The great irony of fundamentalism is its delusional belief it is something that conserves or protects the \u201cold\u201d ways or hearkens back to the early church (or some pristine time after the Reformation).\u00a0 Nothing could be further from the truth. \u00a0But this is why part of the DNA of fundamentalism is a nostalgia for what they believe were once the, \u201cgood old days\u201d or the way we \u201cused\u201d to worship, preach, and believe the Bible.<\/p>\n
And of course, this spills over into many other areas of life.\u00a0 One reason I believe so many fundamentalists and evangelicals (81% of white evangelicals to be exact, many of whom I suspect were probably more fundamentalist than evangelical) voted for Donald Trump is they were immediately drawn to a slogan like \u201cMake America Great Again.<\/em>\u201d \u00a0On a very deep level they identified with this idea that if we could only go back to those \u201cfundamental\u201d ideas and beliefs, the way things \u201cuse to be,\u201d God would smile on us again and all would be well in the world (or at least our white, middle-class, American, male, western world\u2014the only world that matters, right?).<\/p>\n Fundamentalism, however, is not truly an attempt to reach back, or hold on to something given but lost now, it is a product of modernity and very, very modern (\u2018modernity\u2019 and \u2018modern\u2019 are two different things, one being conceptual and the other being chronologically descriptive\u2014but related for obvious reasons).\u00a0 In academia, in both religious and secular institutions this is rather well known.\u00a0 Even in many evangelical academic institutions and seminaries, this is well known.\u00a0 I\u2019m not asserting anything novel here.\u00a0 However, outside academia, many evangelicals and fundamentalists in the pew, or lay-people, have no idea how much the ways they view the Bible, theology, hermeneutics, and many other areas has been informed by modernity instead of the other way around\u2014nor are some aware their beliefs are relatively recent and never espoused by the early church such as a belief in a \u201crapture.\u201d<\/p>\n The early Church was oriented toward and defined by mysticism, metaphor, analogy, allegory, and the poetic.\u00a0 Or, mostly the opposite of a modern orientation or one defined by the ethos of modernity, which is oriented toward mapping (science), control, and so-called \u201cobjective\u201d facts.<\/p>\n Again, fundamentalism (and much of evangelicalism) is too modern .<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The great irony of fundamentalism is its delusional belief it is something that conserves or protects the \u201cold\u201d ways or hearkens back to the early church (or some pristine time after the Reformation).\u00a0 Nothing could be further from the truth. \u00a0But this is why part of the DNA of fundamentalism is a nostalgia for what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3524,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[161,275,278,293],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fundamentalism","tag-modern","tag-modernity","tag-mysticism"],"yoast_head":"\n