A fundamentalist is someone who believes the fundamentals, the basics, of a faith. The fundamentals of a faith are NOT whatever anyone wishes them to be. They are defined historically and, for faiths that are based on documents, by those documents.

This implies the scriptures are self-explanatory. The sheer number of Christian denominations should give the lie to that. Every Christian church claims it is founded "on the documents" -- even those with wildly divergent beliefs. In order for the Christian people who claim to be "fundamentalists" in the sense of basing their faith on "the fundamentals" to really be basing their faith on the real fundamentals, they have to be objectively fundamental. And there is nothing objective in Christian theology. Nothing. It really is that they are deciding what is fundamental, and claiming to be fundamentalists on the basis thereof.

Kent, if a fundamentalist is someone who is going back to the fundamentals of Christianity, then why is their interpretation of the Bible a post-Enlightenment novelty? Of the "fundamentals" they define, how many are mentioned in the Nicene Creed? Surely if any definition of "Christian fundamentals" deserves the name, it is this original one, not the one written in Niagara Falls 1500 years later. And yet there is nothing about the infallability of the Scriptures in the Creed.

In point of historical fact, the so-called "Fundamentals" you link to are a reaction to higher criticism and Victorian liberalism, not an objective, disinterested setting forth of historic Christianity. If you want historic Christianity, you could hardly do worse than to look at the Catholic or Orthodox churches -- there is Christianity going back to the beginning, not invented anew in the 16th, or 19th, century.