On Saturday, The Times carried an opinion piece (paywall) headed thusly: Can you really be a Christian without believing in God? The thrust of the comment was that the rise of cultural Christianity is perfectly legitimate. It is possible to like the ethics of Christianity without adopting the metaphysics.
The comment piece noted two arguments that stand against claims to cultural Christianity:
The first, made by Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, in a recent Spectator interview, is that the very point of Christian belief is that the spiritual and moral teachings are linked to the supernatural.
Christianity is not something one can pick or choose from at will: it demands full embrace and obedience. Williams thinks that the phenomenon of people like Badenoch who call themselves cultural Christians without being Christian in practice misses the whole point of belief. These people like the ethics but not the metaphysics. “At the end of the day,” he said, “the cultural Christian thing misses out on the excitement of Christianity — the life.”
The second argument, made by left-wing progressives, is that the cultural Christianity promoted by Musk and Peterson is merely a proxy for hard right-wing nationalism, cynically deployed in the culture wars. At the extremes, far-right agitators such as Tommy Robinson have gone further still, invoking Christianity as a bulwark against what they see as the assertiveness of Islam in Europe and as a weapon against multiculturalism.
There is something to both of these arguments. It shouldn’t be that surprising I recognise both because I am a Socialist Evangelical Baptist Christian, so I really believe the Bible and buy into all the metaphysics, theology, ethics, the lot as well as being especially anti any sort of nationalism, but particularly those forms that seek to claim Christian grounds for it. It is, interestingly, my commitment to the theology, metaphysics and ethics of all of the Bible – and as an extension the history of my particular theological forebears – that takes me very definitely away from the hard right nationalistic attempts to politicise Christianity.
But I also think it is worth noting that both the arguments above fail on their own. Rowan Williams – in typical fashion for a former Archbishop of Canterbury – suffers from the problem of being nearly right. He is right that cultural Christians miss the whole point of belief and that Christianity, by its very nature, demands full embrace. This much is true. Where he stops short is drawing the link that the ethics only exist at all because of the metaphysical claims.
More specifically, the particular metaphysical and historical claim that Jesus rose from the dead. There are all manner of miracles in scripture, all manner of slightly weird events and goings on, that if we ripped them from the text, I’m not suggesting it would have no impact whatsoever on belief and practice, but it would be far from fundamental. The resurrection, however, is not one of them. Remove that from scripture and you lose the ethics and everthing else! Equally, if you concede the credibility of Jesus raised from the dead, the rest of the miracles immediately become more plausible.
Similarly, the secular progessive argument fails on its own too. It fails by the existence of counter-examples. Richard Dawkins, for example, is clearly not a Christian Nationalist. He may have – as most the New Atheists did – an innate fear of Islam and a particular distaste for its cultural and ethical tendencies, but there is little evidence he is any sort of Christian Nationalist. The same can be said of Tom Holland or a number of other so-called cultural Christians.
Even if one concedes the point, cultural Christianity as an idea is not enough to ward off alternative cultural influences. Dawkins and his ilk, for instance, have made their rallying cry that there is no God and therefore no objective morality. No culture can claim a greater significance or moral value than any other. The very arguments advanced by the New Atheists, who now insist they are culturally Christian, are the foundation of the secular humanist arguments for unbridled multiculturalism. There are no morally superior cultures, so they claim. That is until other cultures blaspheme their secular humanist values. Values, it bears saying, they either borrowed from the Christian culture they dismantled or ethics that they have entirely made up themselves because, well, why not – there are no moral absolutes and so my ethical opinions are just as good as yours! Which is great when you want a live-and-let-live approach to everything; not so much when your cultural values rub up against someone else’s entirely contradictory, and widely condemned, cultural values that you wish to shut down but can’t because you are wedded to all being equally good. New Atheists, having sawn off the branch they were sitting on, are desperately trying to reclimb the tree!
In my view, the two arguments (perhaps taken to their logical conclusions) must sit together. It is only by accepting the metaphysical, theological and ethical claims of scripture lock, stock and barrel – totally and complete embrace – we then see that cultural Christianity is invalid. If you do not accept it in toto you are left with nothing but a cynical and somewhat empty attempt to keep hold of a culture that is fundamentally rejected. Unless you actually love Jesus and believe what the scriptures teach, you aren’t going to see the value of the ethics and so will not wire them to the culture. At the same time, if you really love Jesus and the beauty of gospel ethics, you will quickly see there is no compulsion, you cannot impose them on those who do not bow the knee to Jesus and empty ethical-behaviour change is not the stuff of the gospel. If you want to see Christian values adopted and implemented, you need to aim for heart-change which necessarily means love for Christ, submission to his kingship and belief in the gospel. Anything less is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Perhaps most significantly, if your Christianity remains merely cultural – you like the ethics but not much else – you will inevitably find even its advocates chip away at even the bits they claim to like. If you don’t accept the biblical testimony in total, you are essentially happy to pick and choose the bits you like and reject that which you don’t. The moment you start doing this – as Augustine of Hippo famously said – it is no longer the gospel you believe, but yourself. And so it goes. If you merely like the ethics of Christianity without paying any heed to the root from which they grow, what will happen the moment you hit on ethics you don’t like? Again, we can see cultural Christianity advocates doing exactly this. They set aside whatever ethics they don’t like, for whatever reason they like, and end up with something sub-Christian. There may be Christian-influence in it, they may hold to some Christian values, but the ethics themselves end up being whatever we want to make them because we never really paid any attention to the Jesus nor the fundamental teaching which necessarily underpins it.
This is, interestingly, what Christian Nationalists do. When Jesus insists ‘my kingdom is not of this world’, they just ignore that and insist it is, and his kingdom is, in fact, specific to my country. When Jesus tells us to render to Caesar that which is Caesars, it is quickly deemed irrelevant as we must install a Christian prince. When we are given the sword of scripture and the right only to proclaim the gospel, Christian Nationalists are quick to want to impose its ethics. It is to set aside the ethical and theological aspects of the gospel as and when it suits a predetermined cultural position. The tactics of the New Atheists and the Christian Nationalists are not all that different in the end.
It seems better to see cultural Christianity as a misnomer. Of course, you may share all sorts of values in common with actual Christians. But then, you may find you share some values with Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs and even Atheists at points too. This no more makes you a Christian than it does any of these others. Our national culture is what it is as a result of our particular history which is, quite clearly, heavily influenced by Christian thought. But unless you accept the gospel, and believe the scriptures, and take the fullness of it altogether, you are no sort of Christian and it doesn’t really serve anybody to pretend otherwise.