It’s good to know that they (AIG) aren’t completely given to the “purity death spiral” as it has been called. Though (AIG & co. notwithstanding) I have personally known some conservatives for whom Lewis is removed from their “trusted source” zone - I suspect because of his failure to submit himself fully to their fundamentalistic creeds - likely including his early failure to join in the religiously-motivated moral outrage over evolution. They are a minority and Lewis is still at least accepted or even celebrated in most spaces - and I rejoice in that rare overlap these days.
I’ve heard ‘fundamentalism’ described as being “more a psychology than a theology”. (Psychology of certitude, ferocity, warfare mentality, etc.) From your article, it sounds like those modernists from the inter-war period you describe could also then be described as ‘fundamentalist’ in their own way too (in the broader use of that term). They too waxed eloquently and passionately about the crowning achievement of evolution (the Caucasian ‘race’) and how there must have been Divine directive involved to steer it that way.
As off-putting as such former convictions have rightly become for us now, I have to wonder how much such wider fundamentalism still survives (beyond the explicitly religious set to whom it’s applied). Is there a new ‘fundamentalism’ now wrapped around new and politically updated philosophies - whatever cause du jour the culture has served up for this political season?
There are those voices, even present on this thread as we see, who are quick to object to what they see as imperious demands of conformity from scientific quarters. Where as science-minded individuals (I include myself here) tend to respond still that reality remains and always has been a constraint that persists, however objectionable one thinks it may be. It seems to me that this same attitude is what animated such as A. Compton back in that day too (thanks for that article, btw, - even though I haven’t completed my more recent reading of it yet.) While he may have been holding to lots of now-recognized errors, it’s hard not to think that he would nonetheless have been able to let those go if he was privy to all that has unfolded since.
Question for general discussion here: Can we rightly consider ourselves distanced from the ‘certitudes’ of fundamentalism now if we mostly react against any notion of certitude divorced from evidence while yet embracing our certitude that scientific evidence and consilience does indeed count?