The Curious Career of Cultural Christianity

The Catholic Thing

By Robert Royal
Among the many abrupt twists and turns in our online-driven, unstable social life, one of the oddest is the recent career of "Cultural Christianity" (hereafter "CC"). CC refers to the merely passive - and precarious - residue of Christianity in many people's lives, not a fully living faith. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was often denigrated as a sharp decline from the robust religiosity once quite evident in America. Indeed, back then it seemed there was an emerging "Catholic moment" - the title of a 1987 book by our late friend, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, published three years before he converted from Lutheranism. Evangelicals, too, were lamenting "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," the lack of substance among their otherwise committed and politically influential fellows. There seemed to be a mood for Christian renewal.
Renewals occurred, but even greater defections. The "commanding heights" of the culture, as the Soviets used to say - schools, media, popular entertainment - all fell into decadence and outright anti-Christian stances. We're now living in a sewer of "cultural post-Christianity." And there seems to be no way back from the abyss.
And yet. . . .In recent months, we've seen Richard Dawkins, the great panjandrum of the "New Atheists," publicly proclaiming (as he sees Britain being overrun by Islam) that he now considers himself a "cultural Christian." As, for other reasons, does Elon Musk. And, in his own elusive way, perhaps, Jordan Peterson.
And Ayaan Hirsi Ali - ex-Somali Muslim - (and now ex-atheist) has repudiated Western feminist and progressive nostrums destroying the Western heritage. And has formally embraced Christianity.
Cultural Christianity, which used to be the last stop on the way out of the Faith may now be the first step back in. The numbers, so far, are small, but it says something that they exist at all.
St. Thomas Aquinas - asked by St. Raymond of Peñafort, then head of the Dominicans, how to convert Spanish Muslims and Jews - wrote Summa contra Gentiles, counseling that with Jews, start with arguments from the Old Testament; with Muslims and pagans, who reject both OT and NT, "We must, therefore, have recourse to natural reason, to which all men are forced to give their assent." (SCG I. ii. 3)
Thomas had no experience of our contemporaries, who have largely rejected even natural reason (without knowing it) and replaced it with self-validating emotion. So, there's another category now. But like an alcoholic who has "hit bottom," some now see that life is a mere frustration when the world is viewed through the peephole of purposeless matter and energy, and human beings - including themselves - are regarded as merely clever animals destined for extinction.
The new Cultural Christians have come to realize that, historically, Christianity has been the source of respect for all human beings as possessing inherent dignity. And therefore is also the foundation for many other things that we used to consider unnecessary to defend in our WEIRD - Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic - nations (see more here). Indeed, it's weird, in the usual sense, that our WEIRD societies have declared normalcy itself to be weird (cf. the hysterics at J.D. Vance's affirmation of marriage as one man and one woman, with children).
To be sure, mere CC is a poor substitute for the rich legacy of Faith and Reason that the churches have provided not only in parishes, but in hospitals, schools, universities, and relief agencies for centuries, all over the world. To say nothing of ordering private and public behavior.
All that was for a time replaced with a false myth. Historian Tom Holland (himself maybe a Cultural Christian) has described that false myth in his much-praised Dominion (which strains to connect so much to Christianity that the faith seems a tissue of our current contradictions): "Wilfully, monks had set themselves to writing over anything that smacked of philosophy. The triumph of the Chur...