No takers, trying here.
A fundamentalist is one who believes in the literal truth of the Bible. Many of them seek to have books that hint of heresy, such as occult books, banned.
Google is your friend. 
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/fund.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/55h/
http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/features/pages/evang.html
http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/CHRISTIA/library/defining-fundies.html
http://www.wheaton.edu/isae/defining_evangelicalism.html
BTW, my parents met at Wheaton College. 
Duck Duck Goose, thanks for your web links. I have nothing really to add except for a personal anecdote…
When I was in elementary school, my classmates (most of whom were Catholic or Methodist) made fun of the restrictive nature of my religion, Assembly of God. They accused me of being a Fundamentalist.
Well, I went home and asked my dad if we were Fundamentalists. He said no… we were Pentecostals. I accepted that answer even though I still had no clue what he meant. But my classmates didn’t have a clue either so that answer shut them up.
To this day though I’m not sure why he answered my question that way… in my mind the two are not mutually exclusive.
That’s all.
By the way… while all that speaking in tongues scared the livin’ crap out of me when I was a kid, it was the belief in biblical inerrancy that finally caused me to reject the religion I was brought up in… so I guess we were Fundamentalists after all.
Algernon, most Fundimentalists aren’t big on the whole speaking in tounges, faith healing, miracle working thing, and a lot of pentacostals don’t identify themselves as fundimentalist. Even though there are some similarities between pentacostals, conservative evangelicals and fundimentalists, the three groups are usually distinguished from each other.
I gather from barbitu8 and algernon that its about literal truth of the Bible. DDG seems to be saying that its about “the conviction that the separation from cultural decadence and apostate (read liberal) churches are telling marks of faithfulness to Christ.” Which is correct, and is there any definition that would include DDG herself and Trisk as Fundamentalists?
Eh, Izzy, you want us to categorize something that almost by definition defies categorization. One of the first things you’ll see, if you do some reading about Fundamentalism, is that nobody nowadays, not even the Fundies themselves, really agrees on what “Fundamentalism” means. It’s not like Judaism, or Islam, or even Catholicism, where it’s all been laid out in black and white for hundreds of years.
It’s basically a way of thinking about yourself, your religion, and the culture that surrounds you. It’s a kind of “separatism”, a kind of “Puritanism” if you will. When some people call themselves “Fundies”, they simply mean they support everything Jerry Falwell tells them to support and they boycott everything Jerry Falwell tells them to boycott, but as for “theology”, as for “what do you believe and why do you believe it?”, they have no clue, other than “I believe what my daddy taught me, and that’s good enough for me”. Other people (like me) mean by “Fundie” simply that they believe in the Five Fundamentals, and don’t give a rat’s derriere what Jerry Falwell thinks, or who he wants us to pray for or boycott.
The church I attend right now is not one that you would think of as a “Fundie” church. It’s a mainstream Protestant denomination, for one thing (but not Baptist, BTW). However, their theology is “Fundamentalist”. Going by this criterion, there are a lot more [air quotes]“Fundamentalist” churches out there than you might realize. But not all of them mobilize their membership to boycott Disney, or to write letters to ABC protesting NYPD Blue.
Okay, time for the Sixth-Graders Explanation. “Mommy, what’s a Fundie?”
Way back in the 1920s, even before your Granny M. was born (that’s how long ago it was), some Christian people got disgusted at the way American culture was, as they saw it, going to Hell in a handbasket, and at warp speed. They also were getting disgusted with the way some of the other Christian people in America were saying that maybe some things in Christian doctrine weren’t true, like maybe the Bible was just a book of good thoughts and not the inspired word of God, or that maybe Jesus was just a man, and not the Son of God, or that maybe he didn’t really come back from the dead. Or that maybe the world really wasn’t going to come to an end someday, like in the Book of Revelations, with the Last Judgement and the Lake of Fire and all that. Stuff like that. (They called it “apostasy”, which you don’t need to know about.)
