Carl McIntire ain't got nothing on us...

I've followed (Southern, baptistic) Fundamentalism for many years now, and have come to the view that its militancy and separation owe more than a little to the social environment where it developed. I open this up for comment and likely disagreement, but that's fine.

Here's how. The Southern Fundamentalists were on the wrong side of two great social fissures in American life. The first was the division between the South and the rest of America, a legacy of the Civil War. The second social fissure was that within the South itself, which (I suspect) was reflected in churchgoing patterns: the doctors, lawyers and large farmowners were Episcopal; the accountants and engineers were Presbyterian; and the office workers and farmworkers were Baptists.

So, when strong doctrinal differences were added to an existing and keen sense of 'us and them' in the social hierarchy, what happened next should not be surprising. A lot of the anti-intellectualism of the Fundamentalist movement, especially in its early years, was because 'the enemy' was assumed to be intellectuals who were northern Yankees as well!

The SBC was less affected by these tendencies than the Fundamentalists, but its origins, remember, derived from a split with northern Baptists in 1845 over the issue of slavery, and I have been told by people who come from this background that for many years 'it served as the civil religion for the South'.

Perhaps I draw with too broad a brush, but the militancy that Don describes above, came in the South's case from a whole series of factors.

Would that explain why most of the writers of "The Fundamentals" were northerners and Europeans, then, Ross? :^) (and all those great southern Presbyterians like Machen of Princeton?)

Sorry, I couldn't resist, but reality is that while fundamentalism is reputed to be southern and baptistic, other regions have always had strong fundamental traditions. I personally attend a church that's been fundamental since before anyone knew what a fundamentalist was, and our former pastor (Clearwaters) almost single-handedly rescued Minnesota Baptist churches from the clutches of theological liberalism.

Plus, the southern Baptists were theologically moderate until recently--and given that the correlation of Biblical faith with bigotry rests largely on that body, it largely falls with that body's tendency towards theological liberalism of the past.

I am quite aware of the northern and southern 'branches' of Fundamentalism, with the Northern branch of it having a strong Presbyterian outworking.

I thought I had made it clear enough in the post that I was concentrating my discussion on the southern variety, which I described as 'southern and Baptistic'. Also, most of my exposure to Fundamentalism has been to the southern variety, in terms of reading and so forth. My original point was that there were factors in the southern environment which fueled their version of fundamentalists - I'm thinking of BJU in particular.