Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism started as a reaction against Liberal Protestantism in the 1800’s. Most of Protestantism was falling under the spell of liberalism, but there was a segment of Protestants who banded together and held to the five fundamentals of the faith that were discarded by liberal Protestants. These fundamentals of the faith were:
- The Bible being completely the infallible, inerrant Word of God
- The virgin birth of Jesus Christ
- Christ’s death atoned for our sins
- Jesus Christ bodily rose from the dead
- The historical reality of Christ’s miracles
By no means was this list meant to be exhaustive. This list said nothing about the deity of Christ. They shared the same doctrine as evangelicals for the most part, especially the need to be born again. But these were the battle grounds where they were fighting against the majority of the other Protestants. As the fundamentalists grew in size they also had other traits.
Isolationism
Fundamentalism used to be involved within society and with other Christians. That changed with the Scopes trial in the early 1900’s. Scopes was a teacher on trial for teaching evolution. Defending him was Clarence Darrow. The prosecutor was William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a political liberal but religiously was a fundamentalist. At one point Darrow put the prosecutor Bryan on the witness stand. Darrow made Bryan look like a fool. News spread, and fundamentalists became a laughingstock to the rest of society. This caused fundamentalists to withdraw from society and other Christians.
This is why fundamentalists are so much against going to the movies or watching television. They stay away from parties, especially where alcohol is involved. They believe that fundamentalists should not have anything to do with other Christians. They separated themselves from the churches in mainstream Protestant churches and developed their own churches, usually independent or non-denominational. They usually distrust any denomination, believing that all church government should reside in the local church. Some fundamentalists have formed denominations, but they are loosely structured. They can only date and marry other fundamentalists. They do not trust any other forms of education, especially higher education, except their own. Their colleges are Bible colleges, which is so far from the educational standards determined by society that most or all are not accredited. You can see that they started to develop a cultic mentality.
Legalism
This isolationism led to a strict form of legalism. The fundamentalist could not go the movies, watch television, drink any alcohol, smoke cigarettes, dance, or have any non-fundamentalists as close friends. They teach that they must wear their hair over their ears and women could not wear pants.
My first and last exposure to Protestantism was fundamentalism. When I left the Catholic Church in college, I looked in the Yellow Pages to find a church that was centered on the Bible. I came across a “Bible Church”, which turned out to be a stricter form of Christianity than I expected. I went to this church for three months, and it was the coldest church I ever attended. I went to every single activity that they had. I tried talking to them. But try as I may, I was still treated as an outsider. I could not understand it. I would read in the Bible how we should love on another, and this church as not about love at all. Only years after I left the church did I understand what was happening, This was in the ‘70’s, and like most guys at that time I had my hair below my ears. This was anathema to the fundamentalist. To them, their brand of doctrinal and moral purity was more important than love, acceptance, and forgiveness. The fundamentalist is the modern-day Pharisee.
Let's jump then 12 years later. After I
graduated from seminary, two years later I was still unemployed. A church in a
fundamentalist denomination offered me to preach. Well, beggars cannot be
choosers, so I became their minister. My evangelical friends thought I was
crazy to this, but I thought I could change the church. They were right and I was
wrong. After three years, I thought I was making progress. I weaned them off of
the King James Bible and they started to read the NIV Bible. But it was
frustrating. Once a fellow minister in the same denomination bragged to me how
he kicked a family out of a church service because the mother wore pants.
I once brought a woman in my church to tears, saying that she could not believe that her church would have such a liberal pastor such as me. What was my sin? I told her that there are many sincere, Spirit-filled Christians who have wine now and then at their meals. To her I was guilty of blasphemy! Eventually, things became so bad that I was forced to leave.
Anti-Catholicism
There is one aspect that fundamentalists agree on – their utter hatred toward Catholicism. They will say that they do not hate Catholics. They say that they actually love Catholics, and love them so much that they want them to leave such a terrible church. But remember, I used to be one of them. All their talk about hating the sin and loving the sinner seemed to me to be just a cliché. If you see what a person believes and does is nothing but evil, you will soon see him as evil. And if you see that person as evil, you are going to hate him. When I went to that fundamentalist church with long hair, nobody there talked to me! They did not just hate my hair and love me. They did not want to have anything to do with my hair or me!
This does not mean that we cannot tell anyone what they are doing is wrong. We must speak the truth in love. But if we judge someone so harshly as to we think that this person is definitely going to hell then that cannot help but influence our attitude towards him.
Fundamentalists would hold the same attitude that the Reformers had toward us Catholics. We were either legalists or liberals. We could not be saved unless we came out of the Catholic Church. We believed in a works salvation. We denied the grace of God. The pope is the Anti-Christ. We worship Mary and the other saints. We were into empty rituals. We added things to the Bible.
Ex-priests and Ex-nuns Becoming Professional Anti-Catholics
Sometimes priests, monks or nuns left or were forced to leave their vocations. Many times it is because they met someone and the wanted to get married. Or maybe they just could not handle the life of a religious. So they lived in a rectory or monastery for 10-20 years and now they are homeless and jobless. What are they going to do? I myself could identify with this. Praise God my parents were still around to take me in after I left my ministry! But what were these people going to do about a new career? All they knew how to do was preaching homilies, giving confessions, anointing the sick, and praying. That does not look that well on a resume for a secular job! So many of these ex-priests or ex-nuns found the only one thing left to do was to be a professional anti-Catholic.
