The Rise of Cultural Christianity

One of the most curious phenomena of our times has been the rise of the “Cultural Christian”. 

On the one hand,  this has marked what seems a rather positive direction of travel from the perspective of committed Christians, insofar as it points to a move away from some intellectual elites being hard line “cultured despisers” of Christianity (to borrow a term of Friedrich Schleiermacher) to one where some among such elites have become cultured admirers instead.   

In addition to this phenomenon, we now have also a constituency made up of people who view themselves as definitely Christian but who wish to drop some of the beliefs hitherto held to be entailed by this identity. Hence we see,  for example,  quite a few contemporary politicians and others who very much wish to be identified as “culturally” Roman Catholic, who also make it equally clear that they do not see the moral teachings of the church as obligatory. This is despite the fact that the church itself quite clearly does hold these teachings to be obligatory –upon pain of eternal damnation.  (Illustrative examples of clearly stated official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church which may thus be repudiated by “cultural Catholics” would often pertain to marriage and divorce, as well other aspects of human sexuality and the question of abortion.)

It is tempting to wonder how this latter category arose and to speculate that it parallels developments within Judaism. But many Jewish scholars would say that it is misleading to say that Judaism pioneered the possibility of becoming “cultural rather than religious”. They would argue that this places an entirely modern religion versus culture distinction upon a tradition in which the categories were always historically inseparable. Thus,  it is held that Jewish identity has long been construed in terms of a covenantal people with shared ancestry, law, land, language, memory, kinship, collective practices, and worship rather than simply adherence to a set of particular doctrines. Though a counter argument could be made to say that the legitimacy of resting identity upon all the other factors while expressly repudiating the need to assent to doctrines is characteristically a late modern phenomenon. While others would then respond by pointing out that as far back as the time of Christ, the Sadducees repudiated belief in a resurrection and life to come, which beliefs the Pharisees did uphold. And indeed in antiquity, the Greek term Ioudaioi is often more accurately rendered “Judeans” rather than “Jews,” as the word designated a people connected with the land of Judaea and its inherited way of life, not merely adherents of a detachable and specific set of  beliefs called “Judaism.” One scholarly account argues that the first-century Judean identity was ethnic and communal, with religious practice integral to it but not exhaustive of it.

In any case what is perhaps the defining novelty in the case of the modern Cultural Catholic is the proponents specifically repudiate the authority of the leadership of the very body they say they belong to. This is quite different from the Sadducees who as a group were of the same beliefs as their leaders.¹

But returning to the particular concept of cultural Christianity, we may say that a cultural Christian can be defined as someone who identifies variously but positively with Christian culture, moral formation, inherited practices, or social institutions without necessarily affirming the supernatural and dogmatic claims constitutive of the classical historic Christian faith. Such persons may be atheist, agnostic, deist, religiously indifferent, intermittently observant, or conventionally affiliated but doctrinally non-confessional. In other words one or all aspects of Christianity’s historical, aesthetic, moral, or political inheritance can be admired and esteemed while at the same time assent to its doctrinal claims is withheld.

Is the rise and popularity of such views all bad,  or can it be seen as helpful in marking at least an abandonment of total hostility to all aspects of Christianity?

It does seem evident that people in this category have become increasingly conspicuous in Western societies, where general institutional participation has declined far more rapidly than the heritage of Christian language, memory, architecture, ritual, and ethics. Nonetheless, while adherents may value Christian worship, sacred music, moral norms, political institutions, and see Christianity as quite central to  civilizational achievements the fact remains that they are abandoning belief in God, and consequently the specific doctrines of the incarnation, resurrection, revelation, or eschatological hope.

Charles Taylor’s work provides an unusually powerful framework for interpreting cultural Christianity. It shows that the phenomenon is not simply a residue of obsolete belief, nor merely hypocrisy or nostalgia: it is one expression of the modern “conditions of belief,” in which both faith and unbelief become contested, fragile, and socially imaginable alternatives.

In his book A Secular Age (2007), Taylor distinguishes three senses of “secularity.” The first concerns the evacuation of religion from public institutions; the second concerns declining belief and practice; while his principal interest is a third sense: namely the transformation of the conditions under which belief becomes possible.

