And, if it is accurate, what would a clergyman have told you three hundred years ago if you asked him whether something like the Garden of Eden story actually happened?
Weeks later, conversation on these things is still ongoing. I'm going to link to two long comments I've made that should go some way towards clarifying things:
After much bickering, still continuing a week after this comment, I'm going to edit in another comment here, for posterity, which may further shed some light on the perspective I'm coming from (this is taken from Thomas McIver's dissertation "Creationism: Intellectual Origins, Cultural Context, and Theoretical Diversity" [UCLA, 1989]:
In understanding fundamentalism, Bible-science, and creationism, it is important to distinguish the doctrine of biblical literalism from biblical inerrancy. They are not synonomous [sic]. Since creationism is so obviously based on a literalist interpretation of Genesis, it is easy to assume that literalism is the overriding concern. Such is not the case. In fact inerrancy is the dominant principle in fundamentalist Bible interpretation. Fundamentalists interpret biblical passages literally if at all possible, but are absolutely committed to believing that each and every passage is wholly inerrant.
What fundamentalists insist is not that the Bible must be taken literally but that it must be so interpreted as to avoid any admission that it contains any kind of error. In order to avoid imputing error to the Bible, fundamentalists twist and turn back and forward between literal and non-literal interpretation. [Barr 1981:40]
Despite the danger in these rubrics/categories like "fundamentalism," I'm going to go ahead and say "not accurate at all."
Also, not to delve too deeply into some amateur psychologizing, but...I think that statements like these largely come from liberal Christians who are afraid that the anti-intellectualism of modern Christians "fundamentalists"/Young Earth Creationists/etc. is tarnishing the reputation of Christianity as a whole; and so they're trying to regain some good PR by insisting on a Christianity that's totally safe for modernity, compatible with modern science and all.
Usually, the first thing you'll hear from people like this is that early church figures like the third century Alexandrian theologian Origen and Augustine "didn't take the Bible literally." It often doesn't get more nuanced than that; and, phrased in this way -- with a particular idea of what "literal" means (or doesn't mean) -- this is an ideologically-agreeable statement with much appeal for liberal Christians. If Augustine didn't really believe that the world was created in six literal 24-hours, then we can enlist the support of such a revered Church authority for our own religious views (in which modern cosmology/evolution is indeed accepted, while still retaining the [theological] "truth" of Genesis narrative).
In fact, Augustine is often enlisted as a champion who rather explicitly called out the Ken Hams of the ancient world. This post -- building on Augustine's comments in De Genesi Ad Litteram 1.20, which I'll be getting into more in a second -- writes that
[Augustine] repeatedly warns against interpretations that defy the clear evidence of the sciences. He was extremely concerned that foolish Christians reading scripture too literally would bring discredit on the entire faith.
Post something like this on /r/Christianity, and there's an endless reservoir of karma and high fives waiting for you.
But, two things here.
First: there's an extremely pervasive and gross misunderstanding of what "literal" meant for Augustine. "Literal" for Augustine is "the meaning intended by the author" (Quasten et al. 1982: 10, emphasis mine; cf. De Genesi Ad Litteram 1.21.41) -- and, of course, we should always try to discern what this was. The logical implications of this should barely even have to be spelled out. This obviously means that if all the evidence suggests that a Biblical author really meant to say that the world was created in six 24-hour days, then by God that's what we should believe. (Of course, this is cited as the classic example of what Augustine didn't believe; but more on this in a second.)
By way of the second thing here, I'd like to try an experiment. I'm going to put two quotes up here, and I'd you to take a guess as to which one was written by Ken Ham (if any of them were), and which one was written by Augustine (if any of them were).
"Whenever scientists and philosophers have said anything that conflicts with Scripture (with our faith), we'll be able to prove that it's wrong. And even if we haven't been able to prove it yet, we should still have no doubts at all that they will be wrong."
"There are no mistakes at all in the Bible. If there appears to be a error, the fault is not with the Bible itself. It's either a mistake in a manuscript, or the translation is wrong, or my own impression that there's a mistake is wrong."
...sorry, it was a trick: they're both by Augustine. (I couldn't admit this at the beginning without giving it away, but these are actually slight paraphrases of the originals, adapted for modern English. They're taken from De Genesi 1.21 and Epistle 82.3, respectively; and I'd be happy to supply the original Latin if you think I've misrepresented what he said. [Edit: I've now clarified the former here].)
There are several alternatives to what's thought of (again, confusingly) as a "literal" interpretation. As hinted at above, the guiding exegetical principle of those like Augustine is that the Bible is always right -- and so if there's something Biblical that on the surface conflicts with what we know to be true about the world, then the original author's intent was "mysterious" (cf. City of God 9.6) and/or must have been allegorical (or poetic/typological, etc.). Of course, this is like taking a test and, when you go to hand it into teacher for grading, the first thing the teacher does is automatically give it an A+, 100; and then the teacher starts looking back at the individual answers, looking for a perspective from which the answer could be interpreted as being "correct."
