After the televangelist scandals of the late 1980's and Jerry Falwell's confession of politicizing the Gospel, and returning, at least for a while, to preaching the Gospel rather than activism, by the id 1990's there was no clear leader for the religious right.  People with any scriptural insight at all disregarded the likes of Benny Hinn and Pat Robertson.  Mega church pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels sold millions of books, but worked very hard at staying out of the political fray.Then, by the turn of the century, the emerging church provided an onslaught of new, young leaders such as Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shaine Claibourn and Donald Miller; post-modern theologogians for the millennial church. 

Of course, fundamentalism, however we define it, didn't cease to exist.  In fact, if you look at the headlines on the Yahoo home page, you would think we were back in the Reagan 80's, and the religious right was on the verge of making the United States into a theocracy.  Yahoo really needs to join us in the twenty-first century. In reality, Christian conservative politics is fading (admittedly slower in some regions than others), and yielding to the more secularized conservatism in the form of the Tea Party and Fox news.  That leads me to the article "Five Things Christian Fundamentalists Just Don't Get" by Sean McElwee, which I cited in an earlier blog on this topic. This was my inspiration for writing the three blogs in my series, "Fundamentalism Defined".  

The thing that got my attention from this article was the fact that, as a follower of Jesus, I do not hold ANY of the five positions that Mr. McElwee says 'fundamentalists' hold.  Whew! I guess I'm not a fundy.  I can put my "Quayle for President " bumper stickers and my King James version of the Bible  back in the attic.

The five points in the article include: fundamentalists are:

1) anti-immigrant.  Yet Scripture is clear Israel was to 'welcome the sojourner' into their midst.  Yeah, that was specific to the Jews centuries ago, but I think, within rational limits, the concept still applies.  Anyone who has seen third world poverty first hand understands exactly why some people will do anything to come to America.  Furthermore, immigration brings the mission field to us.  That whole thing about going to the ends of the earth with God's good news becomes a lot easier when the citizens of the ends of the earth come here.

2)  anti-poor.  It would be hard to read more than a page of Scripture before one sees that there's no excuse for a  follower of Jesus to be anything   but passionately involved with the poor.  Check it out for yourself.

3)  anti-environment.  This perception comes from some Christians' oversimplification of Christ's work on the cross.  Colossians 1 is clear that the cross was to reconcile ALL THINGS back to God.  Yes, humanity is the highest thing in creation, but not the only thing Jesus died to win back to himself.  And Romans talks about all creation glorifying God.  By protecting creation, then,we are taking part in helping to glorify the creator.

4)  Pro-war.  This is a tough one.  Early believers were pacifists. History is clear on this. Then, when Rome essentially took over Christianity, the church and politics mixed for the first of many times.  Augustine was commissioned to write a theology of war from which he came up with the just war theory.  It's an oversimplification, but basically this theory says governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens, and Christian citizens have a responsibility to take part in that.  As Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoffer said in a letter from the Nazi camp in which he died for his involvement in a plot to kill Hitler, "Killing Hitler would have been a sin, but letting him live would be a bigger sin." This is a hard one, but I do know this: the only theocracy God ever wanted was ancient Israel, and when America goes to war, we must not assume we are on God's side or that He is necessarily on ours.

5)  anti-woman.  People who get this from the Bible haven't read enough of it.  The Bible is the most pro-woman (dare I say 'feminist') book form the ancient world.  Everything from  Deborah the Old Testament judge to the fact that two Old Testament books are named for heroines, to the inclusion of three women in Jesus' genealogy (unheard of at this time in history) to Paul's statement that 'there is neither male nor female", to the fact that Jesus had female disciples including an ex-prostitute, to Paul's teaching that a woman's value wasn't in her beautiful hair or gold jewelry, the Bible is remarkably pro-woman.

So Mr. McElwee's blog has convinced me that, although I am a Christian and I believe the Bible, I am NOT a fundamentalist.

At least not by his definition.