Starting in 1910 and continuing until 1915, a Chicago publishing company issued 90 essays about the basic beliefs of sola scriptura Christians, which it titled “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.” People later referred to the essays as “The Fundamentals” and people who subscribed to its tenets as “fundamentalists.”
Over the following decades, what first had been a simple descriptor of a certain group of Christians increasingly became a pejorative, spat out by urban elites who saw fundamentalists as credulous, barely literate, easily led and exploited country folk who clung tightly to silly, archaic beliefs: a crucified rabbi rose from the dead; “God” spoke to, guided, and saved people, including entire nations; the first man and woman lived in a wondrous garden where they walked and talked with their creator; adultery, fornication, and sodomy are “sins.”
That fundamentalists are stubborn and backward, especially compared to their sophisticated critics, probably was best illustrated in the climactic interrogation scene in the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, a melodramatic retelling of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In it, Clarence Darrow, an atheist defense lawyer, confronts fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan over whether the Bible’s description of the seven days it took God to create the world is literal or figurative.
Bryan becomes increasingly agitated under Darrow’s relentless questioning, sweating and gasping, trying to cope with Darrow’s sophisticated frontal attack on his fundamentalist beliefs. The movie, scripted to present Bryan as a relic in the emerging secular age, succeeds in the minds of many viewers in relegating fundamentalists to a permanent back seat in U.S. life. (Bryan died shortly after the trial was over.)
The word remains glued to evangelicals and conservative protestants. But there’s an irony here: “Fundamentalist” actually can apply to almost every person now walking the planet. Because everybody — even the most scatterbrained or insane person — has a set of fundamental beliefs that guide his thoughts and acts.
There are two kinds of fundamentalism: “hard” and “soft.” Those adjectives apply depending on the willingness of their respective adherents to routinely resort to violence to get their way or willingness to deal peaceably and reasonably with their opponents.
“Hard” Fundamentalists
“Hard fundamentalists” are groups that adhere to a set of beliefs that at their extremes can countenance mass murder or widespread violence as a means of defending and advancing their core tenets.
Marxists. Marxists, of course, are fundamentalists — stubborn ones. Despite the failure of every communist state founded since Karl Marx, Marxists continue to advocate for the radiant future they are certain lies just around the next pile of corpses.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Xi, Kim, and Castro institutionalized extreme violence and mass murder as the key elements in creating Marx’s utopian society. Their Western followers today occupy rarefied intellectual heights at universities, and their Marxism seems more crotch-oriented than that of the old-school Reds. They pretend to have softened their affection for mayhem and coo, Mamdani-style, about their thirst for social justice. However, bedrock beliefs are just that: bedrock. The revolution, when it comes, will require buckets of blood.
The American left. The Democrats are now close allies of the Marxists. Their fundamental beliefs closely align with the Bolsheviks and Red Guards. They too want a revolution, although they would prefer to do it python-style, by slowly constricting and suffocating the breath of freedom rather than resorting to outright terror and murder.
Their barely hidden glee at Charlie Kirk’s murder indicates that some (many?) of them are ready to openly countenance assassination as a legitimate means of achieving a desired political outcome.
Antifa. This motley collection of pimply, purple-haired grotesques don’t realize how expendable they are. Their core belief in their power and inevitable role in fomenting a revolution is belied by their ignorance of what happened to Hitler’s brownshirts and Robespierre’s minions. Come the revolution, they will be devoured by much more adroit and capable monsters.
Muslims. Muslims posit a hard division between the world of Islam (dar-al-Islam) and the world that has not yet embraced or been forced to accept Islam (dar-al harb — the world at war against Allah). This is not a religion that accepts debate of any sort about its fundamental precepts.
Allah, the Muslim god, makes no bones about whom and what he hates, especially the Jews. Antisemitism is hard baked into Mohamed’s revelations, as well as Allah’s low regard for women, Christians, poets, winemakers, and other necessary denizens of civil and civilized societies.
LGBT and trans advocates are hard fundamentalists, caught up in a tangle that they cannot fix. The trans movement is conducting a war against homosexuals by insisting that a boy or girl who might be gay should be forcibly mutilated to become the opposite sex — an insult to gay sensibilities. The movement has made for itself a Procrustean bed: How do you swallow your doubts and lie down beside a group of activists dedicated to carving up the bodies of possibly gay children?
The inhabitants of the tiny trans segment of the population are solipsists extraordinaire, who really believe they can bend nature to their will simply by saying so. They’re not interested in logic, reason, or sensibility, since the whole goal of their portion of Queer Theory is to subvert “normal.” They do this by refusing to have anything to do with conventional, commonsense standards of proof. You cannot argue trans people out of their fundamental beliefs any more than you can reason a lunatic out of his delusions.
