‘Fundamentalism’ and ‘fundamentalist’ semantically considered: their lexical origins, early polysemy, and pejoration
Abstract
The words fundamentalist (as both a noun and an adjective) and fundamentalism were coined
in 1920 within the Northern Baptist Convention when that and other American Protestant
denominations were experiencing theological turmoil due to the advance of theological
modernism. It is argued in the present article that both terms initially had positive meanings
when used by defenders of orthodoxy. However, within weeks of their birth both were criticised
by less conservative Christians. Like many other theological terms they underwent semantic
change – in this case pejoration and lexical extension. Moreover, by 1923 ‘fundamentalist’
had been extended into political journalism to refer to strict adherents of one ideology or
another. The greatest change, however, and one that fixed these neologisms in the public mind
in both North America and the United Kingdom, came with the widely published ‘Scopes
monkey trial’ of 1925, when the association of ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘fundamentalism’ with
anti-intellectualism and obscurantism reached its apogee.
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