Karen Armstrong says pretty much the same, but here it is from a guy who went to Harvard to study fundamentalism.
Brett Grainger sees fundamentalism as an entirely modern phenomenon, one that was born as a reaction against the modern world, but that has also been shaped by it. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, fundamentalists are not interested in returning to a pre-modern age,” he writes. “They are among the most adept pupils of modernity, copying and recasting its designs for their own purposes.”
(Hat tip to one of my fundy spies.)
Grainger is right. In fact, his analysis here can be extended. Christian fundamentalism is a reaction against the liberal Christianity that made major in-roads into the mainstream in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In other words, liberal Christianity is older than fundamentalist Christianity, which is one of the newest of the successful types of Christianity to develop in the modern world.
–from a guy who studied fundamentalism at the University of North Carolina