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Bob Jones University: Don't call us fundamentalists
In his latest "President's Corner," Bob Jones University head Bob Jones III says the word fundamentalist has become co-opted. "Bob Jones University is unashamedly Fundamentalist, but the term is beginning to carry an onerous connotation with the world at large because of the media's penchant for lumping Christian Fundamentalists in the same heap as Islamic Fundamentalists," he writes.

Instead of Fundamentalism defining us as steadfast Bible believers, the term now carries overtones of radicalism and terrorism. Fundamentalist evokes fear, suspicion, and other repulsive connotations in its current usage. Many of us who are separated unto Christ feel it is appropriate to find a new label that will define us more positively and appropriately. It is too early in the process to know what term may ultimately be embraced by the majority, but I like Preservationist.

This may prove to be an important split. To quickly sum up (and oversimplify) the last 125 years or so of conservative Christianity: battles over biblical inerrancy and other important theological flashpoints formed a split between "Modernists" and "Fundamentalists." This latter group was named largely after the publication of The Fundamentals, a series of 12 booklets published between 1910 and 1915 that outlined core conservative doctrines. After World War II, leaders like Billy Graham still wanted to affirm these doctrines, but believed Christian fundamentalism had become too isolationist. In a recent Christian History profile of Graham, biographer William Martin wrote,

The enduring break with hard-line fundamentalism came in 1957, when, after accepting an invitation from the Protestant Council of New York to hold a crusade in Madison Square Garden, Graham announced, "I intend to go anywhere, sponsored by anybody, to preach the gospel of Christ, if there are no strings attached to my message. … The one badge of Christian discipleship is not orthodoxy but love. Christians are not limited to any church. The only question is: are you committed to Christ?"

Fundamentalists attacked Graham as assisting liberals, and the split has never really healed. This, of course, is a very quick summary. For more, check out Christian History's issue on early fundamentalism and Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (CT review | purchase). In fairness, Jones paints a slightly different history:

Until the late 1940s, the strongest Bible believing Christians distinguished themselves from religious liberals by the term Evangelicals. When the strongest Evangelical group of the day, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), slowly began a leftward turn, which has accelerated unto the present day, those who wished to be more steadfast and less ecumenical began identifying themselves as Fundamentalists.

In any case, since the fundamentalist-evangelical split, fundamentalists like Jones have tended to wear the label with pride. "In recent years," says the Associated Press Stylebook, "fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians. In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the work to itself." Until now, Bob Jones University was one of those. But now with the most prominent of the fundamentalist institutions seeking to abandon the term (there are still churches that wear the label with pride, but few institutions remain willing to do so), it may be time to retire the word for good.

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March (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46