the term being bandied about several years ago (long before Stephen Wolfe's book), I knew instantly that the label was destined to be applied to anyone who, like me, thinks the government should do more to discourage bad things and promote good things, with a knowledge of "bad" and "good" informed in part by our Christian faith.
I believe that fundamentalists have acquired the reputation of being combatively devoted to scriptural purity, anti-intellectual, and quirky because of the social dynamics associated with a devotion to scripture.
The type of person who is willing to speak the truth of scripture without compromise is likely from the beginning to be someone who is not deeply dependent on the culture for his success. Compare a guy who drives a truck for a living to a guy who's a tort lawyer. The truck driver probably doesn't care too much if his neighbors disagree with him in his viewpoints, but the lawyer cares a great deal because reputation is everything for him. The Christian lawyer has one foot in the world and another in the church. That automatically means hedging and compromising with scripture and de-emphasizing parts that aren't consistent with the zeitgeist. Since the academy is a liberal stronghold, the Christian truck driver and the academician often will feel some antipathy. As time goes on, the truck driver will continue to adhere to his Bible and increasingly have a sense of circling the wagons with other like-minded fundamentalists to protect himself and other believers from all the anti-Christian forces. Ultimately, the fundamentalist may become combative and anti-intellectual, and may somewhat confusedly identify with aspects of American life that seem support his world view. He may, for example, be inordinately supportive of Trump because he sees Trump as counter to the elites. That Trump is not particularly Christian doesn't enter into his thinking.
In essence, the strongly Biblical position of the fundamentalist is laudable, but his persona has been whittled into a kind of caricature because of the strong negative forces he's been subjected to.
Now, not all fundamentalists fit that rigid characterization, but enough do that their collective behavior colors elite Christianity's impression of the group. Those who adhere to scriptural truth and are fundamentalist in their theology but don't possess typical fundamentalist personality characteristics are less common.
With all its compromises of scripture, elite Christianity has very little to recommend it. And if the elites don't like fundamentalists, they should recognize that they are largely responsible for the fundamentalists behaving as they do.
Very much agree, intellectuals need to be known as such, but they are not as involved in reality as your truck driver is. I am not a truck driver but those of us more engaged in the world physically see things much differently. Intellectuals have options whereas for truck drivers either it is right or wrong or perhaps it is done right or done wrong with death as a possible outcome for the later. The intellectual has options, like Joel Carini above, who thinks 6 day creationists hurt his faith somehow. Really we who hold that position just embarrass him because he wants to claim the Christian faith without giving God's Word full authority. Evening and morning, day one can mean a lot of things to him. But for me any meaning that is not a 24 hour day results in absurdities for our faith.
You're right that many who wear the fundamentalist label without have flinching have personality and lifestyle traits that cause the insults (and threats) to have less force.
I'll point out that not only does the behavior of some fundamentalists effect the impression many have of them, but the caricature has been promoted and leveraged for political purposes for about 100 years.
I don't believe the term fundamentalist will be helpful in bringing much distinction, since it has long been used as a pejorative. In the negative world, any man who lets his Christianity get in the way of what the secular world views as good will be called a fundamentalist.
Over 40 yrs. ago our pastor advised us that a group of fundamentalists was seeking to take over the SBC. I went to see him to see what I could do to help prevent that. He put me in touch with some "moderate" groups who were organized for the purpose. I started getting their literature (various publications) and soon came to realize that when they spoke of fundamentalists they were speaking of people like me. Some years later a deacon in my church, tongue-in-cheek, told me you could recognize the fundamentalists--they were the people who brought their Bibles to church with them.
Samuel, I think there’s more to it, as documented by Christian Smith in his book on American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. He finds that fundamentalists live less distinctively Christian lives than evangelicals because they engage with the world less and are separatist. Evangelicals are sociologically distinct from mainliners and fundamentalists.
I think it’s important that we on the right do the work to offer our understanding of fundamentalism. Then we can make sure it doesn’t exclude us! I did my part briefly today writing about one marker of fundamentalism, including it’s evangelical variety, the doctrine of six day creation.
https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcarini/p/this-sunday-in-the-church-calendar?r=k9yk0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Joel, you should probably be careful lifting quotes like this out of Smith, given that notions like "less distinctive Christian lives" can be, and will be, interpreted in entirely different ways by people with different agendas. Your "distinctiveness" can easily be seen by others as mere Pop-Eva faddishness with no grounding in the Word of God or eternal truths. I certainly wouldn't consider listening to pop-Christian music or buying LifeWay paraphernalia to be a sign of Christian distinctiveness.
I could just as easy quote Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, and ask you that if you keep finding yourself in agreement with the secular world, on the same questions as the secular world, for the same reasons as the secular world, how can your worldview be entirely Christ-centered? Blindly accepting the meanings that the secular world assigns to core concepts and fundamental notions is how natural law thought derails into naïve presentism.
