American Religious Movements: Fundamentalism and Its Influence on Evangelicalism American fundamentalism and American evangelicalism seem to go hand in hand. Evangelicalism and fundamentalism both emphasize living based on the Bible, repentance, and a personal relationship with God. No one would deny the massive influence fundamentalism has had on evangelicalism or the similarities between the two. Although some historians would suggest that evangelicalism was experiential and sectarian while fundamentalism was conservative and anti-modernist, it is clear that fundamentalism would never have survived as long as it has if it had not been able to adapt to modernity and exist within a pluralist society. In the 1920s American Protestantism struggled with the problems of biblical criticism, sources of authority in Christianity, and the theory of evolution. Presbyterians and Baptists experienced divisions in their denominations as the events of this decade began to chip away at fundamentalism. For example, John T. Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution, which violated a Tennessee state statute. The growing controversy between fundamentalists and modernists regarding biblical criticism and evolutionary theories is not what is important in the analysis of American fundamentalism. What is important to analyze is, “in light of the recognized impact of these forces, why a minority of Christians responded one way while the majority reacted another” (Sandeen xi). It was this split in Christianity that made many people believe that fundamentalism should have died out seventy years ago. But fundamentalism has survived and there has been a recent resurgence in its popularity. Moving into the post-World War II era, the evangelical coalition began to attract older generations, the Hollywood population, and Washington D.C. leaders soon after the war. , the religious conflicts that plagued fundamentalism in the 1920s were no longer relevant. Protestantism, in its mainstream form, had become much more evangelical in its nature, and its sects were increasingly interested in being publicly recognized. Many historians agree that “what has often gone unrecognized, however, is that one of the most important driving forces behind the postwar resurgence of religion was a framework of… middle of paper… er. of evangelical history, in which the Pentecostal-charismatic movement is rapidly supplanting the fundamentalist-conservative one as the most influential evangelical impulse at work today” (Carpenter 237). The neo-fundamentalist movement, stemming from Graham and Falwell, is just another story in the rise and fall of influential popular movements, as Pentecostalism has now become the fastest growing form of Christianity in the world, with three or four hundred millions of members. 12/3). The pattern of this rise and fall tends to be overlapping pieces and changing pieces and fundamentalism is no different. This was a movement that survived hardship and adapted to accommodate every human being, but it seems that it will remain primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon as new forms of the model take its place. Works Cited Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997.Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1980.Riesebrodt, Martin. Pious Passion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Sandeen, Ernest R. The Roots of Fundamentalism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970.