Have you ever noticed that people will throw around the label “fascist” (in a political context) or “fundamentalist” (in a religious context) at times? What I’ve always found slightly amusing about these labels is that they tend to signify far more about the person tossing the label out than the person the label is being applied too.
Alvin Plantinga famously observed that a “fundamentalist” is normally an epithet applied to someone who is a “stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine”. He made this observation on page 245 of his brilliant work Warranted Christian Belief
I think it would be fair to say that such a definition would be just as fruitfully applied to someone who shouts “fascist” in a political context. Keep that in mind next time someone accuses you of being a “fascist” or a “fundamentalist”. Especially when it is clear that they are unfamiliar with the origins of the Fundamentalist movement in late 19th/Early 20th century Christendom or don’t really have even a passing idea of what Mussolini was on about when he started his FascistW Movement.