The notion that secular scientific standards are a blank-slate null hypothesis of nature is just as much at odds with current philosophical epistemology as the old-timey fundamentalists that Mark Noll criticized in The Scandal. "Science" is just as much a product of preexisting worldview bias, group-think, and political ideology as it is an exploration of nature. I'd recommend you read Levitt and Gross's book, Higher Superstition, for a look at why "the scientific consensus" is just as malleable and untrustworthy as any other product of fallible human collective consciousness.
In general, istm, a Christian fundamentalist is one who reveres the Bible, not the PhD degree.
Thanks, Ben - I do think you're significantly misunderstanding me! I know you're in sociology, so I would want to hear your take on the sociology of evangelicals, fundamentalists, etc. In his piece, I think Aaron is affirming the sociological, and even the theological distinction between fundamentalists and evangelicals. In Smith's telling, mainliners and fundamentalists exhibit similar properties of a lack of religious vitality measured in how much their faith affects their lives - I keep searching for the book to pull out the details, misplaced it momentarily... But the evangelical faddish elements are definitely not the measure of religious vitality that Smith is using! Nor that I would use.
I'm wondering what we Aaron Renn readers would offer as an accurate depiction of "fundamentalism" that we too want to avoid, say, the overwhelming of personal life by political preoccupations, some level of dogmatism and separatism (again, not identified in the way progressives and secular people identify them), etc. What would you offer?
Your latter two paragraphs mistake me for something I'm very clearly not, so I'll let mostly let those be. However, on your last paragraph, I would recommend a less contrarian and postmodern philosophy of science. "'Science' is just as much a product of preexisting worldview bias, etc." denies the possibility of systematic empirical knowledge of the world. Rather, I would like to be able to critique errors of empirical science, like the idea that life arose from non-life or that all living things have a common ancestor, not only from biblical revelation but also from observation! In fact, I think the great merit of people like Aaron and yourself doing the sociological work is that it is empirically grounded. Keep up the good work!
I think Aaron's comment about fundamentalism being a word for "too far to the right of me" is the only really useful definition of the term, for the same reason that other anti-rightist slurs tend to operate in that manner. In "Revisions and Dissents," Paul Gottfried talks about the absurdity of the way that Hitler and Bismarck are placed in the same category of "far right," much as we put William Miller and J.G. Machen in the same category of "fundamentalist." I doubt that any sociological or theological distinction can be drawn which gives a rigorous basis to the term at all, any more that we can really talk about a coherent "right-wing" ideology. Just as "rightism" is a catch-all category for contrarians, reactionaries, "left-behind" liberals, and rival leftist factions who fell out of favor (ie. NeoCons), Fundamentalist seems to be a category that is inclusive of theologically rigorous conservatives, obscurantists, enthusiasts, rural blue-collar traditionalists, social-Con Pentacostals, End of Times cultists, and of course, failed rivals to the current crop of Big Eva Elites.
I'm perfectly content to talk about the way we should relate to any of the above groups, but I'm not keen on dignifying the political exclusion label used by Big Eva Elites against cleavages of the Church they wish to outgroup at the present time. My personal feeling is that the extent to which the actually bad groups within the "fundamentalist" tent exist is highly blown out of proportion by people who make a living in bashing fundamentalists.
To your second point, accepting the frailties of the human mind doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of knowledge, as post-structuralists on the Left try to do, but forces us to confront our own Amor Sui and its role in perverting our interpretations of Creation. The value of postmodern critique is not using it as a battering ram against reality itself, like Derrida and Rorty, but revealing to us that our own worldviews and assumptions need to be checked before we begin to explore the world outside. Our self-love tries to bend our reason toward conclusions that are emotionally satisfying to us, to trick us into cherry-picking data or conveniently ignoring alternative interpretations. It tells us to accept the popular conclusions of our peers and high-status groups. Accepting the validity of postmodern critiques doesn't mean denying Science as the Art of Knowing, but it means we can and should deeply distrust the human institutions which are fraught with politics and personal agendas. And it means that we need to be most skeptical of all with ourselves, and ensure that each of us is being as rigorous and intentional as possible when we study things that have emotional valence with us.
Knowing James Wood a little better than you do, I know he has a soft spot for “fundamentalists” because of the conditions of his childhood.
Or maybe a "Fundamentalist" could simply be someone that believes what God word teaches on the Deity of Jesus Christ, the atonement for sin, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the inerrancy of scripture and in miracles . Folks that believed these things as I do as far back as the 1910s were being defined or labelled as "Fundamentalists" by those that took extreme liberty with God's word (i.e. the mainline liberal denominations).
Pretty simple, you can call me a fundamentalist. And I believe that Jesus will return for His Church/bride before judging the world after a 7 year period of extreme tribulation and then return to rule and reign over the nations for a 1000 years. But anyone can be a fundamentalist without believing that too. As long as you believe Jesus will return.
It is all good, the word / label "Christian" was also intended as an insult. If you wish to lead me in different direction from the above points, no thank you very much I will follow my Lord and His written word. I am ok with being not of this world.