But what was "what we know to be true about the world" for people like Origen and Augustine?
Origen ridiculed those who disputed that "the world is quite recent -- not even ten thousand years old" (Contra Celsum 1.19-20). Similarly, Augustine noted that "we compute from the sacred writings that six thousand years have not yet passed since the creation of man. Hence, the writings which make reference to far more thousands of years than there have been are vain, and contain no trustworthy authority on the subject" (City of God 12.11). (And, in this opinion, they're both in good ancient company. I've collected a lot of the earliest Jewish and Christian calculations of the age of the earth/humanity here; and I now have a follow-up comment here that talks more about their motivations for denying this.)
Both Origen and Augustine responded to critiques that not all the animals in the world could have fit on Noah's ark by arguing that the ark was bigger than these people thought it was (Origen, Hom. in Gen. 2.2; Contra Celsum 4.41; Augustine, City of God 15.27).
Origen accepts a tradition that the actual original Adam is buried under Golgotha (Commentary on Matthew 27.32). Augustine denied the notion of the Antipodes by arguing that, if it were true, it would have been described in Scripture -- and if we are all descended from Adam and Eve, how could they have gotten there? (Plus the Bible already gives a detailed description of the nations [ultimately] descended from them.)
(Finally, a direct line can be drawn between this early "literalism" and modern doctrine -- even that which is commonly thought of as "progressive." I often emphasize that the modern Catholic church has done a great PR job of making it seem like they’ve embraced evolution wholesale; though I always refer to the 1950 papal encyclical [which basically has the force of infallibility (edit: I've now qualified this statement here)] Humani Generis, which commands that the Catholic faithful “cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.”)
So much for the non-"literal" understanding of Genesis.
Yet, as hinted at above, the six creation days of Genesis is precisely one of those things for which those like Augustine are lauded for their non-"literal" interpretation. The main problem, of course, is that all of these "days" -- as days tend to do -- have an "evening" (עֶרֶב) and a "morning" (בֹּקֶר)...and yet the it's not until the fourth day that the sun is created in the first place! As the Bible can never be wrong, Augustine writes that "As for these 'days,' it is difficult, perhaps impossible to think--let alone to explain in words--what they mean" (City of God 11.6).
People are sometimes familiar with this line; yet there's less familiar with how Augustine attempted to solve this crux. Again, we should bear in mind the slight agnosticism that Augustine admitted here (as quoted above). But the explanation he did proffer is this:
The knowledge of a created thing, seen just as it is, is dimmer, so to speak, than when the thing is contemplated in the wisdom of God, as in the art by which it was made . . . evening twilight turns into morning as soon as knowledge turns to the praise and love of its Creator. When the creature does this in the knowledge of itself, this is the first day; when it does so in the knowledge of its firmament . . . this is the second day.
There was a thread recently on /r/Christianity titled Does young earth creationism really have the support of the historical church?. Everyone wanted to dissociate the ancients from "modern" Young Earth Creationism -- that is, "scientific young earth creationism (i.e. the idea that we can demonstrate empirically that the earth is less than 10000 years old)." I suppose this is fair.
Not a historian, but I read Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), which is, to grossly oversimplify it, more or less a manual explaining some of the difficulties and perplexities that arise when one takes the Torah too literally. For example, he'll cite conflicting passages about seeing "the face of God" and being told that God has no form, and say that since the (Hebrew) word for face can occasionally be used figuratively (English example: face up), then we must take the Torah figuratively when a literal reading fails. I know your question is specifically about Christian Fundamentalism, but I thought it'd be a good start to show that biblical (or at least Old Testament) literalism has been around for close to a millennium.
This is a good question, and part of it -- the novelty of young earth creationism -- has actually been asked before. There are some good answers here, including my own. In brief, I pointed to Ronald Numbers, who wrote an extensive study of modern creationism, and argued that literalism as an alternative to science, posed as a competing answer to the question of human origins, is relatively new, if "creationism" is not. This might be a tautology -- creationism as a response to evolution didn't exist before evolution -- but it suggests an important point. Namely, creationism as hostile to empiricism is a new thing.
Alternatively, people debate the extent to which Augustine of Hippo and other church fathers believed in "creationism": you can see my answer and others in the linked thread. Basically, early Christians were not what people would call today literalists, in that they raised questions about how faith should incorporate or treat science.
Fundamentalism as a movement itself began in the early twentieth century as a reaction to both Darwinism and German biblical criticism, the foundational text being The Fundamentals (1915), a collection of essays edited by AC Dixon and later editions by Ruber Archer Torrey. So 'fundamentalism' is a modern American phenomenon on that sense.
