(Christian) Fundamentalism

General Information
Fundamentalism is a term popularly used to describe strict adherence to Christian doctrines based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. This usage derives from a late 19th and early 20th century transdenominational Protestant movement that opposed the accommodation of Christian doctrine to modern scientific theory and philosophy. With some differences among themselves, fundamentalists insist on belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth and divinity of Jesus Christ, the vicarious and atoning character of his death, his bodily resurrection, and his second coming as the irreducible minimum of authentic Christianity. This minimum was reflected in such early declarations as the 14 point creed of the Niagara Bible Conference of 1878 and the 5 point statement of the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1910. Two immediate doctrinal sources for fundamentalist thought were Millenarianism and biblical inerrancy. Millenarianism, belief in the physical return of Christ to establish a 1,000 year earthly reign of blessedness, was a doctrine prevalent in English speaking Protestantism by the 1870s. At the same time, powerful conservative forces led by Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield opposed the growing use of literary and historical criticism in biblical studies, defending biblical inspiration and the inerrant authority of the Bible. The name fundamentalist was coined in 1920 to designate those "doing battle royal for the Fundamentals." Also figuring in the name was The Fundamentals, a 12 volume collection of essays written in the period 1910 - 15 by 64 British and American scholars and preachers. Three million copies of these volumes and the founding of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919 gave sharp identity to fundamentalism as it moved into the 1920s. Leadership moved across the years from such men as A T Pierson, A J Gordon, and C I Scofield to A C Dixon and Reuben Torrey, William Jennings Bryan, and J Gresham Machen. As fundamentalism developed, most Protestant denominations in the United States felt the division between liberalism and fundamentalism. The Baptists, Presbyterians, and Disciples of Christ were more affected than others. Nevertheless, talk of schism was much more common than schism itself. Perhaps the lack of a central organization and a normative creed, certainly the caricature of fundamentalism arising from the Scopes Trial (1925), the popularization of the liberal response by representatives like Harry Emerson Fosdick, well publicized divisions among fundamentalists themselves, and preoccupations with the Depression of the 1930s and World War II curtailed fundamentalism's appeal. By 1950 it was either isolated and muted or had taken on the more moderate tones of Evangelicalism. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, fundamentalism again became an influential force in the United States. Promoted by popular television evangelists and represented by such groups as the Moral Majority, the new politically oriented "religious right" opposes the influence of liberalism and secularism in American life. The term fundamentalist has also been used to describe members of militant Islamic groups. Paul Merritt Bassett Bibliography L J Averill, Religious Right, Religious Wrong (1989); S G Cole, History of Fundamentalism (1931); N Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918 - 1931 (1954); B Lawrence, Defenders of God (1989); G Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980); E R Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (1970).

Fundamentalism Advanced Information

Fundamentalism is a movement that arose in the United States during and immediately after the First World War in order to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and to defend it militantly against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other isms regarded as harmful to American Christianity. Since then, the focus of the movement, the meaning of the term, and the ranks of those who willingly use the term to identify themselves have changed several times. Fundamentalism has so far gone through four phases of expression while maintaining an essential continuity of spirit, belief, and method.

Phase I - Through the 1920s The earliest phase involved articulating what was fundamental to Christianity and initiating an urgent battle to expel the enemies of orthodox Protestantism from the ranks of the churches The series of twelve volumes called The Fundamentals (1910 - 15) provided a wide listing of the enemies, Romanism, socialism, modern philosophy, atheism, Eddyism, Mormonism, spiritualism, and the like, but above all liberal theology, which rested on a naturalistic interpretation of the doctrines of the faith, and German higher criticism and Darwinism, which appeared to undermine the Bible's authority. The writers of the articles were a broad group from English speaking North America and the United Kingdom and from many denominations. The doctrines they defined and defended covered the whole range of traditional Christian teachings. They presented their criticisms fairly, with careful argument, and in appreciation of much that their opponents said.

