I just can’t get it out of my head! I really, really want to be a Fundy. How fun does it sound to be a Fun-dy? Of course, my friend Allen Henninger likes to say that the Fundies have taken the “fun” out of fundamental.
I am stuck on this thought, partially because I like the idea of simplicity. The Christian faith is supposed to be accessible. It should be simple enough for anyone. Your level of education, your language skill set, your cultural background, or your IQ should not have to determine the level of your interactive experience with Christ. And, somehow we know this to be true. The wisest people we’ve met are often not the smartest people we’ve met. In fact, there are times when we have all noticed that intelligence and wisdom almost appear opposed to one another. Enter stage the left the idiot savant, and even then the simplicity of the faith makes Christianity accessible to the savant among us.
This simplicity seems to make sense only when I can boil the features of my faith down to a few things in number – but isn’t that what Jesus did for us? He took the complication of over 500 Jewish laws (which is quite simple compared to the US legal code), put it into the pot of faith and reduced it to two laws: Love the Lord your God with all you heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. Even those laws are devoid of complication. They are experiential, and simple, and like gravy on Thanksgiving – thick with flavor.
I want to be a fundamentalist. I want to have a simple, accessible faith that anyone can look at and say, “I get it.” Maybe then they might even say, “I want it.”
I want to be a fundamentalist, because its such a wonderfully simple concept, but I can’t. It seems someone else has been using the word before I got to it.
If you missed part one in the series: go here
Phil Wyman: Dim Saesneg 
Has the term Essentialist been taken?
Or maybe basicist, or simplist, or fewist, or …. 🙂 But then I would have to stop trying to save the term, and I wouldn’t feel counter-cultural.
Have you ever identified as a fundy? Were you one before your excommunication?
No, I was never a Fundamentalist. At least not by the standards of Christian Fundamentalism. Yet, for outsiders looking in, my rather conservative approach to scripture and morality might appear rather fundamentalist.