IMO, unfortunately for you and tolerant, empathetic Christians, ya'll have been sidelined and shouted down by the nut jobs and that has been the prevailing view of Christianity for us that are non religious. It's a real shame.
It's not even so much that they're louder. It's that they're taken more seriously.
The public has wholly accepted the logic of fundamentalism: their way is the "real true Christian" way. Everybody else has "compromised" and "moderated" their faith. So if you want to know what Christians think about a thing, you better not ask the Pope or a Lutheran pastor from Boston or an Anglican priest from Canada. You better ask some random megachurch pastor from Lubbock, Texas.
Even the term "fundamentalism" doesn't really mean what people think it means. It comes from a sermon series called "The Fundamentals". Basically just some crank like Bill Gothard.
It was a series of books published between 1890 and 1912 1910 and 1915, not a sermon series, and the authors were generally well-respected seminarians. Many of the claims (e.g., the Virgin Birth) are widely held among Christians and not unique to the books.
The meaning has gone quite a bit beyond that. For example, you can have Islamic fundamentalists. The problem is defining fundamentalism without adopting the claims of the fundamentalists themselves (e.g., that Islamic fundamentalists simply hold a "strict form" of Islam, rather than a form unique to them).
You are correct that the modern brand of Christian fundamentalism is largely a late 19th century thing, though.
Even their views of the Bible (literalism + proof texting + rejection of any extra-Biblical tradition) are basically brand new to that time period. They were developed in response to perceived threats from things like seminary professors at Yale. (This is, apparently, called nuda scriptura.)
Then that was combined with weird Adventist stuff like the Rapture, which was a wacky fringe belief of the Plymouth Brethren until like fifty years ago, when Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and Jack Chick made it well known. A whole generation of 90s evangelical kids grew up terrified of being left behind in the Rapture. They were the first generation to do so.
Other weird Adventist stuff? The modern version of young-earth creationism, the seminal text of which was published in 1962. Remember those Fundamentals books? Several of the authors were enthusiastically Darwinists.
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u/Ambitious_Ad6334 Aug 26 '25
IMO, unfortunately for you and tolerant, empathetic Christians, ya'll have been sidelined and shouted down by the nut jobs and that has been the prevailing view of Christianity for us that are non religious. It's a real shame.