Richard Dawkins’ Cultural Christianity
Or: Sawing off the branch that holds you up
Perhaps to the surprise of many, Richard Dawkins, famed “New Atheist” of yesteryear, in a recent radio interview called himself a “cultural Christian.” He was quick to clarify that he is “not a believer” in the actual teachings of Christianity, but nonetheless told the interviewer “I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.” This exchange was prompted by the discomfort Dawkins felt in the build-up to Easter seeing England full of lights celebrating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.
Beyond mere aesthetics, Dawkins also stated that he likes to “live in a culturally Christian country” because it is kind to women and tolerant of homosexuals, whereas Islam is fundamentally hostile to both. The tenets of political liberalism happily coincide for Dawkins with a basically Christian culture, though in reality, the specific form of tolerance Dawkins takes to be the Christian culture of Britain is a twisting of the Christian virtues of kindness and love. What is particularly striking is how the rise of militant Islam, combined with the rapidly increasing numbers of Muslims throughout the UK (and all of Europe for that matter), is what prompted Dawkins’ reflections on Christian culture.
Islam is a militantly intolerant religion, but it is also a confident one. Islamic teaching—as wrong as it is—provides its adherents with an understanding of why they exist and how they should live in the world. It gives them meaning and purpose. Political liberalism is impotent in the face of Islam because political liberalism has no positive vision for life. It puts forth certain rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and so forth. Yet, it is unable to tell you why you should even want to live, what you should desire to be free to do, or how you can find happiness. Some of those rights, properly understood, are good and important as far as they go. No one may kill or imprison anyone else without cause; in general, it is best to let people live their own lives without massive interference from others, and so on. Islam, however, has a positive vision for all of life, which is why it is bulldozing every existentially empty competitor in its path.
Dawkins, I’m sure without realizing it, is the heir to many more benefits of Britain’s Christian past than he realizes. In the interview, he primarily focused on the outward, mostly aesthetic, trappings of Christianity, as well as his conflation of Christianity and progressive social mores. But consider just a few of the much more foundational things citizens of nations formerly shaped by Christianity enjoy, though often take for granted. The English, as also their American cousins, are subject to a long history of defending the concept of impartial justice. This is a biblical concept, rooted in God’s own character: “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor” (Lev 19:15; etc.). Such a conception of justice, however, has not existed throughout most of human history, and certainly does not exist in Islam, which requires strict equity for fellow Muslims but allows deception, abuse, and violence toward non-Muslims. Christianity historically provided protections for the weak (orphans, widows, etc.), whereas such were often ruthlessly cast aside in non-Christian societies. The Old Princeton theologian Charles Hodge rightly wrote in his Systematic Theology that
Christianity is the basis of the common law of England, and is therefore of the law of this country . . . . Protestant Christianity has been, is, and must be the law of the land. Whatever Protestant Christianity forbids, the law of the land (within its sphere, i.e., within the sphere in which civil authority may appropriately act) forbids. Christianity forbids polygamy and arbitrary divorce, so does the civil law. (344)
Basic “Christian assumptions about human nature and justice” undergird the entire legal system of the Anglosphere world, as Russell Kirk puts it in a chapter entitled “The Christian Postulates of English and American Law.” That is to say: “Christian doctrine, in the United States as in Britain, is not the law; yet it is a major source of the law, and in particular a major foundation of jurisprudence.” Kirk does not mean that English or American laws are direct applications of the Bible. Rather, he highlights the many ways in which a basically Christian understanding of humanity and justice undergirds the law.
Richard Dawkins has not likely considered the full range of implications of abandoning the Christian culture he has so long sought to undermine in his attacks on the Christian faith. Many others have, however. And they are waiting in the wings to fill the vacuum left by the removal of “Christian assumptions about human nature and justice” from our political system and our laws. Militant Islam is one such competitor to Christianity. Leftism is another. The younger generation of leftists operates with very little doubt as to the superiority of their moral system (however incoherent it is in reality). The only thing stopping this generation from wholly imposing its system is a lack of power, but that will not be the case for long, absent determined resistance. You cannot, however, fill a vacuum with nothing.
Dawkins is the beneficiary of a political and legal system shaped over centuries by Christian principles of justice, human nature, and more. He appears blissfully unaware that he is sawing off the very branch suspending him safely above the mob of Islamists, radical leftists, and others, ready and willing to dispense with classical liberals like himself who only (rather ineffectively) impede their advance and triumph.
But as Kirk also notes:
When the religious understanding, from which a concept of law arose in a culture, has been discarded or denied, the laws may endure for some time, through what sociologists call ‘cultural lag’; but in the long run, the laws also will be discarded or denied. With this hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws— for the two arise for the most part from a common root of belief and experience cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain moral postulates of Christian teaching have been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we grope in judicial darkness.
The “cultural lag” in Western nations once shaped by Christian truth can lead someone like Dawkins to devote his life to attacking the very foundation of the benefits and freedoms he enjoys. As such, he (and others like him) simply hasten the day in which their own worst societal nightmares come true.
To those who seek to retain and extend the Christian shaping of their laws and society the strange case of Richard Dawkins should serve as a reminder that, while cultural Christianity is a good thing, it is also unsustainable in the long term without genuine spiritual renewal in society. The cultural lag between the widespread abandonment of genuine Christian belief and the full societal implications of that abandonment can easily deceive Christians, just as it has deceived Dawkins, into thinking otherwise.
Image Credit: Unsplash