The Rise of Cultural Christianity

Is a Nominal Layer on Christianity in Society Really So Bad?

Photo by ASTRO V/SUAL on Unsplash

According to Madeleine Davies writing for New Statesman, on The Rise of Cultural Christianity, there is an increasing number of public intellectuals and commentators who identify as cultural Christians. Among them are Richard Dawkins (gasp), Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Nick Cave, and Hirsi Ali among others.

The stimulus for this Davies explains is that people are realizing that Christianity and its worldview are a bulwark against both a Caliphate and Communism. Or else, we might say that Christianity is an ideology of resistance against both political Islam and Rainbow Orwellianism.

Davies notes how others are making this explicit case!

James Orr, a professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, made the case that a “constitutionally and culturally Christian nation” offered the best defence for followers of every faith against a “new progressive theocracy”. National Conservatives kept “banging on about religion”, he explained, because they were alive to the dangers of the new public faith emerging, in which “a new priesthood” was “policing conformity to the new dogmas and doctrines of an elite Gnostic theology”.

I agree with that in part, a state rooted in its Christian tradition should lead to a secular and liberal society. Also, progressive parties do exhibit authoritarian impulses and even some theocratic tendencies. But there is a danger here that cultural Christianity becomes nationalistic and a nominal affair of heritage rather than one of the heart.

As to the cure for this nominal Christianity, Davies leans on Tom Holland, and his prescription rings true for my mind.

Tom Holland’s prescription for the Church of England is that it should emphasise the “weird” nature of the faith. He’s critical of the leadership for a perceived failure do so. “Rather than speaking with the voice of prophecy, rather than explaining to a grieving and anxious people how the dead will rise into the blaze of eternal life, rather than proclaiming the miracles and mysteries that they uniquely exist to proclaim, church leaders seem to have opted instead to talk like middle managers,” he wrote during the early weeks of the Covid pandemic.

The Church has been “too successful”, he said. Christianity’s gifts to the culture, rooted in belief in the fundamental equality of all and including education, healthcare and welfare, are no longer recognised as such.

“The future for the churches is to remind people where these ideas come from,” Holland contended. “They come from believing in mad things, that there is a God who created all human beings equally, gave them an inherent dignity because they’re created in God’s image. You know, it comes from the belief that these were taught by a guy who got nailed to a cross and then rose from the dead and offers the promise of eternal glory in life. These are obviously, objectively to a rationalist perspective, mad things. But the madness is precisely what makes them so powerful and has made them so powerful… People want the supernatural, they want the strange, they want what they don’t get out of a Labour Party manifesto.”

I think those points are valid. Part of the church’s public witness should be to:

Show how Christianity is weird.

Show how Christianity is otherworldly.

Show how liberal and secular values are rooted in Christianity.

How should we do that, well, I have some ideas!

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I think liberal democracy only works with the memory of the Christian tradition.

I think secularism changes from “live and let live” to “keep your religion unseen and unheard” when the Christian rationale for secularism is forgotten.

Cultural Christianity might be better than its alternatives, but it can lead to a false Christianity, fake discipleship, and be harder to evangelize people who have had just enough of Christianity to be inoculated against it.

So what’s the solution?

Show how Christianity is weird

Here I would refer to four excellent books about how Christianity was weird in antiquity, so we can make Christianity weird again today! Sometimes, not always, radical difference should take precedence over relevance.

Larry Hurtado - Destroyer of the God: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World
Christianity’s novelty was no badge of honor. Called atheists and suspected of political subversion, Christians earned Roman disdain and suspicion in equal amounts. Yet, as Destroyer of the gods demonstrates, in an irony of history the very features of early Christianity that rendered it distinctive and objectionable in Roman eyes have now become so commonplace in Western culture as to go unnoticed. Christianity helped destroy one world and create another.

Douglas Boin - Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar's Empire
Boin shows, a small minority movement rose to transform society--politically, religiously, and culturally--but it was a gradual process, one that happened in fits and starts over centuries. Drawing upon a decade of recent studies in history and archaeology, and on his own research, Boin opens up a wholly new window onto a period we thought we knew. His work is the first to describe how Christians navigated the complex world of social identity in terms of "passing" and "coming out." Many Christians lived in a dynamic middle ground. Their quiet success, as much as the clamor of martyrdom, was a powerful agent for change. With this insightful approach to the story of Christians in the Roman world, Douglas Boin rewrites, and rediscovers, the fascinating early history of a world faith.

Nadya Williams - Cultural Christians in the Early Church: A Historical and Practical Introduction to Christians in the Greco-Roman World
Cultural Christians in the Early Church, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the rule, rather than the exception, in the early church. Using different categories of sins as its organizing principle, the book considers the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity, as they struggled to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire. These believers blurred and pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be a saint or sinner from the first to the fifth centuries CE, and their stories provide the opportunity to get to know the regular people in the early churches.

Nijay Gupta - Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling
Nijay Gupta traces the emerging Christian faith in its Roman context in this accessible and engaging book. Christianity would have been seen as radical in the Roman world, but some found this new religion attractive and compelling. The first Christians dared to be different, pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable, transformed how people thought about religion, and started a movement that grew like wildfire.

Show how Christianity is otherworldly

Christianity does make you a better person - it certainly did for me. But it’s not just a matter of self-improvement and living your best life now.

Christianity trades in redemption, sin, evil, heaven, demons and angels, miracles, the passion, resurrection, and eternal life.

These are not just metaphors for things we do here and now.

This is not just poetry for social justice or prose for a political project.

Christianity speaks above all about a God above and beyond the world who entered the world in Jesus Christ and who promises to make this world new again.

Show how liberal and secular values are rooted in Christianity

Liberal values did not begin in 1776 or in 1792.

Notions of freedom, love, and equality as the key virtues of a society have biblical origins, they are not the products of French atheist philosophers in the eighteenth century.

There is no UN Declaration on Human Rights, no Rights of Man, no Magna Carta without the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Even secularism was invented, first, to curtail state power over the church (12th century) and then to protect Christian minorities from Christian majorities (16th century).

Points worth remembering!

Do you agree, disagree, what would you restate, or qualify?