Book Description

The Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism provides a comprehensive picture of a widespread, populist, socioreligious movement that emerged in twentieth-century Christian Protestantism, generally known as Fundamentalism. For Fundamentalists, the only viable faith was one organized around a literal interpretation of the Bible. They identified it as the sole, supreme inerrant conveyor of divine truth, and adhered to the hermeneutical principle that its religious truth must not pass through a filter of human interpretation but was unambiguously communicated by a transcendent power, and must be understood as such, and claimed.While some Fundamentalist-like assumptions can be found in most, if not all, religious traditions, Fundamentalists advanced an absolutist claim to religious truth that starkly demarcated them from other religiously inspired actors of their era. Fervent, exclusive, religious clarity achieved via an erasure of doubt (justified by the claim that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God) was the hallmark trait of religious Fundamentalism.Historically, Fundamentalism was closely correlated with the rise of modernism and the accompanying rationalization of public life. In the realm of religion, the Fundamentalist movement was a popular means of revolt against modernism by traditional Christians at serious odds with the dominant values of a rapidly developing modern, technological, capitalistic society, and often squeezed out of meaningful participation in it as well. Religious Fundamentalists resisted the tolerance of religious pluralism intrinsic to the civil society that modernity brought, and maintained that the compromises of religious truth necessary for the modern state to exist were blasphemous, and must be rejected. The encyclopedia's emphasis is on Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, but, in a more international sense, the volume also covers conservative religious, social, and political movements in Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism. This volume is a companion to another volume in the Religion & Society series, the Encyclopedia of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity edited by Stanely M. Burgess. Although the two movements separated early in the twentieth century, they are often confused. Side by side, these two volumes explain the differences between these two major religious movements of the contemporary world.