Fundamentalist Christianity

:This article concerns the self-labelled Fundamentalist Movement in Protestant Christianity. For other kinds of fundamentalism, please see the main article, Fundamentalism.

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Fundamentalist Christianity, or Christian Fundamentalism, in the scope of this particular article, refers to the 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. This core set of beliefs was the "line in the sand" drawn by conservative Christians as they battled against the rise of rationalism, higher biblical criticism, and liberalism within Protestant denominations.

Related Topics:
Christian - Fundamentalism - American - Protestantism - 19th - 20th centuries - Conservative - Evangelical Christians - Modernism - Christian - Inerrancy - Bible - Virgin birth - Christ - Substitutionary atonement - Resurrection - Miracle - Rationalism - Higher biblical criticism - Liberalism

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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.

Related Topics:
1900s - Separatist - Dispensational

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The secular world's current perception of the term "fundamentalism" is colored by shifts in meaning on two 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 Projecthttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/Complete/Series/FP.html (although recent social science research has raised questions about his assessment{{ref|generic}}), 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.

Related Topics:
Secular - Fundamentalism - 1980s - Lutheran - Theologian - Martin E. Marty - Lebanon - Islamic - Hezbollah - Islamic fundamentalists - Extremism - Terrorism

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