They would go from fundamentalist church to fundamentalist church and tell them (for a nice fee, of course!) the inside scoop of all the evils that happened behind the monastery walls. They also wrote these books which the fundamentalist ate up. But it is a scam. They are getting paid to tell these people what they want to hear. This kind of scam happens in the secular world as well. Remember the people who left the Bush administration and then wrote books on how evil and incompetent the administration was secretly? People are willing to lose their souls if they could write a best-seller. And they provide no objective evidence for what they write except their own testimony. We have to take their word for it.
This is what these professional anti-Catholics who used to be part of the Catholic religious are doing. They are enticing their readers with all these sorted perverted stories about what is going on behind those monastic walls. People assume they must be saying the truth. After all, they reason, they used to be part of it. They actually witnessed this going on, did they not? This became so rewarding financially for these speakers and writers that sometimes people who never were priests and nuns would even join in. Eventually, most Protestants realized that they were being scammed, but they are still popular among fundamentalists.
Maria Monk
Maria Monk was a Canadian woman who said that she as a nun she was forced to have sex with priests. If any of the nuns gave birth, the baby was killed. In 1836, she wrote books called Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed. The books became wildly popular. But there was a problem with it. It was all a scam!
Colonel William Leet Stone, a Protestant New York City
newspaper editor acquired a permission to set up his own investigation. In
October 1836 his team entered the convent and found that the descriptions in
the book did not even match the convent interior. Stone returned to
http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/14365/Maria-Monk.html
Even though Mariah Monk has been totally discredited, fundamentalists such as Loraine Boettner and Jack Chick still refer to her books.
See http://www.english.upenn.edu/~traister/hughes.html
Charlotte Wells
Another example of fraud being perpetrated on fundamentalists who are eager to be scintillated by more perverted stories against the Catholic religious is “Sister” Charlotte Wells. Her testimony as a nun can be found at http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Testimonies/charlot1.htm. It is another sorted story of a nun forced to have sex with priests. But again, it is nothing but a fraud. It turns out her name was not Charlotte Wells, but Charlotte Keckler. She said she used a false name because she was afraid that someone from the Catholic Church would kill her, and yet for over twenty years she spoke publicly in churches without fearing her safety. She never gave the name of the convent she was in. She said that she was a cloistered nun and that she worked in a hospital, but a cloistered nun never leaves the convent. See http://mdcalexatestblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/refutation-of-testimony-of-charlotte.html
Mary Ann Collins
Another recent example is Mary Ann Collins. You can go here to find out more about her:
http://formercatholicsforchrist.com/maryancollins/index.html
Fundamentalists treat her as an authority on Catholicism, since she herself was a formerly a nun. But there are some very serious questions on this! Go to http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=1799 . Mary Ann Collins cannot be found anywhere except on the web. Although she was in a convent for two years, she never has given the name of the convent. She has never given an interview. It is questionable whether Mary Ann Collins exists at all.
Bart Brewer
My last example is Bart Brewer. In contrast to the others I mentioned, Brewer was definitely an ex-priest. But his character is not exactly beyond reproach. He himself admitted that the first reason he left the priesthood is that he had an affair with a high-school girl.
I enjoyed watching the girls giggle as they flirted with teasing boys. After a while, though, my attention was drawn to one of the more diligent students, who thoroughly captivated my interest . . . She was lovely and shyly responded as we stole moments talking alone after class. This was a new adventure, and I soon interpreted our newly discovered affection as love.
{Far
From Rome, Near to God, compiled by Richard Bennett and Martin Buckingham, Lafayette,
As quoted in http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2007/03/bart-brewers-initial-reason-for-leaving.html
It seems to me that his sexual problems eventually caused him to leave the priesthood. Being then without a job and no skills to use to the secular world, he did what many ex-priests did – he became a professional anti-Catholic. He would go around from the church to church reinforcing the worst anti-Catholic stereotypes against the Catholic Church. But how can anyone trust what a person says who admits he had an affair with a high school girl when he was a priest?
I once heard Bart Brewer in a debate with a Catholic apologist. I could not believe the theatrics involved in the way he talked. There was an air of phoniness about him. You can judge for yourself:
http://www.bringyou.to/KeatingBrewerDebate.mp3
Would you buy a user car from this man?
I myself could never trust a
person who went against his the vows he made before God. A priest or a nun
makes a vow to God that he or she would never marry.
When a man voweth a vow unto Jehovah, or sweareth an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word; he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth
Numbers 30:2
A vow is a vow, especially a solemn vow to God. So if that religious person then leaves the order and marries, he or she has broken their word to God. So if their word to God means nothing, why should I trust their word?
Evangelicals Out of Fundamentalism
Evangelicals have come out of fundamentalism. For the most part, evangelicals want to retain the fundamentals of the faith but they reject the fundamentalists’ isolationism, legalism, and their overt anti-Catholicism. Evangelicals would rather emphasize the positive aspects of the gospel, instead of emphasizing the negative, such as attacking their Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ. Good for them! Billy Graham’s Crusade is willing to work with Catholics. Campus Crusade For Christ has a Four Spiritual Laws booklet for conversion that was approved by the Catholic Church. This does not means that evangelicals do not have problems with Catholicism, but they generally can see at least some genuine Christians in the Catholic Church.
This has made the Fundamentalists separate themselves from evangelical Christians, believing that the evangelicals have compromised the gospel as they see it.
The Protestant Landscape
You have liberal Protestantism on the left and Fundamentalism on the right, with evangelicalism in the middle. I do not want to give the impression that Protestantism can be broken into these nice categories. These categories can often blur. You can have a liberal evangelical or a fundamentalistic evangelical.
The best book that deals with how we Catholics can converse with Fundamentalists is http://www.amazon.com/Catholicism-Fundamentalism-Attack-Romanism-Christians/dp/0898701775/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263136451&sr=8-1