No trans advocate has yet tried to attach the movement to religion, although there are many Christian fellow travelers who are happy to claim on transgenders’ behalf that “God made me like this.” They earnestly believe that Jesus, famous for hanging out with sinners and reprobates, surely would have winked appreciatively at Peter showing up wearing Mary Magdalene’s finest blue Sabbath tunic.
Materialists are fundamentalists in the sense that they will not allow any conjecture about supernatural or spiritual forces in their thinking about the nature of things. Like Protestant fundamentalists, they become ever fiercer when forced to defend their ideology against mounting evidence from microbiologists that Darwin’s theory of evolution does not anticipate or adequately explain what scientists are discovering about life at the cellular level.
In their defense, however, there are few materialists (Marxists excepted) who call out for blood whenever somebody opposes their worldview.
Sociologists and Nikole Hannah-Jones-type historians. With some exceptions, they are adherents to a pseudo-science that long along ago was captured by postmodernists and other sex- and power-obsessed academicians. Their pedagogical mission is to indoctrinate their students, many of whom reach college as functional illiterates, on the evils of America, white people (who are all racist colonialists), heterosexuals, and anti-pedophile killjoys. No amount of sleet, snow, dark of night, or contrary facts or data will keep these awakened messengers from their appointed rounds.
These fundies are not inclined to personally carry out violence but are happy to encourage and dispatch violent proxies.
Climate Fundies. A fundamentalist movement that praises the likes Al Gore and the autistic gremlin Greta Thunberg is one we can all rightly suspect has more grifters than true believers. But if you tell yourself a lie often enough (such as that Gal Gadot is jealous of Rachel Zegler’s looks), you can come to believe it. These are probably the most clueless hard fundies of all.
“Soft” Fundamentalists
There can be “soft” fundamentalisms, in the sense that one can be adamant about holding and defending certain beliefs while not advocating violence or intense hatred toward those who think otherwise. The fear and loathing that many leftists displayed as the memorials to Charlie Kirk took place was a subconscious understanding that their greatest enemy — Christianity — is far more powerful and attractive among the deplorables than they, especially since it repudiates vengeance and vengeful hearts.
Trumpers and MAGA conservatives embrace a “soft” fundamentalism in the sense that although they hold fast to certain ideas, they are almost always reluctant to demonstrate on their behalf with the in-your-face tactics of the left (Trump's magnificent trolling on X excepted). Charlie Kirk did his best to advocate for a soft fundamentalism that did not automatically exclude political opponents. But when his fundamentalism met the hard variety, the hard fundamentalists murdered him.
By killing Kirk, the hard fundamentalists made a terrible decision. American conservatives are like the motto of the City of San Francisco: Oro en paz, fierro en guerra — gold in peace, iron in war. The hards’ golden moment of offing Charlie Kirk backfired because it forged an iron will among the softs to destroy the left.
Orthodox Christians and Jews. “Orthodox” includes Magisterium Catholics, sola scriptura Protestants, tradition-loving Eastern Orthodox, and Jews who adhere strictly to the commands of the Pentateuch. Yes, these believers can be stirred to war, but never to peremptory murder; wholesale slaughter; or massive, outspoken contempt for the people who hate them. Charlie Kirk was one such orthodox man.
Baseball Players, Tennis Aces, and Gridiron Heroes. Every member of this category can recite all the rules that guide his games — the fundamentals. You can see it anytime a ball player disputes a referee or umpire’s call because he believes that the SOB doesn’t understand the rules.
But aside from the periodic temper tantrum — flinging a bat into the dirt in frustration, throwing a tennis racket over the net in anger, or looking into a gridiron ref’s eyes with sneering disdain — none of the men and women in these sports would ever resort to violence or murderous intent to get his way. Their ill humor is fleeting, and they don’t hold on to resentments to the point that they succumb to the temptation to make them the basis of their whole outlook on life.
Ballet dancers. Either learn the fundamentals — pliés, battements, relevés, arabesques, and ports de bras — or get the hell off the stage. A soft fundamentalism in the sense that a bad performance does not lead to a gulag or being shot down in the street.
Jazz musicians. The hardest and fastest fundamental rule in this music is to listen closely to your brother musicians and learn their styles, timing, and patterns. That way, when you take off on a spontaneous riff, you and they will know how to perfectly fit in with one another. Fail to learn this, and gigs end at senior proms and bowling alleys.
Children four and under. The fundamental outlook for most toddlers and post-toddlers is that the world is an enchanted, magical place, where the large people called adults conjure wonder after wonder — fireworks, ice cream, dogs, copious goodnight kisses, flying machines, goofy dads who tell things called “jokes,” and affectionate nuzzles from gnomes called “grandparents.”
Their outlook often changes when the state intervenes to take away their sense of wonder in places called “public schools.” There the boys — especially the boys — will learn that they were born bad and want to colonize Canada.
Obviously, there are other groups that fit in either of these categories. But fundamentally speaking, it’s not too hard to see the differences among them.
Image via Pexels.