From a Usenet friend:

Many fundamentalists assert that their fundamentalism goes back to Jesus and the apostles or at least to the Protestant reformers. That is totally incorrect as the following demonstrates. Fundamentalism is a recent anti-intellectual invention as is the theory of premillenialism and the "rapture".

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From Karen Armstrong "The Battle For God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam" (Harper Perennial: 2000)

[Christians: Brave New World (1492-1870)] ... the new ethos demanded autonomy and total freedom, and that is what the Protestant reformers demanded for the Christians of this altered world, who must be free to read and interpret their Bibles as they chose, without the punitive control of the Church. p. 65

The Reformed Christian was to stand alone before God, relying simply on his Bible, but this would not have been possible before the invention of printing had made it feasible for all Christians to have a Bible of their own and before the developing literacy of the period enabled them to read it. p. 66

[Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)] ... Newton became obsessed with the desire to purge Christianity of the mythical doctrines. He became convinced that the a-rational dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation were the reult of conspiracy, forgery, and chicanery. ... 1687 ... he began work on a bizarre treatise entitled The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, which argued that ... the spurious doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity had been added to the creed by unscrupulous theologians in the fourth century. Indeed, the Book of Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism - "this strange religion of ye West," "the cult of the three equal Gods" - as the abomination of desolation. p.69

... paradoxically, the emergence of reason as the sole criterion for truth in the West coincided with an eruption of religious irrationality. The great Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ... p. 75

... the new tendency to sideline or even to jettison reason in some of the new Protestant movements ( a development that can be traced back to Luther)

led to a disturbing irrationality. pp. 77-78

People who became known as Old Lights, such as the Boston ministers Jonathon Mayhew (1720-66) and Charles Chauncy (1705-87), believed that Christianity should be a rational, enlightened faith, were appalled by the hysteria of the revivals, and distrusted their anti-intellectual bias. p. 80

... the millenial movement founded by the New York farmer William Miller (1782-1849), who pored over the biblical prophecies, and, in a series of careful calculations, "proved" in a pamphlet published in 1831 that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in the year 1843. Miller was reading his Bible in an essentially modern way. Instead of seeing it as a mythical, symbolic account of eternal realities, Miller assumed that such narratives as the Book of Revelation were accurate predictions of immanent events, which could be worked out with scientific and mathematical precision. People now read texts for information. Truth must be capable of logical, scientific demonstration. Miller was treating the mythos of scripture as though it were logos, and he and his assitant Joshua Hines constantly stressed the sytematic and scientific nature of Miller's investigations. The mopvement was also democratic: anybody could interpret the Bible for him or herself, and Miller encouraged his followers to challenge his calculations and come up with theories of their own. pp. 90-91

... the publuication of The Origin Of The Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, by Charles Darwin .... the following year, when seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews, which made the latest biblical criticism available to the general reader. Since the late eighteenth century, German scholars had applied the new techniques of literary analysis, archeology, and comparative linguistics to the Bible, subjecting it to a scientific and empirical methodology. They argued that the first five books of the Bible, traditionally attributed to Moses, were in fact written much later and by a number of different authors; the book of Isaiah had at least two different sources, and King David had probably not written the Psalms. Most of the miracles in the Bible were simply literary tropes and could not be understood literally; many of the biblical events were almost certainly not historical. In Essays and Reviews, the British clerics argued that the Bible must not have special treatment, but should be subjected to the same critical rigor as any other text. The new "Higher Criticism" represented the triumph of the rational discourse of logos over myth. pp. 94-95

The new apocalyptic vision that took root in America during the late nineteenth century is called premillenialism, because it envisioned Christ returning to earth before he established his thousand year reign. (The older and more optimistic postmillenialism of the Enlightenment, which was cultivated by liberal Protestants, imagined human beings inaugurating God's Kingdom by their own efforts: Christ would only return to earth after the millenium was established.) The new premillenialism was preached in America by the Englishman John Nelson Darby (1800-82)... Darby divided the whole of salvation history into seven epochs or "dispensations", a scheme derived from a careful reading of scripture. pp. 137-138

Darby maintained that just before the beginning of the Tribulation there would be a "Rapture", a snatching up of born-again Christians, who would be taken up to heaven and so would escape the terrible sufferings of the Last Days. ... Premillenialism was a fantasy of revenge: the elect imagined themselves gazing down on the sufferings of those who had jeered at their beliefs, ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized their faith, and now, too late, realized their error. A popular picture found in the homes of many Protestant fundamentalists today shows a man cutting the grass outside his house, gazing in astonishment as his born-again wife is raptured out of an upsatirs window. Like many concrete depictions of mythical events, the scene looks a little absurd, but the reality it purports to present is cruel, divisive, and tragic. p. 139

[Battle Lines (1870-1900)] ... Many Protestants, who expected their faith to bring them security, felt mental vertigo in this complicated world. They wanted a plain-speaking faith that everybody could understand. p. 140

The New Light Presbyterian semninary at Princeton ... In 1837, Charles Hodge ... published Sytemnatic Theology ... Every word of the bible was divinely inspired and must be taken seriously; it should not be distorted by allegorical or symbolic exegesis. Charles's son, Archibald A. Hodge, who took his father's chair in 1878, published a defense of the literal truth of the Bible in The Princeton Review, with a young colleague, Benjamin Warfield. The article became a classic. All the stories of the Bible were "absolutely errorless and binding for faith and obedience." Everything the Bible said was absolute "truth to the facts." If the Bible said it was inspired, it was inspired, a circular argument that was anything but scientific. Such a view had no rational objectivity, was closed to any alternative, and coherent only within its own terms. pp. 141-142

In 1910, the Presbyterians of Princeton, who had formulated the doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture, issued a list of five dogmas which they deemed essential" (1) the inerrancy of Scripture, (2) the Virgin Birth of Christ, (3) Christ's atonement for our sins on the cross, (4) his bodily resurrection, and (5) the objective reality of miracles. (This last doctrine would later be replaced by the teachings of premilenialism.)

Next, the oil millionaires Lyman and Milton Stewart, who had founded the Bible College of Los Angeles to counter the Higher Criticism in 1908, financed a project designed to educate the faithful in the central tenents of the faith. Between 1910 and 1915, they issued a series of twelve paperback pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals, in which leading conservative theologians gave accessible accounts of such doctrines as the Trinity, refute the Higher Criticism, and stressed the imp[ortance of spreading the truth of the Gospel. ... fundamentalists would see it as the germ of their movement. p. 171