Obey ALL Rules

I certainly don't have a problem with the fundamentals of the Christian faith. I believe in those fundamentals: 1. the inerrancy of the Bible, 2. the Virgin birth of Jesus Christ, 3. the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, 4. atonement by the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, and 5. the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, but to define "Fundamentalist Christians" as those that believe in the "fundamentals of the faith" is simplistic at best.

Fundamentalism may have started this way, but it quickly grew into something more by adding more and more "fundamentals" to the list, and by requiring, if not formally then pragmatically, that all "true" believers follow their specific brand of systematic theology. Those that refuse to accept the entire package of fundamentalism are not only heretics, but are either statically positioned further away from God than those that have been fortunate enough to interpret all of Scripture accurately, or worse yet, they are moving farther away from Christ every day until they come to know the full truth.

Furthermore, fundamentalism continued the wave of anti-intellectualism started by The Second Great Awakenings (1800 - 1820) the revivals of Charles Finney (1824 - 1837) and the Layman's Prayer Revivals (1856 - 1858) by emphasizing a personal experience of conversion over a deep understanding of the Christian faith, and an interpretation of Scripture that depended greatly on fundamentalist presuppositions and an expectation of the Spirit to spoon feed them the truth rather than a desire to approach the Scripture with humility, and do the hard work of interpretation with the Spirit coming along side to help and guide.

Rather than presenting fully developed arguments against David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and others, along with German Higher Criticism of Scripture and Darwinian Evolution, fundamentalist withdrew into its own protective cave and helped to create the secular/sacred devision that we have today. The goal of the fundamentalist movement was to protect against the onslaught of attacks that the 19th century presented to the Christian faith, unfortunately what they ended up doing was creating a system of "safety" beliefs much like the Pharisees did in order to ensure obedience to God. In so doing they lost much of the Spirit of Christ found in the New Testament. Indeed, there is much more to a late 20th/early 21st century Christian fundamentalist than simply believing in the "fundamentals of the faith".

Certainly this does not define all Christian Fundamentalists. There are those that define themselves as such simply on the basis of believing in the five "fundamentals" of Christian faith (heck, I would define myself as a fundamentalist based on that definition), but for each one of these there are churches full of the more "developed" fundamentalist described above.