Christianity without Belief?

Not so much

Richard Dawkins believes he is a cultural Christian. It’s a surprising announcement coming from a man who has for years enthusiastically denounced all religion as superstition, and often harmful superstition at that. Nevertheless, according to an article in The National Catholic Register, Dawkins stated, “I do think we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian.” He continued, “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.”

A recent article in The Christian Post recounts a conversation between Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers. Rodgers’ remarks at times make no sense whatsoever but he does make a couple of interesting observations: 

I think atheists can find their own religion. It might be the religion of science, or religion of climate change, or whatever it might be, but to not believe in a higher power means that really nothing we do matters, and ultimately, I live and I die, and that's it. So whatever purpose you might have, it's short-lived. It’s just for this. There's nothing else going on. I have a hard time with that because I believe there's a seen world and an unseen world. And there's forces of good and forces of evil, and that there's a purpose for all this and there's a lot of reasons why we're doing this. There's a lot of opportunities to do this. I'd like to get it right this time around.

I don’t know how one links up atheism with “a higher power,” but okay. Likewise I was unaware that climate change qualified as a higher power. Maybe that’s how the atheists pull it off.

As for Rogan, he just wants Jesus to come back and fix it: “We need Jesus. For real, like if you came back now, like Jesus, if you're thinking about coming back, right now, now's a good time. Now's a good time. We're kind of f----d." You’re not entirely wrong, Joe.

The articles continues, “Rogan reflected on humanity's potential tipping point toward unmanageability and chaos, suggesting that divine intervention, akin to Moses' experience with the Ten Commandments, might be necessary to realign society.” Okay… but we could try paying attention to previous divine interventions. God has already given the Ten Commandments once. And then we have the Exodus from Egypt, the raising up of prophets, the virginal conception of Jesus and incarnation, his perfect life, his atoning death, and his rising from the dead…. I mean, those are pretty significant, right? Does God really have to do all this again to get our attention?

“Though raised Catholic, Rogan has revealed in the past that he does not subscribe to any particular religion. He regularly expresses interest in secular spiritual practices and ideas, including meditation and the use of psychedelics for exploring consciousness.” It sure sounds, though, like he’s leaning toward a particular religion as he’s calling for Jesus to come back.

A fascinating piece by Justin Brierley in The Spectator suggests that a Christian revival may be underway in the U.K. I pray this is true, though the article is long on hope, short on supporting data. It begins, however, by discussing Tom Holland, and, no, not the Tom Holland who played Spiderman. Brierly is writing about the brilliant historian Tom Holland, who is one of the cohosts of The Rest is History podcast, and who wrote a masterful work called Dominion that documents the influence of Christianity on Western culture. (Ken Collins has written a fine review of Dominion for Firebrand.) Holland, we read, has been attending church services at St. Bartholomew the Great in London.

He began attending while researching Dominion, his bestselling book which outlined the way the 1st-century Christian revolution has irrevocably shaped the 21st-century West’s moral imagination. It also recounts how Holland, a secular liberal westerner who had lost any vestige of faith by his teenage years, came to realise he was still essentially Christian in terms of his beliefs about human rights, equality and freedom.

Brierly describes Holland as “an agnostic trying out church again.” I hope he finds his way to Christ and salvation. It sounds like he’s moving that way, but “there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.”

Then there’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who recounts her remarkable journey from radical Islam to atheism to Christianity. She holds that Western civilization faces major threats from Islamism, China, Russia, and woke ideology. Christianity, which has provided the underpinnings of Western culture, must regain its strength if we are to resist these dangerous forces. Moreover, she observes, contrary to the predictions of thinkers like Bertrand Russell, that the decline of Western Christianity has not ushered in a new age of reason. Rather, we now encounter “a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet.” She concludes,

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

I can’t argue with the good sense of her reasoning. I affirm and celebrate her conversion, and I believe she will, as she hopes, grow in her understanding of the faith. I hope she reaches a point where she understands the faith not just as a net cultural good, but as a personally saving relationship with Jesus Christ through which she will receive the transforming grace of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps she has and simply hasn’t written about it.

Commenting on Ali’s conversion, Carl Trueman remarks in First Things,

Others have said similar things before. Philip Rieff and Sir Roger Scruton are two that come to mind. But the impression both of them leave is that, yes, they think God is a very good idea for grounding a civilized culture, but they are not entirely sure that he exists. What Ali has done is taken the obvious—and indeed necessary—next step: She sees the necessity of a sacred order and is not afraid to say so. It will be interesting to see if those others who have so astutely analyzed the sicknesses unto death that grip the West at the moment will follow her lead. 

Jordan Peterson comes to mind here as well. He respects Christianity and finds its teachings beneficial, but, to my knowledge, he has not taken the plunge into a full Christian faith.

Western Christianity is in a strange place. A number of public figures are beginning to wake up to the fact that Christianity is good for society. The values we prize in the West today, such as human dignity and personal liberty, are rooted in the West’s Christian heritage. The attempts to cast off the “shackles” of Christianity, particularly since the 1960s, have run into the law of unintended consequences time and again. The cultural revolutionaries apparently had no idea that the social structure would weaken as soon as they eroded its moral foundations.

Some secular people are starting to wake up, but few are committing fully, as Ali has. They want to acknowledge the goodness of Christianity while keeping it at arm’s length. Perhaps they want to hedge their bets. They’re like the seven sons of Sceva in Acts 19, who did not believe in Jesus, but nevertheless went about shouting at demons, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims!” As they found out, this simply doesn’t work. The demon replied, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” The sons of Sceva wanted to harness the power of Christ. They did not love Christ, nor were they obedient to him, and their efforts did not end well.

Christianity isn’t just an ethical or social program. It is a new kingdom. It is the City of God. It is a world-constituting reality. Christianity is about what God has done to set right a world that is cosmically broken. It is about the God-man Jesus who humbled himself and took on the form of a slave. He died on the cross and rose from the dead, and will come again to judge the living and the dead. God has revealed himself to us through concrete acts in history, and the vision of life that Christians have developed flows out of this self revelation. We cannot have the ongoing positive effects of Christianity unless we commit ourselves to live in this new reality. Trueman writes of “the perennial problem of the connection between the transcendent and the immanent, too often resolved in church history by instrumentalizing the gospel in the service of social activism.” It doesn’t work. The gospel isn’t an instrument. It is the power of God for salvation.

So I’m glad that Dawkins, Rogan, Holland, Peterson, and others have seen the goodness that Christianity has brought. It’s incumbent on them, however, to give themselves over to the God from whom all goodness derives. If they really believe what they’re saying, then the next step should be to get themselves to a church, learn the truths of the faith, and receive baptism. Pray with me they do.