Almost immediately, however, the list of enemies became narrower and the fundamentals less comprehensive. Defenders of the fundamentals of the faith began to organize outside the churches and within the denominations. The General Assembly of the northern Presbyterian Church in 1910 affirmed five essential doctrines regarded as under attack in the church: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, Christ's bodily resurrection, and the historicity of the miracles. These were reaffirmed in 1916 and 1923, by which time they had come to be regarded as the fundamental doctrines of Christianity itself. On a parallel track, and in the tradition of Bible prophecy conferences since 1878, premillenarian Baptists and independents founded the World's Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919, with William B Riley as the prime mover. The premillennialists tended to replace the miracles with the resurrection and the second coming of Christ, or even premillenarian doctrine as the fifth fundamental. Another version put the deity of Christ in place of the virgin birth. The term "fundamentalist" was perhaps first used in 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws in the Baptist Watchman - Examiner, but it seemed to pop up everywhere in the early 1920s as an obvious way to identify someone who believed and actively defended the fundamentals of the faith. The Baptist John Roach Straton called his newspaper The Fundamentalist in the 1920s. The Presbyterian scholar J Gresham Machen disliked the word, and only hesitantingly accepted it to described himself, because, he said, it sounded like a new religion and not the same historic Christianity that the church had always believed. Through the 1920s the fundamentalists waged the battle in the large northern church denominations as nothing less than a struggle for true Christianity against a new non Christian religion that had crept into the churches themselves. In his book Christianity and Liberalism (1923), Machen called the new naturalistic religion "liberalism," but later followed the more popular fashion of calling it "modernism." Even though people like Harry Emerson Fosdick professed to be Christian, fundamentalists felt they could not be regarded as such because they denied the traditional formulations of the doctrines of Christianity and created modern, naturalistic statements of the doctrines. The issue was as much a struggle over a view of the identity of Christianity as it was over a method of doing theology and a view of history. Fundamentalists believed that the ways the doctrines were formulated in an earlier era were true and that modern attempts to reformulate them were bound to be false. In other words, the fundamentals were unchanging. Church struggles occurred in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and even in the southern Presbyterian Church, but the grand battles were fought in the northern Presbyterian and northern Baptist denominations. Machen was the undisputed leader among Presbyterians, joined by Clarence E Macartney. Baptists created the National Federation of the Fundamentalists of the Northern Baptists (1921), the Fundamentalist Fellowship (1921), and the Baptist Bible Union (1923) to lead the fight. The battles focused upon the seminaries, the mission boards, and the ordination of clergy. In many ways, however, the real strongholds of the fundamentalists were the Southern Baptists and the countless new independent churches spread across the south and midwest, as well as the east and west. In politics fundamentalists opposed the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools, leading up to the famous Scopes trial (1925) in Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, a Presbyterian layman and three times candidate for the American presidency, was acknowledged leader of the antievolution battle.

Phase II - Late 1920s to the Early 1940s By 1926 or so, those who were militant for the fundamentals had failed to expel the modernists from any denomination. Moreover, they also lost the battle against evolutionism. Orthodox Protestants, who still numerically dominated all the denominations, now began to struggle among themselves. During the Depression of the 1930s the term "fundamentalist" gradually shifted meaning as it came to apply to only one party among those who believed the traditional fundamentals of the faith. Meanwhile, neo orthodoxy associated with Karl Barth's critique of liberalism found adherents in America. In several cases in the north fundamentalists created new denominations in order to carry on the true faith in purity apart from the larger bodies they regarded as apostate. They formed the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (1932), the Presbyterian Church of America (1936), renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Bible Presbyterian Church (1938), the Conservative Baptist Association of America (1947), the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (1930), and many others. In the south fundamentalists dominated the huge Southern Baptist Convention, the southern Presbyterian Church, and the expanding independent Bible church and Baptist church movements, including the American Baptist Association. Across the United States fundamentalists founded new revival ministries, mission agencies, seminaries, Bible schools, Bible conferences, and newspapers. During this period the distinctive theological point that the fundamentalists made was that they represented true Christianity based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and that de facto this truth ought to be expressed organizationally separate from any association with liberals and modernists. They came to connect a separatist practice with the maintenance of the fundamentals of the faith. They also identified themselves with what they believed was pure in personal morality and American culture. Thus, the term "fundamentalist" came to refer largely

