An Athiest Finds Cultural Christianity

None other than one of the world's most famous atheists has good things of a sort to say about Christianity. 

Richard Dawkins, 83, a former Oxford don and author of 'The God Delusion' has recently said, “I do think we are culturally a Christian country. I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian. 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," referring to the United Kingdom.

Now before we go any further, let's define terms. Any definition of Christianity must primarily include the original Christianity. That is, us, Roman Catholicism. The notion, spread by some historically challenged Protestants, that there is a difference between "Christians" and Catholics is ludicrous. Us and Protestants different? Sure. But we all are under the Christian umbrella. 

The priest who baptized me took a more jaundiced view, "Protestantism is a cheap knock off faith. It's like buying a fake Brooks Brothers pullover on a New York street corner and the sheep is upside down." However, I digress. 

Dawkins' cultural views are somewhat like the Founding Fathers. They were men of The Enlightenment and eschewed orthodox religion for a kind of Voltarean deism. I understand that. Growing up Jewish and straying from the faith in my 20s, it took me a decade to progress from the faith of Thomas Jefferson to Roman Catholicism. Though, after years of Hebrew school, I'm probably still more than a bit culturally Jewish. 

Dawkins goes on to say, "So I call myself a cultural Christian and I think it would be truly dreadful if we substituted any alternative religion...If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time.

“It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not...there is an active hostility to women which is promoted I think by the holy books of Islam.” This not from a conservative or a Christian provocateur. This is from one of the world's foremost atheists. who can look at various faiths from a third person perspective. He thinks the entire concept of God is make believe. Yet, still he understands what many others of his coterie do not. The views of the late Christopher Hitchens were not dissimilar. 

In 2018 Dawkins noted that we should not celebrate that Europe seems to be in a post-Christian era, as we should hold onto it “for fear of finding something worse.” And thus, the man comprehends the ebb and flow of history.

Dawkins can see, as can fellow British author John Gray, that as the religious impulse has weakened since the 18th century pernicious ideologies that sought and seek to supplant God with man and science have entered the void. The cult of reason of revolutionary France, Nazism, Communism, and the modern day far left all are just dark and twisted variations on the faith impulse. They sucker in the gullible, whose faculties for critical thinking are at a low ebb, and they bewitch the power mad, who will latch onto anything for the chance to crack the whip.

The latest incarnation of this? Islamofascism. The hard left protesting to the benefit of the mad mullahs would quickly rue the day their pals in Teheran would implement Sharia law on the Harvard campus. Me? Meh. Serves the credulous students right. 

As Dawkins reminds us, “Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme: ‘Always keep ahold of nurse / For fear of finding something worse." Just so.