{"id":34,"date":"2009-09-04T19:33:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-05T02:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/groansfromwithin.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/04\/fundamentalism-some-rants-on-its-historical-development-repost"},"modified":"2012-01-13T20:25:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-14T04:25:00","slug":"fundamentalism-some-rants-on-its-historical-development-repost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thepangeablog\/2009\/09\/04\/fundamentalism-some-rants-on-its-historical-development-repost\/","title":{"rendered":"Fundamentalism… Some Rants on Its Historical Development (repost)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
This is a re-post from April of 2008:<\/div>\n

I have been studying a bit on the origins of fundamentalist Christian faith in America (many of the following insights come from: UNGODLY WOMEN: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism; Betty DeBerg<\/a>). This is a movement that emerged in the 1880\u2019s as a call back to Victorian family code values. Women are to organize the private sphere (home, church [which led to some feminizing in the church as women were the primary congregants], etc.) while men are to be competitive businessmen in the public sphere (all things public, politics, industry, etc.). When this system of separate spheres collapsed by women being liberated and allowed to enter into the public arena, Fundamentalism began as a movement to define a clear cut \u201cmoral code\u201d that all should live by.<\/p>\n

Male identity was being hurt by this move towards women\u2019s equality, and so men rose up to reclaim male dominance (which some would say was with some motives in \u2018self esteem\u2019 and finding a sense of manliness that had been threatened by this cultural shift).\n

In order to reclaim maleness, fundamentalism arose as a call that included a return to \u2018family values\u2019 and called women to embrace the godly calling of submissiveness. It also called the women to quit experimenting with sexual experiences outside of marriage, dancing, smoking\u2026 well, basically \u201cflapperism.\u201d I would agree with many of the moral values that these and the new fundamentalist would put forth, but I think the way they went about it all has damaged Christian faith in the present.<\/p>\n

In order to defend the \u2018moral code\u2019 that they were comfortable with, men in this movement began to do several things. They defeminized the church with militant themes (hmm, ever wonder where some of the modern impulse in right wing faith towards war came from?). They kicked women out of the pulpits (who many had taken leadership because of a lack of godly men who were too tied up with questionable public lives). They attacked the so-called modernists who began to rethink and challenge their assumptions about the Bible. They attacked any person or belief system that could be labeled as a threat to the defence of the \u2018moral code\u2019 that they claimed to be biblical. All of this, they did on the grounds that the Bible should be read in a \u201cplain sense\u201d, taking the meaning that makes the most sense as we read it through our lens of culture (this apposed to a pre-modern understanding of Scripture as embedded in a very different cultural context that must not be ignored by proper biblical scholarship). This is why most of the early fundamentalists embraced dispensational theology, because it was based on setting up systems in the Bible so that it all made logical sense (this is where the \u201cLeft Behind\u201d gets its view of end times from).<\/p>\n

Well, what is my main point? I think that in an ignorant attempt to defend this new<\/strong> view of how to read the bible, driven by the need to preserve the ethics of the \u2018moral code\u2019 (a return to separate spheres mentality in order to allow men to feel manly again); that many unnecessary polarities have been constructed in Christian faith. For instance, why is evolution viewed as evil? Because it threatens the \u2018moral code\u2019 or the plain reading of the bible. Anyone who considers the first 11 chapters of Genesis are pre-history and that the first 3 chapters are written from an ancient worldview to express God\u2019s truth of creation and evil rather than as modern science, is automatically an evil liberal! So, instead of entering into intelligent dialogue about matters of faith and science, Christians are viewed as naive and irrelevant. So, what do these fundamentalists do? They claim that science is completely driven by atheism and if you believe in any form of evolution you must be a practical atheist\u2026 how ridiculous this has become! Science wars are divisive, and when a student is told their entire life that their faith rises and falls on whether God made the earth in 6 days or not, and then come to realize that the majority of scientist believe the earth to be billions of years old\u2026 many of these students lose their faith. This is one example of unnecessary polarities.<\/p>\n

Finally, I want to call the average Christian to ask questions about their assumptions that were inherited by a late 19th Century reaction to a loss of male identity. Why do I believe this about life\u2026 or God\u2026 or the mission of the Gospel\u2026 or politics? Did I come to that conclusion because of inherited fundamentalism or because that is authentically what the Bible and the way of Jesus communicates? It is in finding new answers to some of these questions that the Church will find new ways of being the people of God in America.<\/p>\n

Let me emphasize that these are some thoughts about the origins of the movement, but that other significant factors also existed that contributed to the formation of fundamentalism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Please share your thoughts!<\/div>\n

\"Share\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a re-post from April of 2008: I have been studying a bit on the origins of fundamentalist Christian faith in America (many of the following insights come from: UNGODLY WOMEN: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism; Betty DeBerg). This is a movement that emerged in the 1880\u2019s as a call back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,39,43,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-evolution","category-fundamentalism","category-theology"],"yoast_head":"\nFundamentalism... 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