Column

Atheism

Belief

Comment

12 April 2024

5 min read

Defining cultural Christianity

There’s already a backlash against Dawkins and the New Theists.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A speaker turns from the podium against a backdrop reading 'Centre for Sckeptical Inquiry

Richard Dawkins speaking at a sceptics event, 2022.

CSI

“Richard Dawkins says he’s a cultural Christian,” I said over breakfast.

“What’s that?” she asked.

I had a stab at it. “Someone who doesn’t buy the Christian faith, but likes hymns and churches and to live in a nominally Christian country, because it’s decent. Apparently.”

“So what’s new?” she said.

She has a point. I’ve just completed a decade as a rural parish priest and plenty of people came to church because it’s a respectable, middle-class thing to do. It’s as comforting as it is comfortable.

But cultural Christianity is a thing of the moment not just because of the pop-atheist Dawkins. To be honest, he’s struggled to retain his increasingly embarrassed atheist flock over the past decade, so in the public sense he’s not much of a trophy. But there are those of higher and more surprising profiles, who have come out for Christianity as the very essence of our culture and the bulwark against something much worse (for which read Islam).

The backlash against New Theism has been swift. And, strangely, most of it hasn’t come from humanists and atheists.

A key text for cultural Christians is Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. It posits, inter alia, that Christianity is the foundation of our civilisation, even the bits that try to destroy the faith. Holland has more recently experienced a miraculous cure from cancer through intercession (which sounds suspiciously like deal-making prayer, but never mind).

Then there’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose journey from Islam to atheism to Christianity traces her developing conviction that secular humanism is a reed in the wind against the threat to the West from militant Islam. Holland and Ali, among many others, including women’s rights activist Louise Perry in her apologia for traditional Christian morality, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, fuel the enthusiasm of Justin Brierley for a new renaissance in his joyful book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.

Collectively, these are called the New Theists, who ride against the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse (more accurately, perhaps, the four hacks of the new millennium), Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris.

The backlash against New Theism has been swift. And, strangely, most of it hasn’t come from humanists and atheists, but from what one might call established Christians. I have heard the likes of Ali and Holland called cosplay Christians and their faith derided as Christianity-lite.

Dawkins still says the Christian faith is nonsense, but who’s to say the spirit isn’t moving in him?

Robert Thompson, a north London priest, has posted that “we will be in the midst of Christian revival… when we actually reorder our lives around the abused Christ and raise the abused Christ’s body”. He argues against Brierley’s championing of London’s oldest church, St Bartholomew the Great, because it’s “the gayest church in town” (no, I didn’t follow this line of argument either) and critiques Brierley’s account of Holland’s witness (if not conversion) by comparing it with “the worst Easter Day sermon I’ve ever heard”.

I accept that this is a savage paraphrase in its brevity. But it’s all there and it comes not from any of the (now old) New Atheists, but from someone ordained to the priesthood. Meanwhile, Chine Macdonald, director of the Christian think tank Theos, writes in relation to his claims of cultural Christianity that “Dawkins isn’t actually a fully paid-up follower of Jesus” and that she’ll save her excitement over New Theists until they start “talking about the ways in which their lives have been turned upside down by the radical love of Jesus Christ.”

Frankly, all this sounds a bit snobbish and patronising, as if there’s a minimum bar for Christian entry, as if it’s cosplay Christians indulging in Christianity-lite. Sure, Dawkins still says the Christian faith is nonsense, but who’s to say the spirit isn’t moving in him? Frankly, I have people at my communion rail who say the same thing. And, to be brutally honest, I can count on one hand those of my very many Christian friends who claim that their world has been turned upside down by the radical love of Jesus Christ.

To be clear, Thompson and Macdonald have important things to say. Thompson writes movingly about his pastoral experience of cystic fibrosis patients in hospital, to take theological issue with Brierley for writing about “an unbiblical God who simply does not exist” as he waited with his patients “until they died… generally well before their 40th birthday.” No Holland miracle cures, please.

Macdonald writes usefully about the difference between the word “Christian” as an adjective and a noun, the New Theists being Christian adjectives in action. She also speaks of Dawkins’ talk of Christianity as a “decent” religion (as opposed to Islam) and his feeling “at home” in a Christian country as code for “whiteness”. To my shame, I hadn’t thought about that.

This would all be an ecclesiastical spat, like arguing about angels on a pinhead, if it weren’t for a darker danger beneath it. I think of former nun Karen Armstrong’s work on the dangers of religious fundamentalism when outsiders are excluded. In that context, I worry even more about those who claim that the New Theists are the work of “the enemy”, or Satan, because they “hollow out” our faith more insidiously than atheists.

In contrast to that, Bishop Graham Tomlin gave a sermon at Lambeth Palace the other day in which he referenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s claim to a faith that proclaims Christ at its centre, rather than worrying too much about the boundaries of the Christian community, which are always a bit fuzzy. I like that, because with fuzzy boundaries it becomes harder to exclude New Theists.

It’s tough being a Christian, whether new or old. When a rich young man comes to the Nazarene and asks how he can acquire the kingdom of heaven, he’s told to sell all he has, give the money to the poor and follow him.

None of us can reach that bar. But the implication I hold on to is that he’ll walk alongside us anyway. And that applies to everyone in this column, without exception. Now that’s what I call radical love.