to orthodox Protestants outside the large northern denominations, whether in the newly established denominations, in the southern churches, or in the many independent churches across the land. Phase III - Early 1940s to the 1970s Beginning in the early 1940s the fundamentalists, thus becoming redefined, divided gradually into two camps. There were those who voluntarily continued to use the term to refer to themselves and to equate it with true Bible believing Christianity. There were others who came to regard the term as undesirable, having connotations of divisive, intolerant, anti intellectual, unconcerned with social problems, even foolish. This second group wished to regain fellowship with the orthodox Protestants who still constituted the vast majority of the clergy and people in the large northern denominations, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian. They began during the 1940s to call themselves "evangelicals" and to equate that term with true Christianity. Beginning in 1948 a few called themselves neoevangelical. Organizationally this spilt among largely northern fundamentalists was expressed on one hand by the American Council of Christian Churches (1941), which was ecclesiastically separatist in principle, and on the other by the National Association of Evangelicals (1942), which sought to embrace orthodox Protestants as individuals in all denominations. The term "fundamentalist" was carried into the 1950s by the ACCC as well as by a vast number of southern churches and independent churches not included in either body. It was proudly used by such schools as Bob Jones University, Moody Bible Institute, and Dallas Theological Seminary, and by hundreds of evangelists and radio preachers. The International Council of Christian Churches (1948) sought to give the term worldwide currency in opposition to the World Council of Churches. The term "fundamentalist" took on special meaning in contrast with evangelical or neoevangelical, rather than merely in contrast with liberalism, modernism, or neo orthodoxy. Fundamentalists and evangelicals in the 1950s and 1960s shared much; both adhered to the traditional doctrines of Scripture and Christ; both promoted evangelism, revivals, missions, and a personal morality against smoking, drinking, theater, movies, and card playing; both identified American values with Christian values; both believed in creating organizational networks that separated themselves from the rest of society. However, fundamentalists believed they differed from evangelicals and neoevangelicals by being more faithful to Bible believing Christianity, more militant against church apostasy, communism, and personal evils, less ready to cater to social and intellectual respectability. They tended to oppose evangelist Billy Graham, not to read Christianity Today, and not to support Wheaton College or Fuller Theological Seminary. Instead they favored their own evangelists, radio preachers, newspapers, and schools. Fundamentalists tended to differ greatly among themselves and found it difficult to achieve widespread fundamentalist cooperation. Meanwhile people in North America and Great Britain who were neither fundamentalist nor evangelical tended to regard both as fundamentalist, noting their underlying similarities. Phase IV - Late 1970s and the 1980s By the late 1970s and in particular by the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan for the American presidency, fundamentalists entered a new phase. They became nationally prominent as offering an answer for what many regarded as a supreme social, economic, moral, and religious crisis in America. They identified a new and more pervasive enemy, secular humanism, which they believed was responsible for eroding churches, schools, universities, the government, and above all families. They fought all enemies which they considered to be offspring of secular humanism, evolutionism, political and theological liberalism, loose personal morality, sexual perversion, socialism, communism, and any lessening of the absolute, inerrant authority of the Bible. They called Americans to return to the fundamentals of the faith and the fundamental moral values of America. Leading this phase was a new generation of television and print fundamentalists, notably Jerry Falwell, Tim La Haye, Hal Lindsey, and Pat Robertson. Their base was Baptist and southern, but they reached into all denominations. They benefited from three decades of post World War II fundamentalist and evangelical expansion through evangelism, publishing, church extension, and radio ministry. They tended to blur the distinction between fundamentalist and evangelical. Statistically, they could claim that perhaps one fourth of the American population was fundamentalist - evangelical. However, not all fundamentalists accepted these new leaders, considering them to be neofundamentalists. The fundamentalists of the early 1980s were in many ways very different people from their predecessors, and they faced many different issues. But they continued important traits common to fundamentalists from the 1920s through the early 1980s. They were certain that they possessed true knowledge of the fundamentals of the faith and that they therefore represented true Christianity based on the authority of a literally interpreted Bible. They believed it was their duty to carry on the great battle of history, the battle of God against Satan, of light against darkness, and to fight against all enemies who undermined Christianity and America. Faced with this titanic struggle they were inclined to consider other Christians who were not fundamentalists as either unfaithful to Christ or not genuinely Christian. They called for a return to an inerrant and infallible Bible, to the traditional statement of the doctrines, and to a traditional morality which they believed once prevailed in America. To do all this, they created a vast number of separate organizations and ministries to propagate the fundamentalist faith and practice.

