A cultural Christian is someone who wants the cultural and moral inheritance of Christianity without its metaphysical claims, but can that inheritance survive once the claims are abandoned?
Photo By Karl Withakay - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136496728
In March 2024, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, told a London radio host that he calls himself a “cultural Christian.” He doesn't believe a word of it, he said, but he loves the hymns and the carols, he feels at home in the Christian ethos, and he thinks it would be truly dreadful if Britain swapped Christianity for some other religion.
Reaction to Dawkins' surprising statement has been varied. Some Christians worry that the metaphysical claims of Christianity will somehow suffer, others were delighted. Still others rolled their eyes claiming that Dawkins can't claim the Christian worldview without accepting the Christian creed. Plenty of atheists were annoyed that their champion had gone soft.
I want to take Dawkins seriously instead, because he has provided an extremely useful question. If a lifelong critic of Christianity looks around the world and says I would rather live downstream of this, what precisely is he comparing this to? (Of course a great many thinking Christians have been asking the exact same question for centuries; Augustine wrote The City of God in the 5th century.)
What a "cultural Christian" is
A cultural Christian is someone who keeps the social habits, the ethical values, and the beauty of Christianity without holding to its beliefs. He may not believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but he does think people have dignity and value, that the weak deserve protection, and that Christmas and Easter are worth celebrating.
That position may well be sentimental or lazy, but before we ridicule it, we should run a simple test. Every culture is shaped by some religion or worldview, even if most of its people no longer practice it. So ask the same question of each: what does the leftover social landscape look like in different cultures if we were to remove belief?
The test: look at the fruit
Jesus said you can know a tree by its fruit. So let's look at fruit of the trees of culture, fairly and carefully, because every one of these traditions has produced at least something positive as well as real harm.
Cultural Buddhism. In places like Japan and Thailand, Buddhism has shaped a deep respect for gentleness, restraint, and the quiet of the mind, which is good. But it does not give a doctrine that every individual person has equal, irreplaceable worth. Buddhism's own teaching says the self is an illusion, and the culture it leaves behind tends to emphasize harmony and duty over individual rights.
Cultural Hinduism. India's traditions have given the world astonishing philosophy, art, and spiritual depth. They have also left a cultural residue in which caste, the ranking of people by birth, which critics say the karma doctrine has been used to justify, and reincarnation have proved extremely harmful. India's own reformers, including Christians, have had to fight the social effects of these for generations.
Cultural Islam. Islamic civilization once led the world in mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. But in many places today the cultural residue includes draconian laws and customs about women, apostasy, and religious minorities that Dawkins himself singled out as an extremely undesirable alternative when he explained his preference. You can disagree with how he said it but you can't deny that he is making an argument about cultural fruit.
Cultural atheism. This one is the least discussed, because we don't usually think of atheism as a culture, but it has been tried. In the twentieth century, states in the Soviet Union and Maoist China (et al) enforced atheism as official policy, and the result was not a gentler humanism, in fact it was quite the opposite. It was labor camps, persecution of believers, torture, starvation, and dehumanization, and tens of millions dead. If you hold an argument for the brutality of religious cultures, you would have to acknowledge far greater twentieth century brutality of irreligious cultures.
Someone may object that these were political tyrannies, not philosophies. But the same could be said for religious tyrannies. The question still remains: what in atheism gave license for thought and speech control? Atheism, by itself, says only that there is no God. It cannot tell you why people matter.
Scandinavia is often held up as the happy example of secular culture. But Scandinavian countries are historically Lutheran, with Christian moral assumptions undergirding their laws, schools, and welfare systems. They are a poster child for cultural Christianity as a society. They may be secularizing but they are doing so from a Christian, not a post-Christian foundation.
The Enlightenment was culturally Christian
The Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s is often told as a story of reason breaking free from religion, and there is truth in that. Voltaire, for example, mocked the church, Hume doubted miracles, and many thinkers clashed with Christian authorities.
But look for a moment at what it retained. John Locke, a founder of modern liberty, argued for human equality and natural rights by appealing to the idea that every person is made in the image of God. The USA was formed on the same political ideal. Isaac Newton wrote more about theology than physics and believed he was uncovering the laws a rational Creator had built into the cosmos. Immanuel Kant built a whole ethics on the idea that every person must be treated as an end, never merely as a means. And when slavery was finally challenged, much of the energy behind it came from Christians, like William Wilberforce and the Quakers, who believed that no human being should be property. Lord Shaftesbury and the factory reforms, which were driven by evangelical conviction, pulled society back from the industrialized exploitation of labor.
Peter Gay famously called the Enlightenment a “rise of modern paganism,” a return to classical thought, and that’s certainly worth thinking about. For example: the pagan world of Greece and Rome never produced the idea that every human being, slave or free, rich or poor, has equal and unconditional worth. That revolutionary idea came from somewhere and by far the best explanation is that it came from the claim that all humans are made by God and in God's image, and that God became a human being and died for all. These are decidedly Christian ideas.
The Enlightenment rebelled against the church while running on moral assumptions that it had inherited from the church. That is precisely what a cultural Christian is: chewing happily on the good fruit while taking the root for granted, as though the fruit arose from the natural goodness of the human heart. Both history and Scripture suggest otherwise. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9).
Fruit
A fresh bowl of fruit is beautiful. It smells sweet and it looks alive, but it has been separated from the root, and it is slowly dying, even though for a few days you can't tell.
I’d like to ask the cultural Christian whether a society can indefinitely keep the fruit of Christianity, such as human dignity, equal rights, compassion for the weak, and the freedom of conscience, after it has cut itself from the root that grew them?
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of Christianity, thought the answer was no. He mocked thinkers who gave up God but kept Christian morality, as though the morality would stand without the foundation. He rightly predicted that it would crumble, and that the result would be something much darker. You don't have to agree with Nietzsche's conclusion but he was a more honest atheist than many subsequent athiests.
The other side
None of this means Christian cultures have a spotless record. They don't. Christians have defended slavery, launched crusades, and persecuted heretics and Jews.
But do you notice how those wrongs were eventually challenged? Abolitionists argued from Scripture. Reformers appealed to Christ against the church's own failures. Luther posted his ninety-five theses to the door of the university church in Wittenberg, where he was a professor. Christianity carries within it the standards by which its own followers can be judged, and Christianity, when it gets off track (including Luther himself), has usually been pulled back by Christians, not by outsiders. That is a lot rarer than it sounds, especially for a 2,000 year old religion. See if you can get an HOA of 10 people to agree after 3 years if you’d like a control group.
So where does that leave us?
Dawkins is half right, he’s on the right track, he just needs to go one thought further. He is right that what we have inherited is precious, exceedingly rare, and hard won (a culture our ancestors laid their lives down to defend). He’s also right that it would be dreadful to lose it. But the natural instinct, of both the atheist and the Christian, to protect the fruit should lead us to ask some deep and honest questions about the root.
I am not asking anyone to believe something just because it’s what I believe. I am asking that we look at the fruit of every tradition, honestly, and ask what it produces socially and where it came from. If the answer points back to a person who said that the last would be first, and that every life is worth dying for, and who taught to love your neighbor as yourself and to lay your life down for others, then the cultural Christian has more to think about than he realized.
The fruit is still available to all, and so is the root.
