Born again Christian is a vacuous term.
A huge portion of the Protestant denominations do not believe in infant baptism et cetera because they don’t believe individuals make spiritual decisions until they are at a higher intellectual level. These denominations typically believe infancy and early childhood are “grace periods” (of course meaning if one dies in that period heaven is assured, because god created humans whose minds do not develop the capacity for true sin for some years.)
So in the strictest sense the first time you publicly accept Jesus Christ as savior and the Lord his father as God, you’ve been “born again” as a Christian.
But again it is a loose term. It also very often refers to people who are either without faith or even people with a troubled past who find god and change their lives to live under Christian doctrine.
Bush is definitely a born again Christian, but many many denominations use the term.
Also strictly speaking the fundamentalist movement is of arguable strength in America.
There is no “fundamentalist” Church, for example. Some point to the Baptists or the Pentecostals. But the Baptists are a very unorganized group, with two very large denominations and several smaller ones. Several northern baptist traditions are extremely contrary to the more fundamentalist Southern Baptist traditions.
Furthermore most of the denominations that are associated with fundamentalism are not denominations with an established hierarchy. So there is no true organized and central doctrine. Many Baptist churches for example are members of the Southern Baptists because the SBC provides supplementary funds and also helps pay a nice retirement to retired pastors. For the members of these SBC churches it’s all win and no gain, because SBC doctrine can be flagrantly ignored as each Church is independent and in the baptist denomination decisions are usually made by all adult male members of the church in a strictly democratic voting structure.
Also many groups that are labelled fundamentalist by outsiders label each other, derisively as fundamentalist.
There is also an important aspect to American religion that many everday churchgoers are much more attuned to their individual spiritual leaders and have little to no real information about their denomination as a whole. There are even people who follow fundamentalist preachers but probably aren’t really fundamentalist as they would disagree with some of the fundamentalist mind set, they just don’t know any better because it’s never really laid out for them.
The typical American chooses a church by sampling the ones in his/her proximity. Not by researching denominations and seeing which one has a belief system he/she agrees with.
A typical fundamentalist sermon isn’t always going to be vastly different from a Methodist sermon or an Epsicopalian sermon. Some of them ARE vastly different, but not all.
Fundamentalism is completely unorganized, poorly defined, and we don’t have any solid figures on how many Christians are even in the movement.
IN the strictest sense fundamentalism is believing in the five fundamentals:
Inerrancy of the Sciptures
The virgin birth and deity of Jesus Christ
Substitionary Atonement
Bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ
Bodily second coming of Jesus Christ
On the last four fundamentals there aren’t many people in Christendom that don’t have those beliefs.
The inerrancy of the scriptures is a different matter. Most all denominations feel that the scripture is the divine truth and is offered as truth from god’s mouth. But the majority of denominations believe that mankind can make mistakes in the interpretation of God’s word. And a good chunk also believe each person can take different lessons from the bible, and that all of these are different forms of the same truth.
Fundamentalism’s greatest contradiction to me is this belief that not only are the scriptures inerrant, but that only one specific interpretation is inerrant. That’s the problem.
They claim the scripture is inerrant. So a problem arises, they say, well John X:XX says this, that is final, no argument. But if someone says, “yes but that could be taken to mean that xxxx” the fundamentalist response is “no, that’s not possible because the scripture says XXXX!!”
That’s where fundamentalism departs largely from other denominations. There is belief that you cannot reinterpret the bible in any way. The big contradiction is the fundamentalist movement has no central organization so no way to establish this one “inerrant” interpretation of the bible. So the fundie movement is in large part powered by coalitions and inter-denominational groups and individual spiritual leaders.
Obviously that is not an environment that bodes well for establishing the “one, true, inerrant interpretation” of the bible.
Evangelicalism believes that the ultimate truth is in the scripture, but that each individual will find that truth in different ways based on their own personal understanding of the bible. See how drastically that varies from fundamentalism.
Some people say that “some evangelicals are fundamentalist, but not all fundamentalists are evangelicals” I disagree and find the true ideas behind each to be irreconciliable. You can’t believe each individual worshipper can find his own truth if you believe that there is only one correct interpretation of the scripture. I think many evangelicals devolve into fundamentalists and that is where the confusion lies.
Also a side note keep evangelicalism separate in your mind from evangelism. Evangelism is simply the spreading of god’s word and more or less conversion efforts.
If one was to identify and peg “the” fundamentalist movement strictly it would most easily be defined as the movement that believes in the five fundamentals and believes strongly in an involvement in social life and a strict enforcement of its ideas across the board. These fundamentalists are the ones who are against gay marriage, abortion, et cetera.
It’s possible of course, though, to be a fundamentalist in all regards but not believe you have to enforce your beliefs on others. So there are “tame” fundamentalists that don’t hurt anybody.