Crossroads Podcast: What’s The Definition Of A ‘Fundamentalist’?

It’s hard to discuss a war in the Middle East without mentioning religion, especially when the main players are Israel, Iran and the United States.

Apparently, the most important word in this drama is not “nuclear” or “oil” -- it’s “fundamentalism.”

In this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, Lutheran Public Radio host Todd Wilken and I responded to an email from a listener who was curious about “On Point” discussions, distributed by National Public Radio, that seemed to equate “fundamentalist” leaders in Iran with the “fundamentalist” leaders in Washington, D.C. The title of that two-part series: “What happens when religious fundamentalists come to power?”

The discussions were led by Meghna Chakrabarti, best known for years of work with the “Modern Love” podcasts (linked to The New York Times), about love, loss, romance, redemption and other related topics. In the second half of the fundamentalism series, she talked with journalist Katherine Stewart, author of books such as “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.” Here is part of that crucial exchange:

CHAKRABARTI: I actually want to just lead off here with the little sound of the Secretary of Defense himself, Pete Hegseth, and how he infuses his version of Christianity into almost every one of his public statements.

So this was just yesterday when the secretary was talking about the rescue of the U.S. Airmen who had been down in Iran. And here is how Secretary Hegseth phrased it.

HEGSETH: Shot down on a Friday. Good Friday, hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday and rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday, a pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing. God is good.

CHAKRABARTI: Now God is good as the English version of something we frequently hear in Islam, in Arabic. Tell me Katherine, how you see Hegseth infusing his version of Christianity, Christian nationalism in his leadership of the Pentagon.

STEWART: Under his leadership, Hegseth has, the Department of Defense has put out videos with bible verses on top of videos of airmen and troops and tanks and warships. It’s a kind of conflation of religion with military domination, and we’ve seen how he does this even on his own body. He has these neo crusader tattoos that suggest a religious war.

Later, the host spotlighted a different kind of U.S. leader:

CHAKRABARTI: Today we’re talking about Christian nationalism in the Trump administration.

Here’s a couple more examples. You’re about to hear Evangelical Pastor Franklin Graham. He led a prayer at the White House for Easter lunch last week, where he made a direct biblical comparison between teachings in the Bible and the current war with Iran.

GRAHAM: Father, you tell us in the Book of Esther that the Persians, the Iranians, were wanting to kill every Jew, woman, child and do it all in one day, but you raised up Esther to save the Jewish people. Father, we thank you. Today, the Iranians, the wicked regime of this government wants to kill every Jew and destroy them with an atomic fire. But you have raised up President Trump.

CHAKRABARTI: Raised up President Trump for a time such as this, Graham said.

The primary topic of this “On Point” discussion was the threat of “Christian nationalism,” a hot-button term that activists define in many different ways (surf this online search on that issue). However, the journalists in this discussion stressed that “fundamentalist” beliefs were at the heart of current efforts to crush American democracy, while using American military power to win victories crucial to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

In addition to “fundamentalism” and “Christian nationalism,” the episode veered into commentary linking those terms with “Dominionism,” “dispensationalism,” “Reconstructionism,” “Fascism” and racism. Chakrabarti and her guests — whether they knew it or not — also addressed beliefs linked to Pentecostalism, Postmillennialism, Premillennialism and several schools of Calvinism. I may have missed a few others.

The key, however, was that all of this was rooted in “fundamentalism.”

So, what — precisely — does the historical term “fundamentalism” mean? Alas, the word “precisely” no longer is part of this equation.

For decades, the Associated Press stylebook offered logical, practical and, from a historic point of view, accurate advice. In a 2011 “On Religion” column — “Define ‘fundamentalist,’ please” — I noted:

Few hot-button, “fighting words” are tossed around with wilder abandon in journalism today than the historical term “fundamentalist.”

The powers that be at the Associated Press know this label is loaded and, thus, for several decades the wire service’s style manual has offered this guidance for reporters, editors and broadcast producers around the world.

“fundamentalist: The word gained usage in an early 20th century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. ... However, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians.

“In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself.”

The problem is that competing voices in public life began to turn this term from Protestant church history into something else altogether, especially when — in the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan era — the “Christian Right” emerged.

In that same column, I offered the following vivid and, in my opinion, totally accurate description of what happened next in discussions of “fundamentalism.”

Anyone who expects scholars to stand strong and defend a basic, historic definition will be disappointed. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga of the University of Notre Dame once quipped, among academics “fundamentalist” has become a “term of abuse or disapprobation” that most often resembles the casual semi-curse, “sumbitch.”

“Still, there is a bit more to the meaning. ... In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views,” noted Plantinga, in an Oxford Press publication. “That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch.’ ... Its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’”

The most important expression of this effort to redefine the term was a five-volume University of Chicago study called “The Fundamentalism Project,” that stripped away the “Fundamentals of the Faith” material in Protestant history.

