The term "fundamentalism" is generally used by and applied to the followers of a movement within United States Protestantism that developed toward the end of the 19th century. The movement developed in reaction to the replacement of what were believed to be biblically authenticated truths with scientific hypotheses and information. Science was perceived as ignoring divine revelation by replacing the truth about creation by God in six days as articulated in the Bible with an understanding of an evolving universe, including life itself. Additionally, the movement opposed a growing secularism and the emergence of "liberal" or "modernist" theologies which respected science as well as biblical studies not confined to literalism. At the heart of early fundamentalism was the principle of "biblical inerrancy," which meant that the Bible, as written, was true in all respects.
The expression "fundamentalism" has its starting point in a succession of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915. Entitled "The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth," they were written by leading evangelical churchmen.
Early fundamentalists adopted five points: (1) the verbal inerrancy of the Bible; (2) the divinity of Jesus Christ; (3) the Virgin Birth; (4) the substitutionary theory of the Atonement (i.e., that Jesus Christ died for us as a sacrifice for the sins of the world); and (5) the physical resurrection of Christ and his bodily return to earth on the Last Day. As one would expect, fundamentalism has evolved with its own "schools of thought" and various emphases. People who identify themselves today as fundamentalists need to clarify their respective uses of the term.
During the first quarter of the 20th century most seminaries of the Episcopal Church rejected biblical literalism. However, well before the rise of fundamentalism more than one interpretation of Christ's divinity, the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, the Resurrection, and the Last Day were under discussion and continue so in Anglican theology. The Prayer Book Catechism records these and other doctrines in very general ways that allow for more than one scholarly explanation within Anglican theology.
Although many Episcopal clergy unfortunately assert their own versions of faith and morals as normative, few today would be classified as fundamentalists.
However, many contemporary laypersons remain biblical literalists with singular quasi-fundamentalist understandings of the Church's teachings. These faithful people have not grasped the Anglican ethos that welcomes well researched biblical, doctrinal, and ethical interpretations, and they become alarmed when they encounter positions different from their own. They care deeply about their understandings of the Faith and are inclined more toward preservation than intellectual explorations. Too often they perceive Christians who are not fundamentalists of their own stamp as damned, unchristian, and as an enemy seduced by human beliefs away from the Truths of divine revelation as recorded in the Bible. Fundamentalists are likely to be mismatched, if they try to live out their baptism within the Episcopal Church.