C T McIntire (Elwell Evangelical Dictionary) Bibliography G W Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism in America; R Lightner, Neo Evangelicalism; L Gasper, The Fundamentalist Movement, 1930 - 1956; J Falwell, E Dobson, and E Hindson, eds., The Fundamentalist Phenomenon; G M Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture; C A Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism; N F Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918 - 1931; E R Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism; J I Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God; James Barr, Fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism is strict adherence to specific theological doctrines usually understood as a reaction against Modernist theology. However, Western forms of Fundamentalism are themselves the product of trends within modernism, that is liberalism. Fundamentalism can be understood as the 'flip-side of the coin' of modern liberalism (or alternatively, modern liberalism is the flipside of modern fundamentalism). The term "fundamentalism" was originally coined by its supporters to describe a specific package of theological beliefs that developed into a movement within the Protestant community of the United States in the early part of the 20th century, and that had its roots in the FundamentalistModernist Controversy of that time. The term usually has a religious connotation indicating unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs.[3] "Fundamentalism" is sometimes used as a pejorative term, particularly when combined with other epithets (as in the phrase "right-wing fundamentalists").

History
American Protestants
Fundamentalism as a movement arose in the United States, starting among conservative Presbyterian theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late 19th century. It soon spread to conservatives among the Baptists and other denominations around 1910-1920. The movement's purpose was to reaffirm key theological tenets and zealously defend them against the challenges ofliberal theology and higher criticism. The term "fundamentalism" has its roots in the Niagara Bible Conference (18781897) which defined those tenets it considered fundamental to Christian belief. The term was popularized by the "The Fundamentals", a collection of twelve books on five subjects published in 1910 and funded by the brothers Milton and Lyman Stewart This series of essays came to be representative of the "Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy" which appeared late in the 19th century within some Protestant denominations in the United States, and continued in earnest through the 1920s. The first formulation of American fundamentalist beliefs can be traced to the Niagara Bible Conference and, in 1910, to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church which distilled these into what became known as the "five fundamentals":

    

The inspiration of the Bible and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this. The virgin birth of Christ. The belief that Christ's death was the atonement for sin. The bodily resurrection of Christ. The historical reality of Christ's miracles.

By the late 1910s, theological conservatives rallying around the Five Fundamentals came to be known as "fundamentalists." In practice, the first point regarding the Bible was the focus of most of the controversy. It is important to distinguish between "Fundamentalism" as the name of a militant style and "fundamentalism" as a theology. Evangelical groups typically agree on the theology "fundamentals" as expressed in The Fundamentals, but often are willing to participate in events with religious groups who do not hold to the essential doctrines. Fundamentalist groups generally refuse to participate in events with any group that does not share its essential doctrines.

Islamic fundamentalism
The Shiite and Sunni religious conflicts since the 7th century created an opening for radical ideologists, such as Ali Shariati (193377), to merge social revolution with Islamic fundamentalism, as exemplified by Iran in the 1970s. Islamic fundamentalism has appeared in many counties; the Wahhabi version is promoted worldwide and financed by Saudi Arabia. The Iran hostage crisis of 1979-80 marked a major turning point in the use of the term "fundamentalism". The media, in an attempt to explain the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution to a Western audience described it as a "fundamentalist version of Islam" by way of analogy to the Christian fundamentalist movement in the U.S. Thus was born the term "Islamic fundamentalist", which would come to be one of the most common usages of the term in the following years.

Hindu fundamentalism
A recent phenomenon in India has been the rise of Hindu fundamentalism that has led to political mobilization against Muslims. After eight years of agitation, Hindu fundamentalists destroyed the 450-year-old Babri Mosque in December 1992. The Shiv Sena is a political party founded in 1966 originally to express Hindu fundamentalism. It is allied with the nationalistic Bharatiya Janata Party.

