Richard Dawkins is no stranger to shaking the cultural tree to see what falls out. In 2024, Dawkins was interviewed by Rachel Johnson on British TV. He noted in that interview that he was a “cultural Christian.” And did that statement ever create a ruckus among both the faithful and nonbelievers. Some even went so far as to claim Dawkins had converted from his lifeling atheism. Piffle.*

The Christian Concern website asked “Is ‘Cultural Christianity’ good news?” and said no in response. The site noted that “cultural Christians… want some of the ‘fruit’ of Christianity without the ‘root’.” No “cultural Christians” appear to have been interviewed to back up that claim. Christian Concern also wrote, “Who would’ve thought we’d ever hear those words come out of Richard Dawkins’ mouth, even a few years ago?”

Methinks the author here mistakes the point of Dawkins’ statement, possibly deliberately. Although I can’t speak for him, I was also brought up in much the same cultural environment and, while I do my best to avoid or ignore it, there are simply inescapable elements and references to it all around me.

Holiday store and restaurant closings, church bells on Sunday, Santa Claus parades down main street, Jehovah’s Witnesses coming to my door, local box stores stocking Xmas lights and decorations in September or Easter chocolates in January. Hearing carols on every radio station and in box stores from November through December. I pass Christian graveyards and churches as I drive through town. I recall the heated debates over opening stores on Sunday, and challenges to and defences for the 1906 Lord’s Day Act. It’s difficult to find a space or time that doesn’t have something Christian-ish in it.

And it’s further afield, in the daily news cycle. Every statement by whoever is the current Pope gets into the national news. CONservative MPs pull stunts with bibles in the House of Commons. The treasonous, Maple MAGA Alberta premier panders to alt-right pseudo-Christians at a conference and invokes Jesus in her promotion of oil pipelines. CONservatives attack a bill that removes religious exemptions from hate speech on the grounds it is an assault on religious freedom. Far-right pastors are demanding the repeal of laws that granted women the vote in the USA. Christians and pseudo-Christians are constantly in the news and a lot of people pay attention because of their religion.**

Despite these, I don’t consider myself a “cultural Christian” like Dawkins, but I recognize its role embedded in the culture around me. And, as an avid reader of history and politics, I am well aware that religion has been entwined with politics and governments for the past four millennia, and still is deeply rooted in many places (like the USA and Iran). I believe I understand Dawkins’ comment better than some of his opponents (who seem overly eager to twist his words to fit their own pro-religion narrative).

Dawkins attempted to clarify his comment, saying, “I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian.” And while rightwing Christians and their Talibangelist cohorts might take exception over any suggestion of a separation of church and state, Dawkins has a point worth discussing.***

Christianity — albeit in different forms, sects, and effects — has so thoroughly seeped into Western civilization and culture in the past two millennia that it cannot be extracted. In just one example, many non-believers in Canada or the USA celebrate (or at least participate in) Christmas, despite their lack of religious faith, solely for the community and familial aspects of the season. The Easter Bunny/candy trope is another  example of how a religious event has become secularized (and commercialized), although still retaining religious connotations for others.

Similar cultural weaving exists in Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures: in their respective regions they have influenced art, architecture, music, theatre, literature, business, and language outside merely the religious aspects. You don’t need to be a believer to appreciate or participate in the cultural aspects. One can stand in a cathedral and feel awe at the architecture without ever believing there’s an Invisible Magical Sky Man lurking in its rafters.

Esme Partridge, on UnHerd, called Dawkins’ views naive, adding,

That the fruits of Christianity can be saved while its roots are severed speaks to a naivety that is perhaps typical of Dawkins’s generation. Baby boomers wanted to tear down the conventions of traditional society and yet, at the same time, overwhelmingly benefitted from them.

Methinks that’s a stretch; are department store Santas, elevator carols, and plastic snow men and pop artists singing Jingle Bells really the “fruits of Christianity?” What about sparkling icicle lights inflatable reindeer on the lawn? What are those fruits anyway? Architecture? The pyramids in Egypt and Mexico, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, the Parthenon, the Coliseum, the Forbidden City, the Taj Mahal, Al Aqsa mosque… just some of many structures built without the help of Christianity. Literature? Poetry? Sculpture? Philosophy? Science? Government? There are many examples of them all without Christian involvement.

How about witch and heretic burnings, inquisitions, crusades, the trials of Galileo and Giordano Bruno to suppress knowledge, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, creationism, residential schools, prohibition, bombing abortion clinics and killing their doctors, book bans and burning, slavery, racism, wars (Trump’s war on Iran for one), and the genocide of native and aboriginal people worldwide? They are most certainly the “fruits” of Christianity. MAGA and their Talibangelist base are two of those “fruits” that have rotted on the Christian tree and infected whole limbs of it. The mythical Rapture and its conspiracy-addled believers are Christian. Many flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers online claim to be Christians and base their anti-science views on biblical verses.

