Christian Fundamentalism another view
From myss.com
The concept of religious fundamentalism originally developed among Christian revival movements in California and New England around the turn of the 20th century. But since 1979, the meaning of the word has expanded to include Muslims and Jews and Sikhs. But before we can understand the implications of world fundamentalism, we need to know what fundamentalism means in its original Christian designation.
To begin with, although most fundamentalists would consider
themselves born-again Christians, not all born-agains are
fundamentalists. To call oneself a born-again Christian, as do
between 30 and 50 million Americans, including former
presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, means to have gone
through an adult conversion experience that included accepting
Jesus Christ as one's personal savior.
The experience is often
preceded by a period of less than exemplary living, after
which the believer is "rescued" by the Lord and is called to
regenerate his or her life. But just as Carter and Reagan had
very different political viewpoints, many born-again
Christians refuse to align themselves with the so-called
Christian Right, remaining staunchly liberal on social issues
and often preferring to maintain separation of church and
state.
How Did Fundamentalism Come To Be?
When empirical philosophy was applied to Biblical criticism
during the 19th century, increasing numbers of Christians
began to accept the Bible as largely symbolic and metaphorical
rather than literally true.
Scientific evidence and biblical
scholarship were increasingly showing that on a rational level
at least, the Bible didn't stand up to scrutiny as either a
scientific document or even as the work of many of the men to
whom it was credited.
Bible scholars, for instance, were able
to show based on textual evidence that the first five books of
the Bible, known in Hebrew as the Torah, could not have been
written by one person, and certainly not Moses. Indeed, they
were shown to have been composed after the works of the
Prophets, who follow those books in both the Hebrew and
Christian Bible.
And parts of the creation and flood
narratives were found to closely resemble accounts from
Sumerian and Babylonian myths that predate the Bible by more
than a thousand years.
Those Christians who clung to the old belief that every word
of the Bible was literally true -- called biblical inerrancy
-- came together and formulated their beliefs at a series of
revival meetings and Bible study conferences that took place
across North America from Ontario to Southern California
between 1875 and 1915.
These groups agreed on five
"fundamentals" of Christian belief that were enumerated in a
series of 12 paperback volumes containing scholarly essays on
the Bible that appeared between 1910 and 1915, entitled The
Fundamentals. Those fundamentals included:
- Biblical inerrancy
- The divinity of Jesus
- The Virgin Birth
- The belief that Jesus died to redeem humankind
- An expectation of the Second Coming, or physical return, of Jesus Christ to initiate his thousand-year rule of the Earth, which came to be known as the Millennium.
By definition, fundamentalists also believe in some form of
creationism, the doctrine that the universe was created only a
few thousand years ago, rather than the billions claimed by
modern science, and that God created man and woman and all the
species outright, rather than by a process of evolution.
(Creationists differ over how to explain fossil records that
"appear" to be millions of years old. Some believe God created
them that way on purpose, others, that they were put there by
Satan to mislead humanity.)
Fundamentalism, or the adherence to the fundamentals of
Christianity, grew at least in part out of a desire by
fundamentalists to return to the days of a less ethnically and
religiously diverse America, a time that predated not only the
empirical approach to biblical criticism but also the influx
of large numbers of immigrants from Southern Europe and the
Mediterranean rim, mainly Roman Catholics and Jews.
They especially sought a return to a world in which moral laws were
absolute, men dominated women, and the laws of the Bible were
strictly adhered to. Throughout the 20th century, for example,
fundamentalist Christians have staunchly opposed equal rights
for women and the legalization of homosexuality and abortion.
For these reasons, fundamentalist Christians tend to be
intolerant of those who practice modernized, liberalized, or
less rigorous forms of their religion (something that is true
to some extent of all religious fundamentalists, including
Muslims, Jews, and Sikhs).
They lobby to have their beliefs,
including creationism, taught in public schools and,
increasingly, they have moved into the political arena by
promoting candidates for public office -- from local school
boards to the presidency of the United States. The extremist
fringe of fundamentalism advocates militant action that may
include civil disobedience, violence, and even murder.
Although many of the most vocal fundamentalists are rigidly
conservative in their political orientation, national polls
have indicated that as few as one-third of Americans who
identify themselves as born-again Christians align themselves
with the so-called Religious Right, which is dominated by
politically active fundamentalists with a socially
conservative agenda.
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