Fundamentalist religious empowerment

The Kashmir conflict is a representation of fundamentalist religious empowerment.This conflict is not a stand-alone phenomenon. The origins of this conflict is Pakistani volonilism and Islamisationby decades, while Hindu institutions were protected and flourished during the colonial period. This study develops a framework of understanding how India and Pakistan are constantly perched on the precipice of war since 1947, caught in a paired-minority conflict a term coined by Stephen P. Cohen, engaging occasionally in the battleground but increasingly in games of stealth and intelligence.[15]

Non-religious "fundamentalism"

Some Christian theologians, some fundamentalists, and others pejoratively refer to any philosophy which they see as literal-minded or they believe carries a pretense of being the sole source of objective truth as fundamentalist, regardless of whether it is usually called a religion. For instance, the Archbishop of Wales has criticized "atheistic fundamentalism" broadly and said "Any kind of [19] fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous," He also said, "the new fundamentalism of our age....leads to the language of expulsion and exclusivity, of extremism and polarisation, and the claim that, because God is on our side, he is not on yours." In The New Inquisition, Robert Anton Wilson, recognized episkopos, pope, and saint of the parody religion Discordianism, lampoons the members of skeptical organizations like the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOPnow the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) as fundamentalist materialists, alleging that they dogmatically dismiss any evidence that conflicts with materialism as hallucination or fraud. In France, the imposition of restrictions on some displays of religion in state-run schools has been labeled by some as "secular fundamentalism".In the United States, private or cultural intolerance of women wearing the hijab (Islamic headcovering) and political activism by Muslims also has been labeled "secular fundamentalism" by some Muslims in the U.S. The term "fundamentalism" is sometimes applied to signify a counter-cultural fidelity to some simplistic principle, as in the pejorative term "market fundamentalism" applied to an exaggerated religious-like faith in the ability of unfettered laissez-faire or free market economic views or policies to solve economic and social problems. According to economist John Quiggin, the standard features of "economic fundamentalist rhetoric" are "dogmatic" assertions and the claim that anyone who holds contrary views is not a real economist. Retired professor in religious studies Roderick Hindery first lists positive qualities attributed to political, economic, or other [25] forms of cultural fundamentalism. They include "vitality, enthusiasm, willingness to back up words with actions, and the avoidance of facile compromise." Then, negative aspects are analyzed, such as psychological attitudes, occasionally elitist and pessimistic perspectives, and in some cases literalism.

Atheistic fundamentalism
The term "atheistic fundamentalism" is controversial. In December 2007, the Archbishop of Wales Barry Morgan criticized what he referred to as "atheistic fundamentalism", claiming that it advocated that religion has no substance and "that faith has no value and is superstitious nonsense."He claimed it led to situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools refusing to put on nativity plays and crosses removed from chapels, though others have disputed this.Winterval was a name given to a whole series of winter festivals, and was not a renaming of Christmas. In The Dawkins Delusion? Christian theologian Alister McGrath and his wife psychologist Joanna Collicutt McGrath compare Richard Dawkins' "total dogmatic conviction of correctness" to "a religious fundamentalism which refuses to allow its ideas to be examined or challenged." Richard Dawkins has rejected the charge of "fundamentalism," arguing that critics mistake his "passion"which he says may match that of evangelical Christiansfor an inability to change his mind. Dawkins asserts that the atheists' position is not a fundamentalism that is unable to change its mind, but is held based on the verifiable evidence; as he puts it: "The true scientist, however passionately he may "believe" in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will." Dawkins has stated that, unlike religious fundamentalists, he would willingly change his mind if new evidence challenged his current position. Put another way, Dawkins states: ...Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to dispute it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that...

Fundamentalist Movement The Oxford Companion to United States History | 2001 |Paul S. Boyer | 700+ words | Copyright Fundamentalist Movement. American fundamentalism emerged within evangelical Protestantism in the early twentieth century in opposition to modernism, a term that encompassed liberal theology, the Darwinian theory ofevolution, and secular culture. Fundamentalists shared with other American evangelicals an emphasis on the classical Protestant doctrines of salvation, the authority of the Bible, the importance of a personal conversion experience, and a missionary zeal to spread the gospel. What distinguished them from other evangelicals was their strident antimodernism. The chief pillars of fundamentalist theology, such as biblical inerrancy, reflected this sentiment. The doctrine of inerrancy developed most fully by Presbyterian conservatives at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late nineteenth century in response to higher criticism, a sociohistorical approach to the Bible advocated by theological liberals. Believers in inerrancy view the Bible as the infallible product of the Holy Spirit's guidance; as the Word of God it contains no errors of any sort and must be read literally. Strongly tied to biblical inerrancy was dispensational premillennialism, which predicted the imminent return of Jesus Christ to earth. Brought to America in the 1860s and 1870s by John Nelson Darby of Great Britain, this interpretation of end time events was theologically antimodernist both in its hyperliteral approach to the Bible and in its view of the role of supernatural forces in controlling all of human history. Dispensationalism also prompted fundamentalists to view the institutional church as apostate and modern civilization as corrupt. In the late nineteenth century, many evangelicals embraced inerrancy and dispensationalism. But the spread of theological liberalism in the major Protestant denominations, coupled with the growing sense of cultural peril engendered by World War I, propelled some of these Protestant conservatives into becoming militant fundamentalists. Having organized the World's Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919, fundamentalist leaders mounted national crusades to rid Protestant denominations of modernist theology and the public schools of evolutionist teaching. Despite enthusiastic and well publicized campaigns, led by such combatants as William Bell Riley of

