Boston Globe: Why Fundamentalism Will Fail

There's an article on Fundamentalism in yesterday's Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/08/why_fundamentalism_will_fail/#

It begins thus:

IN 1910, A COHORT of ultra-conservative American Protestants drew up a list of non-negotiable beliefs they insisted any genuine Christian must subscribe to. They published these “fundamentals” in a series of widely distributed pamphlets over the next five years. Their catalog featured doctrines such as the virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Christ, and his imminent second coming. The cornerstone, though, was a belief in the literal inerrancy of every syllable of the Bible, including in matters of geology, paleontology, and secular history. They called these beliefs fundamentals, and proudly styled themselves “fundamentalists” - true believers who feared that liberal movements like the social gospel and openness to other faiths were eroding the foundation of their religion.

And ends like this:

But a tectonic shift in religion is underway, and the fundamentalist moment is ending. A new and promising chapter in the long story of human faith is beginning. Its untidiness often reminds me of the exuberant earliest years of Christianity. Maturity comes with time. Future historians may look back on the 20th century as a time when something called “fundamentalism” interrupted, but only briefly, the age-old human search for a way to live in the face of mystery, and to envision what Martin Luther King called a “beloved community.”

An interesting read.

The author comes very close to a statement from my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century:

“If you want to know what’s divine in the different Christian denominations, look at what they have in common. The differences between them are mostly human invention for human purposes, and have been put there with the specific objective of dividing and conquering, to provide leaders with loyal and committed followers.”