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.

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Death & life

29 October 2024

4 min read

There’s fear or fascination as cultures confront death

If Western society discussed death more openly, would Halloween’s appeal hold such sway?

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

A bronze statue of a resting angel sits atop a low stone grave.

A grave in a Dresden cemetery.

Veit Hammer on Unsplash.

Watching Christians jump and sing “death is defeated” was a strange experience.

As a new believer in Christianity from a Hindu background, I was struck by how Christians approached death. While I had seen reincarnation as a path to heaven, I couldn’t understand why the church either hesitated to talk about death or celebrated it so intensely. Why were Christians sometimes dancing and other times, silent about death?

During my early years in Christ if ever the topic of death arose from the fun times I was having with Christian friends it was almost always met with a dead silence - excuse the pun. On one occasion, the husband of a close friend in our small church community had passed away due to cancer. I was one of the first to make a call to his widowed wife. When my friends heard that I had done this the response was unusual, “well done Rahil!” “That’s so good Rahil.” Strange. I was sensitive over the phone, but it wasn’t that hard. Then I asked the others if they were going to make a call and the response was equally peculiar, “erm, I can’t” or “I just can’t do that... ” Puzzling.

Recently, I came across the GodPod podcast, which shed some light for me on this hesitation. In an interview with Dr Lydia Dugdale about her book The Lost Art of Dying, a surprising statistic caught my attention: “In the 18th century, one-third of church sermons were about death and eternity.” I had to play that line back multiple times. In contrast, today’s sermons often focus on personal purpose, calling, or spiritual gifts. All important, but are we missing a vital balance—one eye on eternity, the other on our present lives?

Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East?

This avoidance of death became even more apparent during the Covid pandemic. When the Delta strain hit India in 2021 it caused a massive widespread devastation and death. The funeral pyres were filling the sacred river banks up and down the country. At one point there was no more wood left to burn the bodies. It had run out! Urban crematoriums were overrun and so people left their deceased loved ones to simply float down the nearest river in the hope that the next life would be easier.

I followed the detailed footage of the funeral pyres and bodies choking various holy rivers. It was meticulously covered by the western media. Even PM Boris Johnson at the time cancelled his trip to India because the Covid death crisis was “out of control.” It’s Interesting how the western media flippantly assumed that death could be controlled. And then an eminent academic in India wrote a remarkable article for Project Syndicate. Brahma Chellaney’s opening paragraph was,

“When reporting on any mass tragedy, a basic rule of journalism is to be sensitive to the victims and those who are grieving. Western media, which double as the international media, usually observe this rule at home but discard it when reporting on disasters in non-Western societies.”

The author’s accurate observation demanded my attention. Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East? Although Chellaney uses the concept of ‘grieving’ for his argument, there really isn’t such a spiritual concept across Indic faiths as Christianity knows of it. Of course, there is sadness and loss but grieving in the deep spiritual sense, not really. Is that why the Western media found it easier to cover death in the East? Because the secular (although Christian) West knows of the concept of grief so well at home? Or is it because the West do actually want to confront death without hiding and when they see other cultures do it so openly (and a tad bit casually) they are drawn to it? As morbid as it sounds (and I’ll do the British thing and apologise here) there might actually be a healthy interest with the way certain cultures embrace death that the west is seeking to find an expression for.

Brahmar Mukherji chaired the Department of Biostatistics at Michigan University. In an interview with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2021 she stated that India as a society sees death differently which is why the death toll along with so many other complex and practical issues was so high in that nation during Covid. They embrace it more easily. I am not promoting reckless behaviour around rules. One can’t play with a rattlesnake and then call it faith. My hope is that the reader finds hope when confronting death with a Christian lens. Why have themes of Euthanasia and Assisted Dying become such a big thing in the West and not in the East?

Which brings me to Halloween. It’s a leap, I know, but think about it: if Western societies and churches discussed death and eternity more openly, would Halloween’s macabre appeal hold such sway? Dressing up as a ghoul or a skeleton seems to be a playful, yet safe way to confront our fear of death—something we’re eager to do from behind a mask. That lighthearted, but jarring moment in the Barbie film comes to mind: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Maybe that’s the real question we should be asking ourselves. Not just on Halloween, but frequently. How do we truly confront death—with fear, with fascination, or with the hope of something beyond?