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

Character

Comment

Leading

18 February 2025

4 min read

Carney’s call for character still resonates now more than ever

In both business and politics, the vocation of public service is at risk.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

Mark Carney sits between two other speakers, holding a mic.

Mark Carney on the campaign trail.

On May 27 2014, a group of business, political and faith leaders gathered in London for the inaugural Conference on Inclusive Capitalism.

As a 23-year-old Masters student at Cambridge University at the time, it was a defining moment, this in the final months of my first stint in the UK. One of three young people invited, I had prepared carefully and waited impatiently in line in central London on a boiling summer evening.

The most poignant moment of the conference, in hindsight, was less the attendees or the historic venue, but rather a particular speech that I continue to reflect on a decade later.

The speech in question was one given by the then Bank of England Governor, the Canadian Mark Carney, and it was called ‘Capitalism: Creating a Sense of the Systemic’.

It was, and remains, one of the most impressive speeches I have heard, and whose message is as important as ever.

It is a message that Canadians today, as well as others living in Western democracies, need to hear as much as at any time in recent history.

In the wake of the financial crisis, Carney raised a point that is seldom asked in business or political circles - that of responsibility, and more specifically, of vocation. It is as follows:

"To build this sense of the systemic, business ultimately needs to be seen as a vocation, an activity with high ethical standards, which in turn conveys certain responsibilities."

And soon after: "It can begin by asking the right questions. Who does finance serve? Itself? The real economy? Society? And to whom is the financier responsible? Herself? His business? Their system?"

He references Michael Sandel, the philosopher who in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets takes aim at the "skyboxification" of American life.

The example used by Sandel is taken from the sport of baseball. In the not-too-distant past, people from across all walks of life sat together in the stands, the low ticket prices allowing baseball to be the great unifier across divides.

Today? Expensive box seats see the rich and poor seated in different areas, the rich even physically above - looking down on - others. The same goes for ice hockey, soccer, or other sports which no longer see diverse families, across income levels, sitting together.

In short, if you impose a price on a good or increase the price of a good significantly (baseball tickets), the nature of value of that good changes, often irreparably so. Lost is a sense of fairness, and a reduction in the potential to repair divides.

In short, the idea of public service - that to be first, you must come last - seems increasingly bizarre to people.

We live in a world where immediate gratification and personal enrichment are particular cultural values. If there is any tell on the character of President Trump and his new White House, it is the launch of the Trump and Melania meme coins before the Presidential Inauguration: politics used for the advancement of personal interest.

In short, the idea of public service - that to be first, you must come last - seems increasingly bizarre to people. (A conversation with a young person several weeks ago struck me especially on this front, in which I had to explain that the purpose of politics is to serve others, not yourself.)

Carney's 'Creating a Sense of the Systemic' speech is therefore a reminder of what we need from political leaders: people who, outside of compelling rhetoric focusing on putting their nations first, actually consider their responsibilities toward others and who take these responsibilities seriously.

These responsibilities are vocations to which we are called. The responsibilities are not about us but rather are part of the system (made up of people and institutions) of which we are a part, and beyond.

In Canada, the potential election of Mark Carney as Leader of the Federal Liberals, and in turn as Prime Minister, is a step in the direction of a public service focused on responsibility and vocation. It is a step toward a more vocationally oriented public service, which our world needs. Whatever one's partisan affiliations, having political leaders acting with a sense of responsibility toward people and a higher calling beyond themselves is something we should embrace.

If Carney is to channel the same energy, poise and focus of this May 2014 speech, then there is a good chance the Canadian Federal Liberals win a future term. This is because our world is, deep down, yearning for political leadership based on real character, sense of purpose and responsibility beyond the self. But there is equally an opportunity for Pierre Poilievre to do the same, emphasizing the need for character, purpose and responsibility toward Canadians.

For Canada, it is a focus on responsibility, a sense of the broader system and our calling as Canadians in the world that can serve as a foil to the leadership in the United States.

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