Fundamentalism

Abstract This chapter looks at fundamentalism among the Baptists in the United States and Canada in the twentieth century. Central to fundamentalist theology is a strong commitment to a strict (literalistic) biblical inerrancy, in which the Bible is understood as without error and factually accurate in all that it teaches, including about history and science. Notwithstanding the fact that the ‘original autographs’ no longer exist, this commitment to biblical inerrancy has animated fundamentalist campaigns against Baptist modernists (or liberals) and moderates. This chapter examines the origins of the fundamentalist movement, the unsuccessful fundamentalist campaign to take over the Northern Baptist Convention in the 1920s, fundamentalism in Canada and the United States in the middle decades of the century, and the successful fundamentalist campaign to take over the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s. In the process, the chapter surveys a variety of independent Baptist fundamentalist groups—including the Baptist Bible Union and the Baptist Bible Fellowship—as well as fundamentalist patriarchs such as R. Albert Mohler, Jr, J. Frank Norris, Paige Patterson, John R. Rice, William Bell Riley, and T. T. Shields. Finally, the chapter attends to the ways in which biblical inerrancy has been weaponized by Baptist fundamentalists against people of colour and women.