Article

Attention

Comment

War & peace

1 November 2024

5 min read

Put poppy politics in the past and give Remembrance a hopeful future

Memory without hope will lead us to a dead-end.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

A woman walls along a war memorial wall covered in red poppies.

War memorial in Canberra.

Raelle Gann-Owens on Unsplash.

Remembrance Day is complicated. A nation shows its gratitude for the service and sacrifice of its armed forces and tries to connect to its history. Never far away, are poppy politics, along with anxiety about identity and forgetting, and fears about nationalism and militarism. Is this the way to remember?

Last November, protests in solidarity with Gaza dominated the headlines. On Armistice Day, hundreds of thousands of people marched through central London to demand a ceasefire. In the preceding weeks, there was vigorous debate about whether the march should be cancelled. There were several motivations for this: there were genuine fears of violence and extremism, and of disruption at the Cenotaph, but also questions of whether marching on Armistice Day was inappropriate or disrespectful.

The march itself was organised to minimise the risk of disrupting public commemorations of Remembrance. It started several hours after the two-minute silence and followed a route several miles from the cenotaph. It was mostly peaceful, although there were arrests for anti-Semitism, open support for terrorism and violent attacks on police officers. Armistice Day did see violence around the cenotaph, but this was from the self-described ‘Cenotaph Defenders’ who had organised a counter-demonstration against the Gaza march. The group of football hooligans and far-right EDL members gathered with poppy emblazoned banners declaring ‘Have some respect for British Heroes’. Within a few hours, the calls for respect had degenerated into violent attacks on serving uniformed officers, in this case the police.

The far-right’s adoption of remembrance symbolism can be seen as an extreme form of a wider entanglement of poppies and politics. The red paper poppy is a symbol of remembrance, but it has other connotations. For some it invokes patriotism and feelings of pride in their country, for others it represents conformity and militarism. Whether television news presenters are wearing them attracts disproportionate attention. In 2019, one Australian TV network had a very tasteless segment denouncing a rival station whose newscasters failed to wear poppies. The non-poppy wearing hosts were accused of failing in their duty to respect their country and to help preserve its culture and traditions. Regardless of the presenters’ actual reasons, this feels like a lot of baggage to load onto the delicate poppy, a symbol of quiet remembrance and gratitude.

Unsurprisingly, this has led many to question whether Remembrance Day has become detached from its original purposes. Twelve years after the death of the last British First World War veteran, there is little living connection to either of the two world wars. With this passage of time, there is a growing danger of mistaking the symbols of ceremonial Remembrance for the thing itself.

The focus of remembrance can shift away from the sheer horrors of war, from awe at the sacrifice of our forebears, and from the resolved ‘never again’ to fixing our gaze on the processed goods: the ceremonial silence, the poppies themselves and even the quality of our own emotional response.

Some commentators have suggested that organised Remembrance has served its purpose and is best forgotten, and that too much remembering is a bad thing, fuelling grudges and sectarian conflicts. Personally, I’m not convinced, but I do think our current Remembrance is missing something.

With a strong grounding in a shared past and a common hope, we would talk frankly about the times our country has fallen short without a sense of betraying our history or identity.

Reflecting on the importance and difficulty of memory, the writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel emphasised the importance of hope. Despite the horrific experiences of the twentieth century, for Wiesel it is hope that “summons the future”. Memory without hope would lead us to a dead-end, where we grip onto the past while feeling it slip like sand through our fingers. Many of the anxieties around Remembrance point to a hope deficit.

How can we remember with hope?

We need to broaden our perspective and engage better with our shared national story. We need to be grounded in our history, stories and myths but we also need to be drawn forward by the good things we have and will have. If this story is big enough then it will be a large tapestry of interwoven strands, and we will be able to generously incorporate new strands, other cultures with their own relationship to the past into it. We will also be better prepared for our remembering to deal with difficult questions about our nation’s history. With a strong grounding in a shared past and a common hope, we would talk frankly about the times our country has fallen short without a sense of betraying our history or identity. Hope would connect us better to our neighbours overseas and to the men and women who risk their lives to serve their country.

Last Remembrance Sunday, I helped our church’s under-7s make big paper poppies out of red paint and paper plates. The older children made origami peace cranes, and both the big red poppies and the peace cranes were placed by the altar. Here the focus is on remembering, but not just on our own memory. For me and countless other Christians, God’s memory is the real focus. God remembers us in our broken and war-torn world, and as Jesus, chose to join us in it, experiencing the worst of suffering while dying a painful death. All our personal and collective stories of pain, loss and sadness are met in this sacrifice. More than this, in the promises of restoration Jesus gave when He rose from the dead, they find a concrete hope.

What does Remembrance look like when it’s really grounded in hope? I think there would be a few noticeable signs. It would be less precious about itself. It would be more open to different emphases of remembrance such as the Peace Pledge Union and the white poppy, and excited about new creative expressions of remembrance like the ‘poppy walks’ organised by the Royal British Legion. More patient to the concerns of those who find the religious elements of Remembrance difficult. More integrated into our attitudes to current and ongoing conflict around the world. Most of all I hope it would make us really hungry for both peace and for righteousness.