Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism, conservative religious movement of various Protestant denominations during the 20th century, embodying a protest against the incursions of science into revelation. Its object is to maintain traditional interpretations of the Bible and fundamental doctrines of Christian faith. The five points of the doctrine whose literal acceptance is demanded are the Virgin birth, physical resurrection of Christ, inerrancy of the Scriptures, vicarious atonement, and the physical second coming of Christ. The struggle against the teaching of evolutionary theories, which are considered to threaten orthodoxy, became a national issue in the Scopes trial in Tennessee (1925), in which Clarence Darrow defended J.T. Scopes, a public‐school teacher who expounded evolution, while William Jennings Bryan upheld the Fundamentalist point of view, winning the case for the prosecution. The trial was the subject of the play Inherit the Wind (1955) by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Fundamentalist views have been widely revived and extended during the 1980s and 1990s by some ministers in their churches and allied institutions and on their television programs, becoming a political force under the rubric “The Moral Majority.” As in the past, the theory of evolution is challenged, as is the practice of abortion, while they fulminate against or urge censorship of books, films, and the media whose expression or values they disapprove.