I love how Catholics throw around the word “Fundamentalist” as if it were an insult or something dismissive. When one considers the origins of the word it’s really something good.
"Fundamentalism as a movement arose in the United States, starting among conservative Presbyterian academics and theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. It soon spread to conservatives among the Baptists and other denominations during and immediately following the First World War.The movement’s purpose was to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and zealously defend it against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other “-isms” which it regarded as harmful to Christianity.
The term “fundamentalism” has its roots in the Niagara Bible Conference (1878–1897) which defined those things that were fundamental to belief. The term was also used to describe “The Fundamentals”, a collection of twelve books on five subjects published in 1910 and funded by Milton and Lyman Stewart This series of essays came to be representative of the “Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy” which appeared late in the 19th century within the Protestant churches of the United States, and continued in earnest through the 1920s. The first formulation of American fundamentalist beliefs can be traced to the Niagara Bible Conference and, in 1910, to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church which distilled these into what became known as the “five fundamentals”:
The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.
The virgin birth of Christ.
The belief that Christ’s death was the atonement for sin.
The bodily resurrection of Christ.
The historical reality of Christ’s miracles.
By the late 1910s, theological conservatives rallying around the Five Fundamentals came to be known as “fundamentalists.”
Since then, the focus of the movement, the meaning of the term Fundamentalism, and the ranks of those who willingly use it to identify themselves, have gone through several phases of re-definition, though maintaining the central commitment to its orthodoxy." - Wikipedia.
So wouldn’t Catholics agree with the “five fundamentals”? If so, you’re technically a fundamentalist yourself.