The decisive question, for Taylor, is not simply, “How many people still go to church?” It is: how did Western societies move from a world in which belief in God was largely unchallenged and socially taken for granted to one in which it is “one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace”? Cultural Christians are intelligible within this third sense of secularity. Lady Warnock, Iris Murdoch, Dawkins, and Murray do not inhabit a world in which repudiating Christian doctrine necessarily entails repudiating Christian culture. They can reject traditional belief while retaining a sense that Christianity still mediates moral seriousness, aesthetic depth, civilizational memory, or existential orientation.

Taylor therefore shifts the question from: Why do these people inconsistently retain Christian fragments after losing faith? to: What kind of social imaginary makes it possible—and even plausible—to value Christianity while suspending or denying its truth claims? That shift is important. Cultural Christianity is not merely an intellectual position. It is a social and imaginative possibility generated by modernity.

Taylor’s central term for the modern Western predicament is the immanent frame: a social world in which reality can be understood, organised, and experienced without any necessary reference to transcendence. The world is not necessarily experienced as atheistic; rather, it is experienced as “self-sufficient.” Religious belief remains possible, but it is no longer socially unavoidable.

Some very notable but strikingly different figures have embodied this phenomenon in Britain and America.  Mary, Lady Warnock described herself as an “atheist Anglican”; Iris Murdoch repudiated belief in a personal God while claiming, in a qualified sense, still to be “inside the Anglican Church”; and Richard Dawkins has expressly called himself a “cultural Christian”; while Douglas Murray has adopted the designation “Christian atheist.” 

Each of these cases point to divergent ways in which the deep Christian inheritance may remain normatively or imaginatively powerful long after the metaphysical assent formerly held to be a prerequisite has weakened or even been abandoned entirely.

But one technical point is important to be clear about – namely that purely cultural Christians are different from non-practising Christians as many or most within the latter group retain some theological belief, including belief in God or a higher power;  whereas “cultural Christians,” include persons who explicitly deny central Christian truth claims while continuing to esteem other aspect of the faith tradition’s character and legacy. But the main element affirmed can be quite different and might comprise primarily:

–An aesthetic attachment to liturgy, sacred music, architecture, and the Prayer Book tradition.

–A moral attachment to Christian accounts of love, compassion, sin, forgiveness, dignity, and sacrifice.

–An institutional attachment to to the particularities of a national or established church.

–A philosophical attempt to preserve transcendence without traditional theism.

A civilizationally focused defence of the society Christianity shaped. 

A further look at specific figures can be illuminating 

Mary Warnock (1924–2019), the moral philosopher and “public intellectual”, gave unusually direct expression to a culturally “Anglican atheism”. Speaking in the House of Lords, she declared: “I consider myself to be a Christian by culture and by tradition.” And then  continued: “I do not want the Church of England to be disestablished, and I regard my loyalty to the sovereign as loyalty to the head of the church as well as to the head of the state. Having said that, I suppose I should confess that I am an atheist.”

Warnock’s formulation was significant because it held together culture, establishment, monarchy, and personal unbelief. Moreover her attachment to Anglicanism was not exhausted by nostalgia. She valued worship, church music, and the ecclesial forms within which English moral and political life had been shaped. Yet she was equally clear in rejecting the necessity of belief in God for morality. In her later reflections, she could maintain that Christian institutions had been formative in her life while opposing religious influence over public policy.

Her final book, Dishonest to God: Keeping Religion Out of Politics (2010), was polemical against the political authority of religious argument, but it did not for her entail a repudiation of the Church of England as a personal, historical, or cultural reality. An obituary of her in the Church Times noted her statement that “the Church of England has played a significant part in my life.” Warnock thus represented a form of cultural Christianity in which institutional and aesthetic loyalty could  coexist with explicit atheism.

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) offered a rather more philosophically ambitious form of post-theistic Christian appropriation. In 1970, she observed that “Christianity is not abandoned so much as simply unknown. A generation has been growing up outside it.” The remark diagnosed not principally apostasy but cultural amnesia: Christianity’s declining intelligibility as a lived symbolic world.

Murdoch explicitly rejected belief in “a personal God,” and therefore the divinity of Christ as traditionally understood, and any belief in life after death. Yet she sought neither a “flat materialism” nor a merely subjective ethics. Her philosophical alternative centred upon “the Good,” construed in a rigorously Platonic sense as a transcendent moral reality demanding attention, purification of egoism, and loving responsiveness to what is real. As she put it in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, “Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.”

This does not make Murdoch conventionally Christian even it echoes the Deists of the eighteenth century. It does, however, show why she cannot be assimilated simply to secular humanism. She retained a deep indebtedness to Christian imagery, story, liturgy, and moral discipline. “I grew up in Anglican Christianity,” she remarked, “and I feel in a way I am still inside the Anglican Church.” She attended services but refrained from communion: “Something inhibits me from doing this—I’m not quite sure what.

