You may have seen a headline doing the rounds on social media in April – Richard Dawkins’ declares himself a ‘cultural Christian.’ Does this represent his conversion? It sounded like an April Fool’s prank – the internet being so awash with misinformation, every day feels like April Fool’s Day.
However, listening to his original radio broadcast on 31 March on LBC, it turns out to be neither conversion nor comedy. His comments are worth noting. Taking a more positive tone than we might usually associate with him, Richard affirmed: ‘I do think we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian.’
Islam and the Rest
Richard Dawkins, now in his eighties, was an Oxford University biologist with an ability to explain evolutionary biology at a popular level. But his name became a household one when he turned his attention to religion, delivering a scathing attack on faith laced with mockery and vitriol.
He does retain a more visceral loathing for Islam, saying he would choose Christianity over Islam ‘every single time’. This is a recurrent theme for many of the contemporary atheists – a recognition that Christianity offers a basis for Western, liberal values. In another recent podcast Richard said: ‘If rooting for benevolent Christianity in preference to malign Islam is all it takes to be a Christian then I’m a Christian too.’ But, of course, that is clearly not all it takes to be a Christian and would be a low bar for identifying as such.
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However, the recent LBC interview offered more than this minimalism. His tone today is more conciliatory. ‘I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos,’ he explained. Furthermore, Richard even conceded that Christianity is ‘a fundamentally decent religion’. You have the feeling that the mood of The God Delusion might be more subtle if he wrote it today.
If Richard Dawkins has shifted, it is not to faith in Christ and belief in the creeds. But he is more honest, particularly in view of the alternatives, that he owes Christianity a great deal. It is the growth and spread of the Christian faith in the late Roman Empire that went on to change the world.
Christianity introduced beliefs about the sanctity of life, the priority of love, the value of all people, and freedom of expression. Where Christianity, over time, was able to transform society, we ended up with nations that taught ‘just war’ ethics for combat, allowed democracy for all their citizens, permitted freedom of conscience, encouraged science and art.
It is no accident that most refugees around the world flee to countries with at least some Christian bedrock to their history and culture. Richard Dawkins could not have made his name as a public intellectual in Saudi Arabia, China or Iran. We might be even more precise and say the impact of Martin Luther and the Biblical worldview of the Reformation created the conditions for the culture to which Richard is so indebted.
Grateful to God
Justin Brierley in a recent article in The Spectator, ‘Living on a prayer: the secular tide is turning’, describes a number of intellectuals coming to clear faith in Christ in recent years. More than one attributes their conversion to the thesis of Tom Holland that ‘Christianity is the foundation on which the ethics of the West sits’.
Modern atheism is built on a contradiction. It wants the ethics and values of the Christian worldview without the belief in God that it rests upon. In debate, many atheists will protest – you don’t need God to be good! In a personal life that may be true, there are many kind people who don’t believe in God. But at a national level Richard Dawkins may have joined other atheist voices in realising this just isn’t true. Many of the shared values we care about are themselves dependent on the God who is there.
As Friedrich Nietzsche, another celebrity atheist of a different generation put it: ‘Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, faith in God, one breaks the whole.’ You can’t just cherry-pick the bits of faith you like and discard the rest. Christianity offers real answers to real questions, and that starts with a God who is really there.
