E.D. Kain and Helen Rittelmeyer have been discussing religious conservatism and fundamentalism. As I will try to explain in a moment, these are not the same things at all. Indeed, there are few more misleading errors than the conflation of the two and the treatment of all expressions of religious conservatism as examples of fundamentalism.

In Kain’s first post, they are treated as interchangeable and set in opposition to cultural or civilizational conservatism. The association or equation of the latter two might also be debatable, but I’ll leave that for another time. Ms. Rittelmeyer defends what she describes as her kind of conservatism, but temporarily accepts the fundamentalist label. According to Kain, the main difference is that cultural conservatism takes account of the possibility of change and does not “necessarily frame [a] political worldview on a vision of religious infallibility,” while so-called fundamentalist conservatism needs nothing more than “a dogmatic approach to [a] particular religion.”

It might depend on exactly how Kain means to use the word dogmatic here, since the promulgation of dogmas is a product of religious tradition. Unlike actual fundamentalist Christians, it has been the high liturgical churches that have developed extensive intellectual and interpretive traditions that are most attached to dogmas, which they are fully aware came into existence over time and in particular historical contexts. While some theologians in those churches choose to describe this in terms of “progressive revelation,” which is not entirely right, it is the churches that have the most developed sense of church tradition that take the greatest interest in the historical development of doctrine and cultivate the strongest attachment to ecclesiastical history on the assumption that God continues to work through and in history, which is an obvious implication of the Incarnation and Pentecost, and that God continues to guide and inspire the Church.

The key characteristic of a genuinely fundamentalist mentality is its hostility to complexity, historical context and the possibility of a text being multivalent; fundamentalists are to some extent the terrible simplifiers of rich dogmatic traditions. I assume Kain uses dogmatic here to mean inflexible or uncompromising, but this does not take into account the inherent flexibility and minimalism of dogma. Dogmas are minimal statements that provide correct guidance regarding religious matters, most of which are ultimately mysterious and not fully comprehensible. Given the nature of their subject, they cannot always be exhaustive, but they can nonetheless provide the right guidance and serve as sign-posts to the proper destination of the believer. A fundamentalist is like someone who tries to navigate using a map without ever looking at his surroundings. Someone instructed in a dogmatic tradition will pay attention to those surroundings and understand how to relate the map to those surroundings. Religious conservatives are those interested in defending such a tradition and holding it up as a guide to the world.

The different senses of Scripture are a good marker for distinguishing fundamentalists from religious conservatives. Religious conservatives assume that there is more than one, while fundamentalists are intent on the literal or plain reading alone. Something that purely historicist and literalist readings of Scripture have in common is their exclusion of other meanings. Historicists will tend to exclude the moral sense, dismissing ancient commandments as the product of the period when the text was composed and therefore “irrelevant,” as well as the typological sense, which they regard as deliberate anachronism. Meanwhile literalists are anxious about the possibility of interpreting Scripture in any figurative or spiritual sense. Both are mistaken and at odds with the richness of the religious tradition whose real meaning each will claim to be defending against the other even as each wanders off the royal road into its own ditch.

Update: Thanks to Alan Jacobs for the link and the interesting follow-up post.