Minneapolis (18611947) and J. Gresham Machen of Princeton (18811937), the fundamentalists failed to capture control of the Northern Baptist and Northern Presbyterian denominations, where the struggle for control had been fiercest. Moreover, the anti evolutionist movement, while experiencing some successes, sputtered and stalled in the years after the Scopes trial of 1925. The end of the 1920s found the fundamentalist movement in retreat. But these national defeats did not bring about the demise of American fundamentalism. Instead, fundamentalists created a rapidly expanding network of nondenominational organizations, including publishing houses, mission boards, and radio stations. At the center of this fundamentalist network were approximately seventy Bible institutes across the country. These schools, such as Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and Riley's Northwestern Bible Training School in Minneapolis, provided nearby fundamentalist churches with ministers, teaching materials, Bible conferences, church secretaries, and a host of other services. After flourishing for years at the grassroots level, fundamentalism reemerged in the 1940s on the national scene, using radio, evangelistic campaigns, and youth organizations (such as Youth for Christ, from whose ranks the evangelist BillyGraham arose) to bring the gospel to the masses. This emphasis on national revival, however, exacerbated tensions within the movement. Many fundamentalists had responded to the failures of the 1920s by adamantly refusing to cooperate with those who did not wholeheartedly share their views. In the 1940s and 1950s, a group of somewhat less rigid (and often younger) fundamentalists rejected both this extreme separatism and dispensationalism. By the latter half of the 1950s the fundamentalist movement had divided into two camps: those who called themselves new evangelicals, or simply evangelicals, and formed associations with evangelicals outside the fundamentalist tradition; and militant separatists who defiantly retained the fundamentalist label. For the next two decades, fundamentalists concentrated on church building and evangelizing. But in the late 1970s and 1980s the fundamentalist movement made a dramatic reappearance on the national scene. Fundamentalism had always been associated with patriotism, militarism, and free market economics; in postVietnam War, post Watergate America, when such sentiments came back into vogue, politically energized fundamentalists, who had long yearned to recreate a Christian America, played an important and visible role in the resurgence of the Right. Framing their involvement in religious and moral terms, fundamentalists rallied to the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. Created in 1979 with the goal of electing to public office pro life, pro family, and pro America candidates, the Moral Majority contributed to the election and reelection of Ronald Reagan. Its demise in 1986, followed in 1988 by television evangelist Pat Robertson's failed candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, did not mean the end of fundamentalist politics. From the ashes of Robertson's campaign arose theChristian Coaltion. Under Ralph Reed's leadership this organization, which had attracted upwards of a million members by the early 1990s, became a formidable force in American politics, particularly within the Republican party. Besides electoral politics, the fundamentalist movement addressed an array of related issues, aggressively opposing gay rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and, most important, abortion rights. Aroused by the spread of secularism in the public schools, fundamentalists campaigned for mandatory school prayer and equal time for scientific creationism. More in keeping with the separatist side of their heritage, fundamentalists also created thousands of alternative schools for their children and energized the home schooling movement. In the 1980s, Southern Baptist fundamentalists successfully captured the levers of power in America's largest Protestant denomination and removed moderates from positions of authority. Despite periodic predictions of its demise, the fundamentalist movement continued to flourish in cities and rural areas, particularly (but not exclusively) among lower middle and working class whites. Although fundamentalists often displayed intolerance toward those who did not share their religious and political commitments, they offered believers certainty and community in a culture where both were often in short supply. See also Baptists; Conservatism; Millennialism and Apocalypticism; Missionary Movement, The, Modernist Culture; Religion; Revivalism; Secularization.