Partridge throws the baby out with the metaphorical bathwater, as Christian Today notes::

“Dawkins’s belief that it is possible to reap the cultural benefits of Christianity while publicly undermining its legitimacy is perhaps an expression of this generational mentality,” she wrote. This was also the attitude of Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu, who believed that liberal values would be upheld without Christianity. Partridge points out that this has been shown to be false too, as they have mutated into “anarchic systems of self-interest which undermine the virtues upon which liberalism was originally premised.”

She adds her voice to the calls for a renewal. “Like any organism, Christianity must recover its roots, or it will die — a fact of life which, as an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins ought to appreciate,” she said. Excuse me if I am skeptical, but calls for renewal in religion always seem to lead to more fundamentalism and extremism, coupled with less tolerance and less compassion.

Theos CEO Chine McDonald, writing in Premier Christianity magazine, wondered,

 Perhaps Professor Dawkins had in fact finally turned to the Lord after encountering God at Greenbelt 18 months ago?

I assume she was being sarcastic (Greenbelt is a Christian arts festival that Dawkins attended in 2022; there’s no evidence he “encountered” a deity or anything supernatural in his time there). On the Theos Think Tank site, she wrote:

We’ve come a long way from the antagonism of New Atheism that made it its mission to denounce all religion, including Christianity. But I’ll save my excitement for when Dawkins et al start talking about the ways in which their lives have been turned upside down by the radical love of Jesus Christ.

Yeah, that’s not happening. It’s a long way from singing along with carols over a department store speaker to praying and singing in a church, and then blockading an abortion clinic and trying to repeal women’s voting rights. Both done in the name of Christianity. Radical love for a guy who died two millennia ago seems a bit ghoulish to me.

Dawkins added in the interview, “I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.” And in an essay following that interview, Dawkins clarified,

Christianity itself is nonsensical wishful thinking. That has been my view all my adult life. Nothing has changed. Nor will it as long as I retain my sanity. I am a cultural Christian atheist.

Dawkins also said he regretted making that statement because of how it was interpreted. In an interview in Reason, he said,

Well, I’m rather sorry I said that thing about being a cultural Christian, because people have taken it to mean I’m sort of sympathetic toward the belief.

Dawkins is not the only person to identify as a “cultural Christian.” Wikipedia provides a long list of people and groups sharing that view. And it has an entry for “Christian atheism,” a topic that might require another post and a deeper dive into the theological implications of the term. Not the least of my disagreement with it is that Christianity includes a wide range of sects and often conflicting beliefs and scriptures. There isn’t a single Christian culture: the Catholicism of Rome does not mesh well with the Mormonism of Utah or with the Talibangelism of Texas or the Christian doomsday and rapture cults scattered worldwide. Dawkins might better have described himself as a “cultural Anglican.”

Dawkins’ essay ends with something I can agree with him on (emphasis added):

Let me offer something better. Be a cultural scientist. Rejoice in your membership of a species, Homo sapiens, that over four billion years evolved a brain capable of working out the true reason for its existence on this pale blue backwater of the Milky Way. As a cultural scientist, bravely inhabit the real world, the increasingly understood universe whose swelling grandeur puts all religions to shame.

And in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, let me add, Ramen!

Notes:

* I have long been a fan of Dawkins and read several of his books on evolution and evolutionary biology. In that field, he is outstanding. I also have his book, The God Delusion, in my library and have read it twice. I agree with most of what he says, and, although I am also an atheist, I don’t consider myself quite as radical in my disbelief and disregard for religion as he appears. However, I recommend the book to everyone. Religion and faith should not be taken for granted, and should be rigorously challenged in any nation where it is part of a government or bureaucracy.

** The far-right, so-called Christian Nationalists are actually pseudo-Christians, better known as Talibangelists or Christofascists. That’s Nationalist as in Nazi. They don’t care about faith: for them is is merely performance, politics, and theatrics. What they really care about is power, money, and controlling others. Ever hear one of them quote Matthew 25 or the Beatitudes? Of course not: those verse are too “woke.” Can’t have compassion or caring in their churches. Instead, they always find some verse that justifies their hatred and repression of others.

*** Not content to just flail away on Christianity, Dawkins also took shots at Islam. He’s an inclusive atheist: no faith is too big or small not to be includes in his snark. In the Reason interview, he added, “I would not wish to live in a country where the penalty for apostasy is death, and gay people are thrown off high buildings, and women are stoned to death for the crime of being raped.”
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