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What Is Fundamentalism?

What Is Fundamentalism?

Last updated on: August 29, 2026 at 8:38 pm by Richard Ostling

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What Is Fundamentalism? 2026-08-29T20:38:05-04:00 Richard Ostling

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Merriam-Webster’s first definition says Fundamentalism “often” is a **“**movement in 20th-century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching,” or “the beliefs of this movement,” or “adherence to such beliefs.” The second meaning is “a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles,” e.g. “Islamic fundamentalism.”

“The Encyclopedia of Religion” calls Fundamentalism “a subspecies of Evangelicals” who “consider it a chief Christian duty to combat uncompromisingly ‘modernist’ theology and certain secularizing cultural trends.” Historian George Marsden quipped that a Fundamentalist is “an Evangelical who is angry about something.”

Those sources capture the basics, but theologian J. I. Packer contended that, properly understood, Fundamentalism is “in principle nothing but Christianity itself.” That quote appears in a clear, concise and significant book Packer produced at age 31: “‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God” (still sold by print-on-demand at Eerdmans.com). Last week, The Guy happened to spot this title in his library, idly leafed through it, and discovered material that’s pertinent 68 years later.

England’s Trio

Packer (1926 –2020) was a seminary teacher, researcher, and author in the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. Christianity Today magazine’s obituary ranked him among England’s “three most influential Evangelical leaders” alongside preachers Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott. His huge-selling “Knowing God” (1973) remains a beloved classic. Packer’s influence increased in North America when he spent the second half of his career teaching at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada.

Some history. Influenced by Princeton seminary professors, the U.S. Presbyterian General Assembly in 2010 decided clergy candidates should profess belief that “the Holy Spirit did so inspire, guide, and move the writers of the Holy Scriptures as to keep them from error.” This biblical “inerrancy” became the first of the so-called “five points of Fundamentalism” embraced by right-wing Evangelicals, later including Packer.

Conservative scholars critiqued “modernist” theology in 90 essays collected in 12 booklets titled “The Fundamentals,” distributed between 1910 and 1915. In 1919, militants founded the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, and in 1920 a Baptist magazine coined the term “Fundamentalist.” In the public mind, Fundamentalism fused with opposition to theories of biological evolution with the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” and developed an image of anti-intellectual and combative attitudes isolated from the Protestant mainstream.

As the word became a slur, most biblical conservatives, typified by Billy Graham, favored the “Evangelical” self-definition. British conservatives never accepted Fundamentalist for themselves and Packer thought the word should be discarded as pejorative and misleading. (Also, The Guy contends the word is so bound up with American Protestantism that it should be avoided for Muslims.)

Simple Essence

The Packer outlook is simple in essence. He reasoned that if God is wholly truthful and reliable, that logically extends to the entirety of the written words he inspired, so that the history and the miracles are inerrant. Jesus Christ and Jewish contemporaries upheld the absolute authority of their Scriptures (Christians’ later “Old Testament”), and likewise with writings that the church came to recognize as New Testament scripture. Yes, conservatives build upon suppositions such as these, but so do liberals.

Packer lamented the hostility toward scholarship in some Evangelical quarters, and sought to clear up important misconceptions as follows.

The Bible contains narratives, prophecies, visions, poetry, hymns, prayers, proverbs, parables, and other literary forms. Packer said, for instance, that the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis chapters 2 and 3 depicts what actually happened, but Evangelicals are not “literalistic” and know that “there is nothing inconsistent in recognizing that real events may be recorded in a highly symbolic manner.”

Similarly, “literal” interpretation only applies when the author intended to offer objective information. Thus Evangelicals insist Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy because that’s what the texts state, whereas Ecclesiastes puts the words in the mouth of the “son of David” (Solomon) as a literary device.

Dictated?

Some say Evangelicals think God “dictated” the Bible. (That is actually Islam’s belief about the Quran, regarded as God’s verbatim words in Arabic revealed to a passive Muhammad.) Jewish and Christian tradition teaches the Bible is both divine and human, written by authors but inspired by God. In Packer’s formulation, “the authors wrote word for word what God intended,” thereby making Scripture “the speech of God himself.”

Divine inspiration pertains to biblical texts as originally written, which did not survive, so “textual criticism” compares manuscripts to discern what the autographs said, and modern translations list alternate readings in footnotes. Packer said we can be confident that our Bibles are “trustworthy,” and no doctrine is at stake in the “small number” of doubtful cases.

Packer’s work is dated in two respects. First, he lamented that Evangelicals focused so strongly on spiritual development and evangelism that they neglected responsibility in politics. Subsequent change was dramatized by such conservative U.S. organizations as Moral Majority (founded in 1979) and Christian Coalition (in 1987), with continual activism by many Bible-believing Christians ever since.

More skeptical

Secondly, Packer challenged the “Neo-Orthodoxy” and “Biblical Theology” of that time, whereas today skeptism toward the Bible is fiercer at secular universities and many theological seminaries. We’ve also seen increasing numbers of well-credentialed Evangelical scholars who believe the Bible is either fully “infallible” on spiritual and doctrinal matters or, as with Packer, “inerrant” even on historical details.

Yet further history. The struggle between those two outlooks focused on Fuller Theological Seminary, a significant Evangelical campus founded after World War Two. Its original statement of faith declared the Bible “free from error in the whole and in the part.” Eventual faculty evolution produced a 1972 change to affirm “the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures” as “trustworthy” with an explanation that downplayed inerrancy “sloganeering.” In 1977, Christianity Today Editor Harold Lindsell, a former Fuller professor, lamented this shift in his book “The Battle For the Bible”

In 1974, Graham summoned an international congress where 2,700 Evangelicals defined the faith in the Lausanne Covenant, with Stott as primary author. It endorsed the “infallible” Bible’s “truthfulness and authority” and deemed it “without error in all that it affirms” – implicitly allowing leeway regarding what the writers meant to affirm. https://lausanne.org/statement/lausanne-covenant/

Packer was then a key author of the 1978 “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” signed by 300 Evangelical leaders. Two follow-ups further explained disputed Bible passages, the 1982 “Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics” (i.e. interpretation) and 1986 “Chicago Statement on Biblical Application.” These sophisticated proclamations, posted at https://alliancenet.org/icbi/, characterize the thinking among right-wing Evangelicals, including those who took command of the Southern Baptist Convention starting in 1979.

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