Writing at GetReligion.org, the religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling noted that “fundamentalism” emerged from:

… “The Fundamentals,” a series of 12 booklets with 90 essays by varied thinkers from English-speaking countries that were distributed beginning in 1910. Along with standard Christian tenets, the writers defended the authority and historical truth of the Bible against liberal theories coming mainly from Germany.

That founding effort drew support from “mainline” Protestants, “evangelicals” and proto-“fundamentalists.” Brothers Milton and Lyman Stewart, the Union Oil millionaires who funded the project, were lay Presbyterians. The authors were reputable scholars ranging from Anglican bishops to “mainline” seminary professors to Bible college presidents. …

The budding movement was further defined by insistence on the “five points of fundamentalism,” namely the Bible’s “inerrancy” (history without error) as originally written, the truth of biblical miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, his bodily resurrection from the dead, and “vicarious” atonement through his death on the cross to save sinners.

Oh my. Presbyterians? Episcopalians? “Mainline” scholars as well as “evangelicals”? Where are the really dangerous declarations about politics, war, family and the Sexual Revolution?

For journalists, “The Fundamentalism Project” took care of that, defining fundamentalism as a global, militant, anti-modernist and anti-secular religious force in world affairs. Fundamentalism is a “selective retrieval, embellishment, and/or construction of ‘essentials’ ” used to justify attacks — even violence — against secularism and modern life.

I do not, at this moment, own a subscription to the ever-evolving AP stylebook. However, I ask the Grok AI program to search for material about the wire service’s current guidelines for the use of “fundamentalism” in news reports.

AP still advises journalists not to use term “unless the group or individual uses it to describe themselves.” However, Grok found this other “context” guideline:

While it originated in early 20th-century Protestantism, the term is now used for movements within various religions — including Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism — that demand rigid adherence to specific, fundamental beliefs. …

In general usage, “fundamentalist” can imply fanaticism, backward thinking, or a “hardline” stance that the subject may not hold.

I have been following these trends for several decades. The bottom line: Few journalists are interested in facts about history. Also, I have seen little or no evidence that journalists are worried about whether specific groups of religious believers use the term “fundamentalist” to describe their beliefs. For example, I have never heard an Islamic expert embrace that term.

Basically, this term now means whatever academics and journalists want it to mean. A fundamentalist, especially when talking about politics, is a religious believer who holds dangerous beliefs. Period.

What can journalists do? For starters, they can ask if these believers embrace the “fundamentalism” label. When dealing with specific issues — such as the future of the Holy Land — journalists can ask newsmakers to describe their beliefs or find on-the-record sources in which they address these topics.

Then, this is important, they can ask other believers — including other religious conservatives — to critique those comments. Chakrabarti and her “On Point” guests frequently blurred the lines between schools of conservative Christian thought that hold beliefs that clash with each other. Does that matter?

I will end with this. In the podcast, I urged listeners to pay close attention to an important topic raised in the one-side “On Point” discussions — the status of policies linked to the work of military chaplains.

This is an astonishingly complex subject in church-state debates. Hegseth wants to make changes. What are some of the key facts that are in play? Consider the following, drawn from a report by The Hill:

Chaplains, the commissioned officers acting as religious leaders and counselors to service members and their families, have been part of the military since 1775, when President George Washington established the Chaplain Corps as an exclusively Protestant group.

In the mid-1800s, Catholic and Jewish chaplains were introduced, followed by the first Muslim chaplain in 1994 and a Buddhist in 2008.

In 2017, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board reviewed the Defense Department’s recognized faith groups to provide more accurate demographic data on religious beliefs held by service members across the armed forces. It listed more than 200 different faith codes, many of them specific religious groups under the wider umbrella of Protestant.

OK, consider this practical issue: How many chaplains, representing those 200 “faith codes” can work inside a U.S. Navy submarine or even in a front-lines military unit in the Middle East?

All kinds of questions surface in real life. Is it fair to ask a Catholic Marine to confess his sins to a female Episcopal chaplain? Can a Southern Baptist chaplain serve as a shepherd for Wiccan or neopagan soldiers? In terms of theology and church-state issues, this is a maze full of landmines.

What happens next? The Hill report added:

… Hegseth said that moving forward, the Pentagon would use 31 faith codes instead of the more than 200, which he called an “impractical and unusable system,” with many codes never used at all.

“An overwhelming majority of the military population used only six of the codes,” he said, adding that a more streamlined system will support chaplains in ministering to service members “in a way that aligns with that service member’s faith background and religious practice.”

Now, what “faith codes” will make it into that list and which ones will be dropped?

When reading coverage of this complex subject, news consumers will need to pay close attention to any references to “fundamentalist” leaders involved in the debates. Look for solid, on-the-record facts drawn from interviews with activists and experts linked to a wide variety of faiths. Which experts are given negative labels?

Stay tuned.

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