In the November Penn Press podcast, David R. Swartz, Assistant Professor at Asbury University and author
of Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, discusses the overlooked history of progressive evangelical Christians in the United States.
In this section of the interview, Swartz describes the differences between fundamentalist Christians and other evangelical believers:
Evangelicalism--often called neoevangelicalism to distinguish it from nineteenth-century versions of it--came out of fundamentalism. This was a more separatist movement. And this was the era in which Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians are starting to split along fundamentalist and modernist lines. Neoevangelicals came in the wake of that and wanted to reengage the world. They were less separatist, and they were less fired up in some ways.
When you see a conservative Christian, say, railing against gays on a YouTube video, that’s almost always a fundamentalist. The pithiest way to say this is that a fundamentalist is an evangelical who’s angry about something. Now unfortunately in the popular imagination, the word evangelical has come to mean fundamentalist. So there’s a historical part to this, but there’s also a temperamental aspect to these two movements.
David Swartz, author of Moral Minority by PennPress
The complete interview is available at the Penn Press podcast page.
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