Of course, this emphasis on education had a profound impact on Christianity and the West. As more people became educated, they no longer tolerated the faith belonging to a small intellectual elite. The printing press, the rise of the middle class, nationalism, but as much as anything, the spread of an educated and reading laity led to the Protestant revolt. The very idea of a university rose out of the Greek, Western, Christian focus on intellectual pursuit of the faith, which is ironic because most universities these days want nothing to do with God. More than anybody Western Christians have been tempted to reduce the faith to a matter of the intellect.
Fundamentalism is mostly mental, concerned primarily with orthodoxy, with having right belief.
Like the Protestant Scholastics of an earlier generation, and the Pharisees of an earlier generation still, they focus so much upon knowledge, study, and agreement in doctrine, on dogma and law and principle, they run the risk of confusing faith with belief and trust in God with intellectual assent to ideas about God. Trust in God's grace is replaced by the intellectual work of knowing the right answers. In other words, the faith is all in your head. Though my own thinking has taken me to a different place from most of them, I suppose I am too Western and academic, perhaps even too fundamentalist in my background to abandon the intellectual pursuit of truth altogether. What we believe does make a difference in how we behave in the world.