The Historic Rise of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States in the Late Nineteenth Century.

Fundamentalism is a religious response to modernity. Although the term is frequently used in a popular context to mean any religious position perceived to be traditional, archaic or scripture-bound, it has a specific meaning from an historical perspective, and a genealogy which has seen the term change from the self-referential description of a particular religious group, to a term which may have lost its impact through misplaced, and indiscriminate, application. Originally used by a specific group of American Protestants, who shared a similar world-view and theology, Fundamentalism grew from individuals within disparate denominations finding common cause to an organized movement with the power to challenge modernity at the level of the courtroom and the popular press. This essay will consider just how we can account for Fundamentalism’s emergence in the US by first considering its historical roots within the Great Awakening, and up to the 1920’s with the Scopes “Monkey” trial. Secondly it will consider the theological innovations that underpinned Fundamentalism by exploring both Dispensationalism and Premillenarianism, before finally placing Fundamentalism within its sociological background by looking at broader cultural movements in American society, and considering how changes in both the scientific and intellectual spheres challenged the traditional place of evangelical Protestantism. Christian fundamentalism has been succinctly defined by George Marsden as “militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism.” In the latter part of the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th they developed specific beliefs and operating principles that set them apart from what was, in their view, dangerously liberal evangelical Protestantism. In a post-Darwinian world the Protestant worldview, particularly in the US, came under a number of specific threats from advances in science and contemporary intellectual developments. Unlike the liberals, who sought

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