After reading on JU about the “furor” surrounding the release of the movie based on Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code , I have to admit that I initially thought that it was simply another episode in America’s curious culture war in which American christians are pushing themselves to the fore as a new oppressed minority, battling against secularist ‘persecution’ and ‘slander’. However, a just rebuke to this idea from Bakersteet caused me to look into the matter more carefully and I found tha...

Recent postings on JU have expressed frustration and annoyance with what has been seen as a fundamentalist hijacking of the Christian religion, while the fundamentalists in reply claim to be doing no more than expressing the original purity and power of the Christian religion as it was known to those who encountered and followed Jesus of Nazareth. My own view on the matter is that this Christian Fundamentalism, far from being a renewal of the faith in its pristine original purity, represents ...

Recent postings on JU have expressed frustration and annoyance with what has been seen as a fundamentalist hijacking of the Christian religion, while the fundamentalists in reply claim to be doing no more than expressing the original purity and power of the Christian religion as it was known to those who encountered and followed Jesus of Nazareth. My own view on the matter is that this Christian Fundamentalism, far from being a renewal of the faith in its pristine original purity, represents a...