HOWEVER, conflating 'fundamentalism' with 'reading the Bible literally' is a big mistake - the fact is, before the 19th century, most Christians had little reason to read the Scriptures as anything other than broadly literally. The doctrine of Original Sin as formulated by Augustine and his successors depended on a literal Adam; the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), one of the earliest mass-printed books was an illustrated world history that depicted human history beginning in the Garden and regarded the Old Testament as factually accurate; Columbus was convinced that he was going to find the Garden of Eden somewhere in the Americas (http://masoniblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/promised-land-in-age-of-discovery.html?m=1).
I think Reza Aslan stated in his book Zealot that few people read the Bible literally before the 19th century. This would be clearly false. Modern fundamentalism may be a myth of 'old time religion' but the liberal counter-myth is just as damaging historically. Attempting to shoehorn modern liberal theology, gay-friendly or feminist readings of Scripture and claim the historical support of the Church simply denies history. Maurice Casey in his Jesus biography (2010) covers some of these efforts and explains how unfounded most of them are. People are welcome to any interpretation or reading they like, but rewriting history to discredit your opponents or whitewash the ignorance of predecessors is not cool.
The essential assumptions of modern Christian Fundamentalism come from a series of pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals, which were published 1910-1915. Thus the name.
The pamphlets themselves were written as a reaction to a large number of theological issues that arose from the Enlightenment, particularly due to Christian and Jewish theologians actually talking to each other for a change.
Source: Whose Bible Is It? by Jaroslav Pelikan.
Now obviously, these ideas existed before the pamphlets were produced; otherwise, they would not have been so successful, would not have been published in the first place. That said, making statements such as "liberal Christians find comfort in..." like /u/koine_lingua does is misleading; theology itself is something that has always been in flux, something you can see within the Bible itself, as worshipping of a god which began as a polytheistic tribal religion, then became a national religion, then became monotheistic, then became not merely the god of a people but of the world; then, we have a savior quite different from the one predicted, and debate over what the divine is that continues today. What it all means has always been in flux, with parties arguing for different meanings all along. Those who got their writings canonized did not necessarily mean what previous authors meant, and not all that is canon is written.
Davis Young's book The Biblical Flood quotes Philo of Alexandria as saying that the account of Noah can't be literally true, because it says that the winds caused the flood waters to dry up, but we know that the wind blows across the sea all the time and has done so for centuries and the sea isn't dried up. Philo still believed that the Noah story was basically accurate, but this detail had to be an oversimplification or something, since that couldn't be right.
The book itself tracks centuries of how religious thinkers thought about the Flood, and mostly what it works out to is "They believed it happened until they had reasons not to." And they did find evidence consistent with that belief: when fish bones were found in the side of a mountain, that was probably because of the Flood. How else would a fish get all the way up there?
But they also found spiritual lessons in Biblical stories, and several of Jesus' stories are specifically labeled as parables. So they would also see that Noah lived because he was obedient, God had a plan, and so on, and what we learn for ourselves is that God has a plan and we should be obedient. As reasons to doubt the literalness of the Flood came along, people began to put more emphasis on the parable aspect than on the literal aspects.
Fundamentalism was a response to this; the reactionary quality of rejecting learning and study didn't exist until some people were alarmed by where learning and study were going.
If you asked someone of a few centuries ago whether the Flood was a literal story, they'd say yes, because they had no reason not to. But they wouldn't be what we call Fundamentalists, because they had no problem with higher learning and study.
Another book you might find interesting is The Creationists, by Ronald Numbers.
If you're interested, I wrote a short paper a few years ago comparing views of Scripture between Augustine and a few representative American fundamentalists. I think you might find it gives a helpful perspective on your question.
Here's a link (PDF warning)
I'll leave the heavy lifting to others here who are clearly better educated on the subject but one trait that identifies fundamentalism is anticipation of the apocalypse. This has been going on for a couple of thousand years, give or take a few hundred years. Probably longer.
I grew up in that environment and it wasn't until I was leaving my teens that I realized that people had been making the same predictions all this time.
A decent book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/History-End-World-Controversial-Civilization/dp/0061349879
Paul referenced Adam's influence as a type of Christ's own. Jesus referenced Abraham's God as a type of Himself. If the histories are figures? Zeus has as much import and impact. And they each would have known that. Novel sophistication is not. 'Scripture is true'? not new. Postmodern-ish revision? also not new.
From Eugen Weber's Western Civilization
Paul’s epistle to the Galatians should bring other historical problems to mind. Paul’s rejection of Jewish Law and his insistence on “justification by faith” would inspire Martin Luther in his struggle to reform the Catholic Church in the 16th century. During the age of the Protestant Reformation, the peoples of Europe formed armed camps based on varying interpretations of Paul’s comments on “justification”—i.e. salvation. Paul was thus one of the most creative and influential thinkers in all of western history: truly the “second founder” of Christianity.
So within 20 years of the Crucifixion, Christianity was virtually divided into 2 hostile camps. It is hard to say just how this quarrel would have been resolved. Then politics intervened.