Richard Dawkins The "Cultural Christian?"

This is how you make nativism socially acceptable.

Image via Flickr/Shane Pope

by Justin R.

For my second to last article for the Banter, I’m going to jump in my way back machine and travel to the distant past of…2008 or 2009 or so. I stumbled across the New Atheist movement and, oh, look at how useful it was! I’ve been an atheist my entire life. I’ve been to church, I’ve been to synagogue. I went to Hebrew School for a couple of years. Nothing ever remotely convinced me any of it was true.

New Atheism gave me a way to articulate that lack of belief and I was quite happy about that. Understanding something and not having the vocabulary to express it is…annoying. It’s quite literally what I try to do with my writing, give you, my beloved audience, the vocabulary to rail agains the evils of this world. You know something is wrong. You may even know precisely what that something is. But having the ability to speak about it coherently is vital. That’s what New Atheism gave to me in that particular subject area.

I puttered around for a few years, absorbed what I needed and then moved on. I know some people make atheism their identity but, frankly, I had other fish to fry. As much as I enjoy chewing Creationists and spitting them out, an entire Christian Nationalist movement was coming for us and I was screaming about it into the void over a decade ago.

That means I missed the schism is the New Atheist movement and even after I noticed it, I didn’t really pay much attention. But now Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk are “Cultural Christians?” Oh, that’s a load bullshit and so is the entire concept of “Cultural Christianity.”

The schism

In June of 2011, Rebecca Watson, had an uncomfortable experience with a man at a convention and she joked about it on her Youtube channel. Men in the NA community lost their goddamn minds. Who the hell did this…this…woman think she was asking men to behave better?! Richard Dawkins put out a response that was jaw-droppingly sexist and the schism was on.

For those of you who do not know who Richard Dawkins is, he is, was?, is?, one the leading voices in the atheist community. His book, “The God Delusion” is almost the, haha, bible, for modern atheists. He set the unapologetic confrontational tone of New Atheism and he drove the religious right up the wall. I can only image the mountain of death threats he received.

But it turns out he was a sexist asshole who had no time for women asking to be treated like human beings. Ah well, so much for a worldview based on rationality.

It went downhill very quickly from there. Sides were chosen and the schism widened. Half of the movement said, “Hey, maybe don’t embrace the misogyny and racism of the right wing?” and the other half decided that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.

Now, I missed all of this. The last time I poked my nose into New Atheism, I saw one of my favorite atheist Youtubers had gone from demolishing Creationists to almost exclusively railing about how feminism was evil yadayadayada.

I slowly backed away and just wrote the whole thing off.

And that’s where I left it until I came across this nonsense recently: Richard Dawkins announcing (again, apparently) that he is a “Cultural Christian.” Elon Musk declared the same earlier this year.

That means they don’t actually believe in the Bible but they like the trappings of Christianity. It’s funny, because there appear to be an awful lot “Cultural Christians” these days. They like the message of a certain type of Christianity, and you know which type I'm talking about, but they don’t really want to bother with all of that going to church, feeding the poor, caring for the sick, annoying being kind stuff Christ preached about.

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Republican Jesus triumphant at last

Just to be clear, the concept of a “Cultural Christian” is someone who indulges in the cultural aspects of Christianity but not the religious aspect. Technically speaking, I’M a Cultural Christian. Sort of? I celebrate Christmas and Easter and…that’s about it. Still, compared to the swine of the right wing, I’m a devout Christian. I actually do a lot of the stuff Jesus wanted us to do. Unlike the “Cultural Christians” of the right.

Rather than practice the Christianity of the Bible, which says things like welcome strangers into your land and love thy neighbor, “Cultural Christians” like the part where they can exclude everyone they hate and empower themselves to stay at the top of the social pecking order. The New Republic digs into this:

Those skeptical about cultural Christianity might note that it bears the hallmarks of some of the more robust reactionary strains of secular politics without any of the Christ-like obligations—such as communal rituals, an emphasis on humility and forgiveness, and a dedication to serving others—that might conflict with the practitioner’s simultaneous adherence to a reactionary and antisocial brand of conservatism. In order to fill the void where religious faith might otherwise reside, cultural Christians are inculcated in a stew of sermons without questions about their own behaviors, beliefs shorn of moral foundations, and moralizing without scriptures. At its crudest interpretation, it could be argued that cultural Christianity is a home for those who don’t necessarily believe that Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins, but rather, that they are heirs to his victimhood. Persecution didn’t only happen to Jesus—it’s happening to me.

If that sounds familiar, it’s quite literally the recipe for the modern Republican Party: No matter how much power they accumulate, they are always the victim of some grand conspiracy against them. It doesn’t matter how many laws they pass hurting women and the trans community and immigrants and the poor and Muslims and and and, they are always the ones being persecuted. Just the existence of people they despise is an intolerable form of persecution. Knowing that somewhere, someone is living their life differently is persecution. Not being able to spew racial slurs at people minding their own business? That’s persecution. This very article discussing it? Also persecution. Everything is persecution.

Richard Dawkins and half of the NA movement melted into a pile of radioactive outrage because women asked them to stop making them feel unsafe. That’s it. That was the entire controversy over “Elevatorgate.” So many atheists hammered themselves to crosses as martyrs, Dawkins chief among them, you’d think you were at a Catholic Church cosplay convention. But this is what happens when you ask white men, and it was overwhelmingly white men in New Atheism, to treat others with the same level of privilege they themselves have lived with their entire lives. The mere suggestion of not being able to abuse, insult, and harass others without consequences sent them into a spiral of rage they couldn’t escape from.

Now they’re “Cultural Christians.” And where does that lead? Right down the rabbit hole to nativism and all things far right:

On closer inspection, other prominent cultural Christians appear to be motivated more by Western cultural chauvinism than their own personal circumstances, a route similar to the one the new atheists followed out of the smoke plumes of the September 11 attacks. Bellicose British commentator and new atheist Douglas Murray, who has been outspoken about the righteousness of the destruction of Gaza, now describes himself as a “Christian atheist.” Last November, his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch American writer and fellow former new atheist, wrote an essay on her outright conversion to Christianity, citing reasons such as wokeness and Islam—while not once mentioning Jesus.

Of course she doesn’t mention Jesus. What in the world does Jesus have to do with Christianity these days? The religious right has been using Christianity as a cudgel for decades. Now they’ve reached it’s perfected form. It’s ultimate…evolution, one might say: A religion sans the actual religion.

One no longer need believe a word in the Bible. One no longer needs to attend church, offer up prayer, do good works, or do a single thing recognizable as “Christian.” One only need say, “I’m a Cultural Christian” and you have carte blanche to discriminate against any minority group you deem a threat.

After all, you are part of the in crowd and that means you are special. One of the good guys. Free from the “woke mind virus.” That means you are one of the persecuted and everyone knows that when you’re being persecuted, you are morally obligated to fight back. Even when you have all the power and control, you have to fight back because you’re the eternal victim. So of course you embraced fascism, oh, sorry, I meant “Cultural Christianity,” to fix everything broken in the West. And by “broken,” I mean “not tailored exclusively for your benefit.”

I’m glad Dawkins is finally publicly embracing nativism. He’s proven that his status as part of the ‘in group’ is more important than his morality, ethics, or reason.

The Banter was here before me and it will carry on after I’m gone. But if you’d like to stay in touch, you can find me at The Opinionated Ogre on Substack and Bluesky.

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