What to Salvage from Fundamentalism

In a fallen world, reform efforts never perfectly hit their marks. They address one problem only to sow the seeds of others. Or they so aggressively attack an infection that they weaken or destroy what’s healthy and vital.

Blunders in this delicate dance between correction and overcorrection are familiar in the political arena. Yet the same pattern is found in matters of religion, as Reformation people can readily understand. 

Around a quarter century ago, theologian Richard Mouw wrote a short book surveying the evangelical landscape of that time. He had much to celebrate. But he worried that evangelicalism had too thoroughly eclipsed the fundamentalism that preceded it. His reflection, titled The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage (2000), models a healthy approach to reckoning with a flawed past that still tugs on your heartstrings.

In one sense, evangelicalism has existed ever since Jesus first gave us the Good News to share with the world. As a contemporary movement, however, it emerged in the 20th century as a correction to the fundamentalist overcorrection.

As I never tire of reminding those who casually deploy fundamentalist as a slur, the term is no mere synonym for Bible-thumping zealot. Fundamentalism responded to the late 19th-century advent of “modernist” Christianity, which reengineered supernatural elements—like Jesus’ virgin birth or bodily resurrection—that offended science-loving contemporaries.

Fundamentalists drew essential lines in the sand. (The name derives from The Fundamentals, an essay collection defending core Christian doctrines.) But over time, they turned quarrelsome and insular, growing preoccupied with moral-purity tests and esoteric threads of Bible prophecy. Rattled by cultural rejection, they devoted more energy to speculating about the world’s demise than to shining the light of Christ within it.

The Smell of Sawdust asked evangelicals at the turn of this century: Are you flirting with overcorrection?

For Mouw, the subject is deeply personal. Born in 1940, he grew up immersed in a tight-knit fundamentalist world. He learned dispensational theology at its Bible conferences, staffed kitchens at its summer camps, and inhaled the aroma of its revival tents, which his title evokes.

Like many believers of his generation, however, Mouw ended up charting a different course. Anxious to avoid modernist heresies and fundamentalist habits of cultural retreat, he took the “neo-evangelical” path that launched leaders like Billy Graham, publications like Christianity Today, and institutions like Fuller Theological Seminary (where Mouw served 20 years as president).

Mouw doesn’t regret that journey. In fact, much of the book champions evangelical achievements. But for all this, he retains a sense of “indebtedness to . . . the fundamentalism that nurtured me in my early years.”

My own childhood had few, if any, fundamentalist hallmarks. Still, The Smell of Sawdust moved me to ask which features of that inheritance may be worth salvaging. I can’t cover everything here, but 25 years after Mouw’s book, I’ll propose three areas where the pendulum might be swinging too far toward overcorrection. 

The first concerns personal piety and morality. Fundamentalists weren’t shy about setting behavioral boundaries. That often led to legalistic dead ends and petty judgmentalism about drinking, dancing, cards, and other presumed gateways to naughtiness. But they weren’t wrong to guard against a sinful world’s enticements. 

My wife and I sometimes joke about evangelical writers enlisting the Incarnation as a versatile moral permission slip. Jesus lived on earth, you see, which means the world is good, not tainted. Presto! A handy rationale for tasting its fruits with an untroubled conscience. 

That’s a caricature, of course. Rightly understood, evangelicalism rejects antinomian license and follows Jesus in looking at the heart’s posture. I don’t want evangelicals to be known primarily for the priggish hang-ups of yesteryear. But when I think of how I’ve reassured irreligious friends with my conspicuous lack of hang-ups, I worry I’m failing to seek the set-apartness that God commands of his people.

Second, I’ve come to value fundamentalist warnings about the pitfalls of intellectualism. Contrary to the lunkhead stereotype, Mouw notes that fundamentalists often brought prodigious intellectual energy to their pursuits. At their worst, they also cultivated an unhealthy suspicion of secular knowledge as a distraction, an irrelevance, or a rival to biblical authority.

That mindset clashes with my dearest convictions about the inherent goodness of reading and learning. Mouw has little patience for it either. But he shows where the fundamentalist caution is worth heeding: Theology can lodge in the head without transforming the heart, and some strains of Enlightenment rationalism do rule out religious belief.

I’d add another danger of intellectualism, one that rises as we evangelicals ponder our place in America’s social hierarchy. Evangelicals should always obey God’s call to renew the mind. But when braininess functions as a status symbol, intellectual ambitions can devolve into quests for esteem from secular peers or distance from fellow evangelicals. 

Finally, I think we could stand to recover something of the fundamentalist emphasis on the eternal fate of individual souls. 

Mouw writes of revivalistic altar calls “where people were encouraged to make deep and abiding commitments.” He knows, of course, that emotional appeals can yield ephemeral professions of faith. He knows, too, that cathartic moments of conversion can’t substitute for regular church fellowship and patient discipleship. But he helpfully stresses the high stakes involved. It matters whether people get saved!

Obviously, evangelicals believe this. But in recent years, evangelical leaders have taken great pains to portray the cosmic scope of God’s redemption. God isn’t just gathering lost souls and depositing them in paradise. He’s renewing creation itself and reigning as King forevermore.

I want pulpits to ring out with this glorious message. But I cringe at the thought of dismissing a perennial source of existential dread—What happens after I die?—as selfish or unimportant. The gospel promises abundantly more than “going to heaven,” but surely not less.

I give thanks for the evangelical tradition, warts and all. But like Mouw, I remain grateful for the fundamentalist streams still nourishing it. Yes, you’ll find some corroded junk in those waters. But also some precious gems. 

Matt Reynolds is senior books editor at CT.

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