So a group of the religious people who were upset came up with five points that they thought you just HAD to believe in if you were going to call yourself a “Christian”. They called these the “Fundamentals”, so that’s why they got to be called “Fundamentalists”. The five points were:
[ul]
[li]the Virgin birth.[/li][li]the physical resurrection of Christ.[/li][li]the infallibility of the Scriptures.[/li][li]the substitutional atonement.[/li][li]the physical second coming of Christ.[/li][/ul]
So, according to Fundamentalists, if you don’t believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, that He physically came back from the dead in His own body, that the Bible is the Holy Inspired Word of God, that the whole reason Jesus died was so He could pay the price for our sins, and that He will physically come back some day to judge us all–well, according to the Fundies, if you don’t believe these things, then, well, you’re just not a Christian, that’s all.
And all the rest of the jingoistic political Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson/Harry Potter/Disney-boycott stuff is just so much distracting crapola. It’s so completely unimportant to any discussion of Fundamentalism, but it’s too bad that that’s all that people think of when they hear the word “Fundie”, because that’s all they see on TV all the time. The media never talks about the serious midnight Fundie Bible study discussions of inerrancy, (“well, are there mistakes in the Bible?”), or of eschatology, which is the study of the Second Coming, or of the painful and difficult issues of abortion, divorce, homosexuality. They never show any of that, preferring to stereotype us as jingoistic sheep who picket abortion clinics, think the Harry Potter books are Satanic, refuse to consider the possibility of evolution, and vote the way Pat Robertson tells us to. It isn’t fair, but that’s the way it is.
The Sixth-Graders web hit.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/articlesnew/04816.html
Thank you, DDG. To make sure I have it correct, I’ll summarize: the term is used in two distinct ways. The “technically correct” usage (going back to the origins of the term) would be someone who believes in the Five Fundamentals. And this would be how you use it to refer to yourself. The popular usage of the term (including the SDMB) would be someone of the Jerry Falwell type (which would not include people like yourself).
Using DDG’s definition, Catholics are Fundamentalists.
In fact, by that definition, almost ALL Christian churches are fundamentalist. Maybe not the United Church.
I admit the word seems useless to me if defined that way.
Yep, that’s about it, Izzy. Some of us just mean “we believe in these five fundamental things”–it’s just mainly a “theology thing”. Others mean “we buy into the whole Fundie lifestyle package–Jerry Falwell, Harry-Potter-Satanic, picket-abortion-clinics, and everything.” In the latter case, it’s then a combination of “theology” and “lifestyle” stuff.
My grandparents were all “Fundamentalists”, and held that things like dancing and playing cards and women wearing makeup were evil. The only movie my mother was allowed to go see, when she was growing up as a Southern Baptist teenager in Florida in the 1940s, was Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, because it was “Culture”.
So, in my family, for my grandparents, it was both a “theology” and a “lifestyle” thing, but starting with my parents, even though they both graduated from Wheaton College, it was just a “theology” thing, although they still followed a more conservative American lifestyle. They didn’t go to bridge parties or cocktail parties, for example, alone among all the other suburbanites in their neighborhood. But they thought books were good, period, and some movies, and I was allowed to wear makeup in high school.
So now for me and the Better Half, it’s 95% a “theology” thing and only 5% a “lifestyle” thing. We live a more conservative lifestyle than many other Americans. We don’t have cable TV, and we’re extremely picky about what TV shows the kids do watch, and what videos we rent. But as far as The Cat Who Walks Alone wearing makeup, or playing cards (even poker–she and Bonzo play poker in the back seat on long car trips), shoot, it’s no BFD, you know? And, books are good, period. 
So, from now on, when you’re talking to somebody who calls herself a “Fundie”, ask yourself what “kind” of Fundie you’re talking to. Is she a “theology” Fundie, or is she a “theology and lifestyle” Fundie? Because it can make a very big difference in how she’s going to approach difficult questions like divorce, or abortion, or homosexuality, and if you make assumptions about her reactions based on what you think they ought to be (“She’s a Fundie, and Fundies all hate gays…”), you may find yourself being embarrassed. Stereotyping is sometimes so awkward for the perpetrator…
The problem is that over the last 25 years or so, a group of people calling themselves “Fundies” have gotten a lot of airplay in the media–Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and there were others in the 1980s, like Jimmy Swaggart and Oral Roberts. And now it’s James Dobson and the “Left Behind” series guys who are in the media’s eye. So people get the idea of “Fundies” from TV the same way they get the idea of “Los Angeles blacks” from TV. Not a positive or unbiased image, in other words.
