Memories: The difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism

Photo by Nikko Tan from Pexels

Discussing the debates within the Southern Baptist Church, David French offers a distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists (and no, he emphasizes, the two are not the same):

Instead, I’d frame the difference in a number of different ways—“grace versus law,” or perhaps “open-hearted versus closed-minded.” In an earlier newsletter, I described fundamentalists as possessing “fierce existential certainty.” The fundamentalist Christian typically possesses little tolerance for dissent and accepts few sources of truth outside of the insights that can be gleaned directly from the pages of scripture.

(Snip.)

Evangelicals often also have a higher view of grace than fundamentalists. They emphasize God’s grace more than God’s rules and are more prone to focus on God’s mercies than God’s judgment.

In my real life and my online/writing life, I refer to myself as a lapsed Mennonite, but it's actually more complicated than that. I was raised and baptized -- Feb. 27, 1983 -- in the Church of Christ, a fundamentalist nondenominational church found primarily in the south. Some of my earliest memories involve my dad's year attending what was then known as Oklahoma Christian College, a sort of denominational school, as much as there could be one, for the churches of Christ.

I grew up so afraid of sin. So afraid I would lie, then die without having had the opportunity to pray for forgiveness. It's stressful to be a kid when Hell is sitting at your elbow, constantly. Jesus dying on the cross was an act of love, but it also reflected God's Terrible Wrath. God may have so loved the world, but he also was ready to torture you eternally for getting crosswise with him, and that was the part that made an impression. I think I remember the word "grace" being used in Church of Christ sermons, but I don't really remember feeling it. 

In 1984, my family moved to Hillsboro, a central-Kansas town populated mainly -- but not exclusively -- by Mennonites and Mennonite Brethren, the latter a more evangelical branch of the church. And then, one day, my parents decided to take us to an MB service. This was shocking -- to step foot inside a church that wasn't a Church of Christ, to worship with all these people we'd been told all our lives were going to Hell because they didn't love God the right way (they used musical instruments in their worship!) was terrifying.

Over time, though, I got over it. What I remember most from this time was a transition from the constant fear, from a legalistic belief in God, to the emphasis on God's mercy -- on having a relationship with God. Hell was still there, to be sure -- it was one reason the church supported missionaries. But it receded as a presence from the center of my daily lived theology. Eventually, as I got older, I embraced the Mennonites more broadly, but then slipped away from the church. I won't lie: Along the way the old ways have occasionally stuck in the back of my mind. What if my grandparents, who stayed in the Church of Christ and who railed against my father's choices, were right? What if a little embrace of grace was just a steppingstone to Hell? 

Somewhere over the years I asked myself that question and answered: "So be it." I think it was when I encountered gay Mennonites at the original national meeting of the Mennonite Church-USA in 2001. (Oh, goodness, that's 20 years ago now.) I decided that if God really did so love the world, he wasn't going to hold it against me for trying to act in the same spirit even if I got the particulars wrong. It was liberating. Of course, that also liberated me to leave the church entirely, I suppose.

The point being: French's distinction between fundamentalists and evangelicals really resonated with me. They both might look conservative from the outside, and they are, but there are (um) fundamental differences in approach. In my life, those differences have been meaningful.