Cultural Christianity: The Gateway Out and Back

Trendy Atheism May Be Stalling Out

On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists weaponized hijacked planes and killed nearly 3,000 Americans. I’ll never forget that terrible Tuesday. Overcome with shock and sadness, we gathered our church family that evening to pray for our nation. American churches were filled the next Sunday and the Sunday after that, and I thought this might be the beginning of a deep national revival.

But as the shock wore off and the sorrow turned to anger, our national unity and spiritual interest dissolved. From the crowd of pundits, analysts, and philosophers, rose the Four Horsemen of New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. 9/11 rattled our cultural foundations, but many still thought that religion is the answer. No, the New Atheists retorted, religion is the problem. Religion got us into this mess. Those suicide terrorists held a deep, sincere, life-orienting belief in God. The title of Christopher Hitchens’ book said it all: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Intellectual Permission to Disbelieve

It's difficult to measure the damage these four men did to Christianity. Atheists in the past were countercultural and odd, but they generally kept their atheism confined to ivory tower academics. But these atheists were evangelistic about their faith in no god and they were looking for converts. The Four Horseman made atheism cool for the masses, especially for people who judged themselves to be intelligent. You can believe in God or be smart, but not both. Smart people put their faith in…nothing. It takes great faith to believe that nothing times no one equals everything.

Their message: We are alone in this universe and we need only science, not religion, to answer life’s three greatest question: Where did I come from? Evolution. What is my purpose in life? Pursue happiness and inject my DNA into the next generation. What happens after I die? Nothing. The sooner we realize that the better. Our unenlightened ancestors needed a God of the Gaps; a deity card they could play whenever they had a question that science couldn’t answer. But scientific advances render the idea of God obsolete. Or so they said.

Since September 11, 2001, atheism has grown worldwide, including the United Kingdom and the United States, where Christianity has historically been the dominant worldview. In the United Kingdom, “atheists now outnumber theists.” In the United States, only 4% of Americans identify as atheists, but New Atheism contributed to Christianity’s decline. In 2001, 82% of Americans identified as Christians compared to 65% today. In 2008, 15% of Americans were not religiously affiliated. Today 28% now claim to have no religious affiliation.

Cultural Christianity

All Four Horseman were raised in the cultural Christianity of the United Kingdom and the United States. But cultural Christianity is not Biblical Christianity. Biblical Christianity adheres to the apostolic, historic Christian faith, captured in historic creeds like the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. But more than orthodoxy (orthodox belief), Biblical Christianity involves orthopraxy (orthodox behavior). Beyond Biblical doctrine and ethics, it also involves a personal trust and commitment to Jesus Christ that results in practices like faithful church attendance, frequent Bible study, private prayer, personal integrity, acts of love and mercy, and sincere warmhearted devotion to God. It’s marked by a willingness to make sacrifices while trying to “discern what is pleasing to the Lord” (Eph. 5:10).

Cultural Christianity on the other hand is a form of nominalism. Nominal Christians are Christian in name only. They identify as Christians by default because of where they live or because their parents identified as Christian. But they’re unable to articulate sound doctrine or unwilling to act on it. A cultural Christian adopts the name, the symbols, the traditions, the songs, and basic values of Christianity, but by Biblical definition, is not a genuine Christian. In that sense, cultural Christianity is a counterfeit Christianity, but its decline is a mixed bag.

Christopher Hitchens was raised as a nominal Christian and attended Christian boarding schools. When he rejected Christianity, he was likely rejecting cultural Christianity, often fraught with hypocrisy and used to hurt people.

My point is that the gateway from Biblical Christianity to atheism is often through cultural Christianity. But cultural Christianity is also the gateway an atheist can take to come to Christ.

The Gateway Is an Exit and an Entrance

The good news is that the gate opens both ways. Christopher Hitchens’ brother, Peter, followed the same path from cultural Christianity to atheism. He renounced the faith and left the church. But Peter returned to Christianity and today professes belief in the historic doctrine and ethics of the Christian faith. In 2010, he wrote The Rage Against God , partly in response to his brother’s book. In Rage, Peter describes his own journey from atheism back to Christianity. I can’t judge whether he is now trusting in Christ alone and has a warm-hearted walk with Jesus. But I know that in turning from atheism, he has at least made it back to cultural Christianity, and that’s going in the right direction.

More dramatic, Richard Dawkins created quite a stir recently when he declared himself to be a “cultural Christian.” Understand that in 2006 Dawkins wrote a book called “The God Delusion” and the title speaks for itself. People who believe in God are delusional. But almost 20 years later, Dawkins looked around his beloved England and began to suffer an epic case of “be-careful-what-you-wish-for.” For decades he was committed to scrubbing Christianity from the public square. But now he sees the results of his labor and doesn’t like it so much.

[Richard Dawkins being interviewed in 2024 on Leading Britain’s Conversations]

Instead of Christianity, England is getting Islam with its dangerously different worldview. So, in an Easter message to his nation in 2024, Dawkins said, “I call myself a cultural Christian…I feel at home in the Christian ethos.” England is losing its culture, its traditions, its unifying values, its songs and symbols, because England is losing Christianity. Maybe, pondered Dawkins, Christianity is a “decent religion” after all, at least compared to all other religions.

What made English culture so great is the greatness of Christianity. The Bible is inseparable from Britain’s history. Try understanding Shakespeare without a working knowledge of the Bible. Perhaps Dawkins will seriously reconsider Christianity’s claim to provide a cohesive worldview with superior answers to the three most important questions in life.

Hope For Richard Dawkins

This is not to say that Richard Dawkins confesses Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. He makes the perceptive distinction between “cultural Christians” and “believing Christians” and clearly denies being a “believing” Christian. In other words, he wants the basic ethics, traditions, holidays, and songs of Christianity, but not the core doctrines. He wants the shell, but not the nut; the box but not the chocolates; the fruit, but not the root. He wants to cling to atheism with one hand and cultural Christianity with the other.

We can pray that Richard Dawkins will see the inconsistency in his own position. If you want a world without God, you get a world without good. And if there’s no good, there’s no evil. We’re just random life forms, the product of chance, blindly wandering into non-existence for no particular reason, clawing through this absurd game we call the survival of the fittest.

But deep in his heart, Dawkins doesn’t believe that. He knows there is evil, and if there is evil there is good, and if there is good, there is a God who has created a moral universe with objective moral standards. Richard Dawkins is at least moving in the right direction. We can pray he keeps moving through the gate of cultural Christianity back to the real thing. The unrepentant Christopher Hitchens died in 2011, but it’s not too late for the 82-year-old Richard Dawkins to become a “believing Christian.”