I’ve noticed that a great many integrists* are either converts or reverts. Moreover, nearly all of the integrists that post frequently on the web come from a fundamentalist background.

This actually make pretty good sense. Fundamentalism started as a protestant reaction against modernism – a reaction based on highly literal readings of scripture. What distinguished fundamentalism is its stridency and use of proof-texting. Since fundamentalism was a reaction against some serious heresies, it’s not surprising that fundamentalists have a tendency to look for (and find) the worst in everyone. Too often the stridency brings out the worst in those who try to engage them in discussion. Since fundamentalism was a reaction against a new set of ideas, fundamentalists are so suspicious of anything that appears to be new that they often conclude that the world is now more evil than it’s ever been. Since most fundamentalists have relatively narrow educations, that notion sticks.

I had limited exposure to fundamentalists before my conversion to Catholicism. There were some in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, such as a college prof who taught Old Testament and insisted that anyone who believed that the exodus occurred after 1300 B.C. had endangered his salvation. I remember the 1970s debates in the LCMS in which one side held that anyone who denied or doubted the literality of the story of Jonah was a heretic. That sort of overreaching insistence on strict adherence to notions that are at best peripheral to the message of Jesus, while often ignoring the clear mandates of the King of Kings, drove me from the LCMS and, ultimately, to Catholicism.

Fundamentalism doesn’t deal well with paradoxes and contradictions.
Eventually, any bright, honest and dedicated fundamentalist would invariably run into many of the inconsistencies presented by Sola Scriptura. Ultimately he would have to either proclaim some kind of private revelation or look to Rome.

When a fundamentalist becomes Catholic, a new problem arises. Too often the convert’s way of looking at the world doesn’t change that much. The stridency is still there, and now there’s a much larger body of literature to search for proof texts. If the convert had believed that the world is growing more evil every day, there’s little chance that he’ll outgrow that notion. That and an ill-informed focus on the purported immutability of the Church would lead one to recoil in horror from even the slightest alteration to doctrinal pronouncements or liturgical practice. Instant integrism.

During my conversion, I was deeply troubled by what I read at a putatively Catholic web site (I’d rather not give them any traffic by naming them), until I figured out that they were Catholic fundamentalists or, to use a better term, integrists. They insisted on private interpretation of self-selected documents to establish their own doctrinal purity and the depravity of everyone else.

Ironically enough the integrists, to the degree they reject the authority of their bishops, the Pope and the most recent Council, are ultimately protestants.

*The term “integrist” is preferable to “traditionalist” (whether or not modified with “radical”) or other like terms because it conveys the central trait of Integrism –seeing some peripheral trappings of the Church as integral to Her life and mission. Besides, they don’t have any monopoly on respect for traditional practice (which they emphasize to the exclusion of the ecclesiastical structure implicit in Sacred Tradition).