On Sep 3, 2005, at 1:42 PM, Deborah Harrell wrote:
"...Though it may shock those who equate fundamentalism and
Christianity, ninety years ago the term "fundamentalist" did not
exist.
The term was coined by an American Protestant splinter-group which, in
1920, proclaimed that adhering to "the literal inerrancy of the Bible"
was the true Christian faith. The current size of this group does not
change the aberrance of its stance: deification of the mere words
of the
Bible, in light of every scripture-based wisdom tradition including
Christianity's two-thousand-year-old own, is not just naiveté: it is
idolatry...
Thus have I struggled with many of my Christian brothers and sisters
over the years... And then there's the idolatrous insistence that
changing the US constitution to prevent or enforce this or that evil
or good (homosexual marriage, school prayer ...). I try to remind them
that your God is that which you think will save you, so if you think
that changing the US Constitution will save souls, you're idolizing it.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalism) gives a little
more detail on the origin of the word:
The term itself is borrowed from the title of a set of books
published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola
University) called "The Fundamentals." This series of essays
came to be representative of the "Fundamentalist-Modernist
controversy" which appeared early in the 20th century within the
Protestant churches of the United States, and continued in
earnest through the 1920s.
The pattern of the conflict between Fundamentalism and Modernism
in Protestant Christianity has remarkable parallels in other
religious communities, and in its use as a description of these
corresponding aspects in otherwise diverse religious movements
the term "fundamentalist" has become more than only a term
either of self-description or of derogatory contempt.
Fundamentalism is therefore a movement through which the
adherents attempt to rescue religious identity from absorption
into modern, Western culture, where this absorption appears to
the enclave to have made irreversible progress in the wider
religious community, necessitating the assertion of a separate
identity based upon the fundamental or founding principles of
the religion.
(I can almost hear the Good Doctor's rant on romanticism vs.
enlightenment.)
As for Mark Twain, it may well be a more modern writer has put the
word into his mouth: Twain railed against what we would today call
fundamentalism in such writings as "Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven." But I don't know that Twain used the "F-word" himself.
Dave
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