And, the Fundies who are on TV are always the ones for whom Fundamentalism is both a “theology” thing and a “lifestyle” thing. After all, midnight Bible studies on inerrancy don’t offer any juicy sound bites or instantly comprehensible, newsworthy visuals, so the media isn’t interested in those. You know, a new Bible translation came out not so long ago, the New International Version, which generated a certain amount of buzz in Fundie circles, but I didn’t see anything about that on ET or CNN.
I am sure it was an unintentional personalisation by Duck Duck Goose but it should be pointed out that it is possible to be a male Fundamentalist of either persuasion.
Duck Duck Goose, you are much more knowledgeable than I on this topic… maybe you can clarify this for me. In my earlier post in this thread I mentioned my father’s agitation at being labeled a Fundamentalist when he asserted that we were Pentecostals.
When I look at your five points that define a Fundamentalist (from a theology perspective, not lifestyle), they all seem to be consistent with what I was taught growing up… I too was not allowed to go to movies or or play cards, etc.
Is it that perhaps all (or most) Pentecostals are Fundamentalists, but not all Fundamentalists are Pentecostals? (like all ham is meat, but not all meat is ham). In other words, if one would do the Venn diagram, would the Fundamental and Pentecostal circles mostly overlap?
I think Catholics would fall short on number 3, “The infallibility of the Scriptures”. Not that they think the Bible is “fallible” in the sense of “wrong”, but they believe that it is not all to be taken literally.
DDG, thank you for this education. I had never before heard “Fundamentalist” used except as an insult.
Meant to preview this… this part in my post above was supposed to be just a parenthetical comment about my upbringing being also consistent with the lifestyle definition of Fundamentalism… sorry for any confusion.
(headlines… “Newbie Screws Up - High Posters Not Surprised”)
My understanding of the difference between Fundamentalist and Pentecostal, in general usage, and I’m talking about “denominations” here, rather than individuals, is that the various Pentecostal denominations practice the “Gifts of the Spirit”, ie. speaking in tongues, prophesying, etc., and the Fundamentalists don’t. One example: my personal experience is that at both a Fundamentalist and a Pentecostal worship service, you’re extremely likely to have folks raising one hand to the ceiling and intoning, “Yes, Jesus…praise You, Jesus…” However, at the Pentecostal service, these folks will often be saying it in “tongues”, i.e. in an obviously foreign language phrase of some kind. (Or, at least, they’re saying something with the cadence of praise.)
I understand your dad’s pique, Algernon. Pentecostals tend to feel that folks in other denominations who don’t practice the Gifts of the Spirit are missing out in a big way on a major part of the Christian Experience. The tension is especially high between those denominations whose Fundie theology and lifestyles are similar. For example, my observation is that it jes’ seems natural to the Assembly of God “Holy Rollers” that their Southern Baptist brethren ought to go that final step and learn how to be slain in the Spirit, so why on earth don’t they?
It’s rather like the way that people who have sex for “fun” view people who only have sex for “procreation”. “You poor things, God gave us these talents and gifts for our use and enjoyment, and yes, for our edification, you are missing out on so much, you have no idea…”
P.S. My best friend all through high school was the daughter of an Assembly of God pastor (me, the token Baptist who visited her church sometimes), and she cheerfully applied the term “Holy Roller” to herself, and thus I use it with kindness, no insult intended.
Thank you Duck Duck Goose for your articulate explanation of Fundamentalists vs Pentecostals. I now understand my father’s reaction. It’s so simple when you point it out. The key, as you point out, appears to be related to the Gifts of the Spirit.
Since the Assembly of God church I grew up in seemed to adhere to the five points you listed, plus a sixth point (namely the belief and practice of the Gifts of the Spirit), that these six points would characterize a Pentecostal faith?. Would you concur?
And interestingly enough, we too often referred to ourselves as Holy Rollers. It was done with a sort of sense of pride. No insult taken… ~grin~
All in all, with all the “praise Jesus” and speaking in tongues, and prophesying, and faith healing, etc… it was an interesting environment to grow up in.
Nice job, DDG!! Just to muddy the waters, I’d observe that some people use the term to mean “those who believe the fundamentals of the Christian faith.” What are those fundamentals? Well, obviously, the ones I believe are fundamental to the faith, and not all the periphery that you believe is important…