Answering those who say “fundamentalist” is too strong a word to describe antigay Episcopal bishops who have aligned with corrupt foreign bishops to destroy the U.S. Episcopal Church, Father Jake borrows from religion expert and author Karen Armstrong to define the term “fundamentalist”:
At the outset of their monumental six-volume Fudamentalist Project, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby argue that the “fundamentalisms” all follow a certain pattern. They are embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secular policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices from the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of charismatic leaders, they have refined these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action. Eventually they fight back and attempt to resacrilize an increasing skeptical world.
(The Battle for God, p. xiii)
Father Jake notes that “this mutated form of Christianity has very little to do with the Good News offered by Jesus Christ.”