Murdoch’s position therefore presents a serious philosophical alternative to both orthodox confession and cultural nostalgia. Her concern was not merely to preserve the beauty of religion after God, but to recover ascetical and moral seriousness: attention, self-emptying, love, and the overcoming of the “fat relentless ego.” Her Anglicanism was not credal in the conventional sense, yet neither was it simply ornamental.

Richard Dawkins’s self-description as a “cultural Christian” attracted considerable attention because it came from a figure long identified with militant atheism and with the “New Atheist” critique of religion. In a 2024 interview, Dawkins distinguished belief from cultural affiliation: “I’m not a believer, but there’s a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian.” He described himself as at home in a Christian ethos, commending hymns, Christmas carols, and the idea of a culturally Christian country.

Dawkins’s case differs markedly from Murdoch’s. Whereas Murdoch sought a metaphysical and moral account of transcendence without theism, in the case of Dawkins his interest is principally cultural and civilizational. Christianity, in this account, is valued as the historical matrix of a society’s moral habits, public festivals, inherited symbols, and forms of mutual intelligibility. He has however explicitly said that he prefers Christianity to Islam, describing Christianity as “a fundamentally decent religion” in a way he does not think Islam is.

The theological criticism of Dawkins’s position is correspondingly forceful. John Heathershaw characterises the aspiration to retain Christian culture while rejecting Christian faith as a secular “subtraction story”: preserving the benefits while excluding the reality from which those benefits historically arose. He argues that one cannot simply “pick and mix” Christian cultural goods while abandoning the faith’s substantive claims.

Lastly here we may consider Douglas Murray, who specifically identifies himself as a “Christian atheist,” a formula that indicates both unbelief and yet also continued imaginative residence within a Christian moral culture. He has described himself as having become an atheist in his late twenties, while continuing to “dream Christian dreams,” (an expression associated with the Anglican atheist cleric Don Cupitt). He has also expressed the wish that Christianity might be true, saying that he does not understand those who do not desire it to be true. Moreover his public understaning and engagement with Christianity is closely connected with his defence of Western civilisation and his critique of contemporary progressive culture. 

In this latter respect, his position resembles Dawkins’s more than Murdoch’s since Christianity matters not simply as a private spiritual grammar but as a source of social cohesion, moral seriousness, and cultural confidence. His thought has also been associated with the Ratzingerian invitation (which echoes Pascal) to live veluti si Deus daretur—as if God exists—even where certainty of belief is absent.  But we should also note that the  phrase “Christian atheist” may be rhetorically powerful but is conceptually unclear since it can mean,  an atheist formed by Christian culture; an atheist who judges Christian moral norms socially necessary; or a person who doubts Christian doctrine but remains existentially open to its truth as a possibility. The first position is descriptive, the second political, and the third potentially religious in a more substantive sense.

From the standpoint of classical Christian theology, “cultural Christianity” raises pretty basic questions of coherence. Christianity in terms of its historic self-understanding  is simply not reducible to an ethical system, a national heritage, a corpus of art and culture, or an account of civilisation. It has always been ultimately a confession of faith expressed in propositional terms concerning the triune God, the incarnation of the Word, Christ’s death and resurrection, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Church, judgment, and the hope of eternal life. While it has also had extensive lived content in terms of grace and sacraments, and the baptismal and eucharistic life of the Church.

And in the face of this historical reality someone who repudiates all central doctrinal commitments may be culturally shaped by Christianity, Anglican in sensibility, or favourably disposed toward Christian institutions and all the rest; yet the continued use of the word “Christian” without qualification becomes in this context theologically misleading. The designation “cultural Christian” has value precisely because it acknowledges the distinction between cultural affinity and confessional faith.

Nevertheless, it would be too simple to dismiss cultural Christianity as mere contradiction. Religious belonging is not exhausted by intellectual assent it does indeed includes practices, liturgy, memories, affections, embodied habits, inherited narratives, and communal loyalties and much more. And while there may be an allure to “believing without belonging” when confronted with the particularities of institutional practice and diffuse forms of belief in Europe authentic belonging  without believing will in the end lack the fulness which historically grounded the legacy that continues to attract. In this sense it would seem one cannot have only the grin without in fact accepting the existence of the Cheshire Cat.