That Growing, Dying Dinosaur

"So, Sonny, back in my day, there were these guys called Fundamentalists."

"Really, Grandpa? They were like what, professional fun-thinkers, game-makers or something?"

"Heh. Not if you believed Mencken."

"Who?"

"Never mind... he's deader than they are now. Though a lot of those Fundamentalists had a lot more fun than folk realized. Sneaky fun-havers, a lot like the Puritans."

"Who?"

"Never mind - the Puritans wouldn't have liked the Fundamentalists, either. Mostly, the fundies just said and thought stuff people didn't like. Got 'em in all kinds of trouble."

"Wait... I heard about those in school. They're the ones who were always blowing themselves and other stuff up until they just died out, aren't they?"

"Well, that's pretty much what you'd expect to happen to people who blow themselves up, isn't it? But nah, you're thinking of the Muslim kind. I'm talking about the Christian ones. Mostly they just blew up at people until they blew themselves out and all dried up because nobody wanted to be one."


Will grandads and grandsons be having this conversation in twenty or thirty years? Probably, if this article by Michael Spencer in the Christian Science Monitor is correct, and grandads who tell their sons about the good old days and all the bad things that happened in them haven't all gone out of style or into nursing homes before then.

The consensus among those who even have a clue what Fundamentalism is (more on that in another post) seems to be that Fundamentalism is a dinosaur. The meteor that smashes the movement into oblivion like an out-of-date species has already crashed someplace up north. The dinosaur is breathing in all that dust, and its lungs are getting black on the inside like a five-pack-a-day smoker (not that most Fundamentalists would ever condone smoking, even among dinosaurs, unless, of course, it's a way to make dinosaur jerky). The dinosaur is about to keel over and die any day now, if not from lung cancer, then from the cold because of all the dust it didn't breath in and get stuck to the inside of its lungs.

Now, Mr. Spencer is a smart guy. He's probably running a couple of post-graduate degrees hotter than your average Fundamentalist, too. He says some very sharp things in his article, some very insightful things that I agree with completely. He's also humble enough to admit that he's definitely wrong in some of his predictions. And I think I know what one of them is, because in his routine filling-in of Fundamentalism's death certificate, he missed one obvious, glaring thing about the dinosaur: it's still growing.

The dinosaur of Fundamentalism really is pretty old-fashioned in a lot of ways. In some of them, it goes beyond old-fashioned into timeless and eternal, I think. In others, many of its members have ideas and practices that make Amish buggies look positively space-age. But Fundamentalism is not wheezing its last breaths and wasting away because its throat is clogged with second-hand asteroid smoke.

Like it or hate it, understand it or have no idea what it really is, Fundamentalism is alive and growing. A recent survey of independent Baptist churches (the most common culprits in the harboring of Fundamentalists) done by Global Baptist Church Planters (there's a book coming out with Paul Chappell, based on the study) found that among respondents, the average church has grown by 20% since 2005. It reported that the average independent Baptist church was seeing people saved, baptized, and becoming faithful members. Maybe this dinosaur is so resilient it made one of those desperate space missions starring Bruce Willis to blow up the asteroid, then immediately junked the technology because, of course, all technology not at least one generation out of date is probably evil unless it's really useful.

I am not honestly convinced the study was enormously scientific, from what I've seen of the data. It tries to be aware of and compensate for obvious deficiencies, and they made it on the largest scale they possibly could. However accurate the actual numbers are, the general trend confirms what I've seen. Fundamentalists are out there, sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, which the Bible calls, "The power of God unto salvation." Thus, even as mainstream evangelicalism staggers toward the brink of destruction, its lungs clogging further with every step, this group that has always been out-of-step with the rest of the group now finds itself marching in a completely different direction.

Many Fundamental independent Baptists have somehow managed to hang onto a portion of the Bible that is strangely disappearing even faster than the dinosaurs did - the bits that tell them to tell other people about Jesus Christ and to be bold and active in doing it. (This is the "aggressively evangelistic" trait Mr. Spencer referred to.) And it kind of makes sense - the people getting their message out there are the people who most likely to propagate themselves, wouldn't you think? And the people actually doing what God told them to do with His power are the ones most likely to fully realize it, aren't they?

Maybe this dinosaur is better equipped for the post-meteor (whatever that mysterious meteor of destruction might be) world than most of so-called Christianity. Maybe it's even good enough at the core of what it does that it can even deflect or evade that big rock completely (even without Bruce Willis' help), though tough times are surely coming. It may not be good with technology, and it may not be as socially conscious as some other dinosaurs - but neither social consciousness nor techonology are the power of God unto salvation.

This dinosaur ain't dead, and it ain't dying. Whether it scares you or excites you, it's growing.