The word fundamentalist was coined proudly, by a Baptist editor, in 1920
Today fundamentalist is usually an insult, but it began as a badge. American Protestant conservatives compiled a short list of non-negotiable doctrines, printed pamphlets to defend them, and in 1920 a Baptist newspaper editor suggested that anyone fighting for those essentials should wear the name with pride.
Scholars describe fundamentalism as a tendency to read scriptures or doctrines with strict literalism, to draw a sharp line between insiders and outsiders, and to prize purity and a return to an ideal from which the faithful have supposedly drifted. Most regard it as a largely modern phenomenon: a reaction against liberal, secular and ecumenical currents that is itself shaped by the modern world it resists. Depending on who uses it, the label can be neutral description or a slur, much as right-wing and left-wing can be.
The Christian story is well documented. Annual Niagara Bible Conferences between 1878 and 1897 tried to pin down essential beliefs. The movement first formed at Princeton Theological Seminary, where conservative Presbyterian scholars led it in the late nineteenth century, and spread to Baptists and other denominations between about 1910 and 1920. In 1910 the Presbyterian General Assembly named five fundamentals, among them the infallibility of scripture, the atonement through Christ's death and the historical reality of his miracles. The brothers Milton and Lyman Stewart funded twelve pamphlets, The Fundamentals, issued from 1910 to 1915.
Curtis Lee Laws, editor of The Watchman Examiner, first put the word fundamentalist into print in 1920. Historian George Marsden defines the stance as insistence on particular doctrines in opposition to Modernist theology. Fundamentalists refused kinship with related traditions, rejecting even the idea of an Abrahamic family, whereas evangelical groups that shared the same core beliefs were often willing to join events with outsiders.
Similar patterns appear far beyond Protestant America. In seventh-century Islam, the Kharijites declared fellow Muslims unbelievers. In Japan, some Nichiren Buddhists practised shakubuku, loudly condemning rival sects as deficient. In nineteenth-century Tibet, the lama Pabongkhapa promoted the protector deity Dorje Shugden against a movement blending teachings across schools. Critics have even labelled New Atheism a secular fundamentalism.
Source: Fundamentalism
