One variation of Vince Lombardi’s annual “back to basics” training camp talk went, “Gentlemen, this…is a football…Am I going too fast?” Anyone who’s played organized sports remembers related preseason and post-loss mid-season talks or drills. A musician’s scales, a singer’s “do-re-mi” and a ballet dancer’s five “positions” are all versions of the same, and most everyone remembers school textbooks titled “Fundamentals of…(Whatever).” Yes, fundamentals are fine – until you start talking about religion and add an “-ism.”
Christian fundamentalism in the late 19th– and early 20th-century was an attempt at recapitulating the basics of the biblical Christian faith in response to the wholesale acquiescence of liberal protestants to cultural mores and Enlightenment perspectives that seemed to militate against biblical truth. As is often the case, valid beginnings don’t guarantee staying on course. In just a few decades, some Fundamentalists began to unbiblically (1 Corinthians 5:10) withdraw (socially if not physically) from the still-changing culture. “Fundamentalist” has often been used pejoratively ever since for anyone with a conservative, biblical view of the faith.
Enter Islamic Fundamentalism. I’m not an expert on Islam, but I’ve seen Quranic views that extolled the “peaceful religion” of many, and those of fundamentalists, “extremists” and “radicals.” Whether the abhorrent behavior of terrorists is borne from right or wrong interpretation of their holy text, or from some other sociopolitical dynamic, I don’t know. I do know that comparisons between those who commit crime in the name of God (including some “Christians” today and over the history of the church), and those biblical Christians who “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15) are ludicrous.
Recently, Evangelical Christianity (the next “movement” attempting to rescue biblical Christianity from the last movement as it diverged) at least partly overstepped and conflated their faith and politics – it was called the Religious Right. Thankfully, the confusion cleared, but left a worry from the more secular that anyone who brought their faith to the public square was attempting to build a theocracy. Ours is “fundamentalism” of a sort, so a biblical Christian is unable to dispatch the resultant worldview from their politics, but we want no more than our voices heard and votes counted. If there’s such a thing as “Christian Jihad,” it’s to save lives, not take them. (Note: I still consider myself a Christian and an Evangelical, though “biblical Christian” saves so many words of differentiation from others who use the same descriptors.)
True, biblical Christians rightly decry tired, staid, lifeless churches, but we must be careful on how we define “lifeless.” Many faithful churches, with enlivened members, have been “doing it the same way” for many years. Our culture worships the “new and exciting,” but heaven’s population will be heavy with those faithful who found wonder in the weekly recitation of the gospel of grace by the preached Word of God and the right practice of the sacraments, despite living an otherwise mundane existence.
So I’ll take the label “fundamentalist” and even “extremist” since, by nature, that’s what the biblical Christian life is. However poorly I personally meet it, the call of the Christian is to love and service, to one another and to neighbors (Matthew 5:16), including the proclamation of the truth of the gospel (Mark 16:15). How “radical” this is, though, should be determined by the surrounding culture, not by some intentional effort to try harder. The brightness of the light often depends on the darkness of the night. Any aberrant need to stand out or be intentionally radical leads only to burnout and disillusionment when we fail, or self-righteousness when we believe we’ve succeeded.