Terra Extraneus has a nice three part series entitled Why I am No Longer a Christian Fundamentalist. Well worth the read.
But the word ‘fundamentalist’ has acquired a broader subtext of additional connotations: separation, exclusion, judgmentalism, intolerance, militancy, racism, hard-heartedness, arrogance. Am I all of those things, simply because I continue to believe in God, in Christ, and in the Bible? I sure hope not.
However, fundamentalism soon strayed from its noble beginnings by tacking on many non-fundamentals as every bit as important as the true essentials of the faith. By the 1920s, it was common for fundamentalists to espouse a host of ‘non-fundamentals’ as just as important or even more important than the short list of doctrines which they had originally identified as fundamentals of the faith. That tendency, which I will call ‘Non-Fundamental Fundamentalism,’ continues to this day.
Many secondary doctrines and matters of opinion found their way to the essentials list of the Non-Fundamental Fundamentalists. I will discuss teetotalism, preservation of the white race, and separatism in subsequent articles of this series. In this article, I will discuss two primary non-essentials which early on became intertwined with the very definition of Christian fundamentalism: dispensationalism and premillennialism.
Check out the whole series.
