Cultural Christianity – a Typology. # 219. 14/01/2025
Out of many, One People.
Welcome and happy new year with a blog that seeks to plumb how rising discussion of the Christian faith might indeed add to the sum of human happiness this year. This blog is a day late because of unforeseen circumstances. The next one should be on Jan 27th.
Cultural Christianity – a Typology.
A fairly safe prediction for 2026 is that Christianity will have a higher public profile than in 2025, and considerably more than in, say, 2019. This may partly reflect ripples from the ‘quiet revival’ but perhaps much more from a ‘noisy revival’, with professions of faith by controversial, high-profile public figures such as Tommy Robinson, the porn celebrity, Lily Phillips, and – especially with his court case likely to come up this year – Russell Brand. But probably of more significance is the longer term, emerging recognition that Christianity’s presence in the past of our society was not merely just one more accidental phenomenon but rather contributed foundationally and significantly to who we became, with the corollary that its national decline is not marginal, like, say, the decline of Morris Dancing, but rather the cause of a fundamental crisis of national identity and self-understanding.
Paradoxically, it can be argued that partial credit for this renewed seriousness about Christianity should go to Sir Keir Starmer. Whereas previous Conservative governments were well peopled by scoundrels and fools, Starmer was – as well as being an out atheist - obviously intelligent, compassionate and principled. He offred a return to adult government. The fact that he and several equally genuine colleagues have obviously failed to turn around a national mood of cynical disillusion cries out for an explanation that pushes down into much deeper layers of our cultural substructure. Their role as our most secularising government, legislating for assisted suicide and minimal abortion restrictions, may also be relevant. So, the year has begun with several considerations, or rather reconsiderations, of the place of Christianity within our society, for example Jon Cruddas in the New Statesman and Jason Cowley in the Sunday Times.
However, a range of very disparate people and ideas have been clustered together in these treatments of cultural Christianity. This blog is an attempt to expound the very different dynamics that might underlie the growth of ‘cultural Christianity’, whilst noting there are significant variations within each section.
1. Nostalgia.
Richard Dawkins is at one end of the nostalgia scale. He values the way Christianity has contributed to the ethos of our society. He enjoys singing Christmas carols. But it is a pleasure emanating from deep-seated secularity; in effect we have long since been disabused of the belief that any of the faith is true so we can join in wholeheartedly as an expression of our tradition. The quaintness is part of the fun.
More typical is Kemi Badenoch. Outlining her story to Amil Rajan for the BBC she spoke of the eclipse of her faith in being unable to account for the fact that God didn’t answer people’s prayers: ‘I rejected God, not Christianity. So I would still define myself as a cultural Christian.’ In particular she has spoken of her desire to retain the traditions and ethics of Christianity. I suspect Badenoch represents large numbers for whom belief in God has quietly ceased to be part of their intellectual framework, but who are not willing to abandon it completely. At some times and in some places people who have exited Christianity have jubilantly danced on its grave in a joyful celebration of liberation from superstition and repression. But I think Badenoch’s experience of slight disappointment at a candle being blown out, along with fairly easy confidence that there are many good things that can be retained from what remains is a far more typical response. Not too much has been lost, but nor is it believed that the legacy should be that central to life.
There are several elements from our Christian past that nostalgic cultural Christians wish to retain. Community-binding celebrations and traditions such as Christmas are central, though increased secularisation has diminished the salience of other festivals. There is the specifically ‘cultural’ heritage: great art, sacred music, cathedrals and ancient churches that still nourish peoples’ hearts and minds. The former astronomer royal, Lord Rees, instanced these in response to Jason Cowley’s article. Then there is the diffuse area of ethics and ethos that both Dawkins and Badenoch have referred to. These are not as universally obvious as often thought, as will be pointed out in section 3, but have formed an important underpinning for British society over the centuries: love for your neighbour, service to the community, honesty and integrity, the need for forgiveness. People refer to the ‘teaching of Jesus’ but it is often processed by removing traces of anything that western liberal sensibilities find difficult – of dying to self, the dangers of possessions, the need to make choices. Meanwhile ‘tolerance’ acquires a more central role than it has in the gospels. The full meaning of Christ’s Lordship, or of our accountability before God, have slipped away.
2. Nationalism.
It is this aspect of cultural Christianity that has most come to the fore over the past year, especially due to the appearance of Christian symbols, slogans and even music at September’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ demonstration, and enhanced by Tommy Robinson mounting a carol service in central London. For people accustomed to seeing politics as the primary force in national life (I think evidenced in Jon Cruddas’s New Statesman article) these events were deeply disturbing, as more broadly to liberal opinion, not least in the Church of England (see my last blog, # 219).
Given that these assertions were essentially of white nationalism, and in the context of a heated debate over immigration which carried strong anti-Muslim overtones, the concern was justified. But the extent to which Christianity, and of what sort, is involved in the movement is uncertain and will only become apparent over time. Certainly in a time when identity has been widely mobilised as a means of enhancing political power, then it was inevitable that there would be moves to mobilise a white working-class political identity, especially as the stated concerns of the Labour party have moved away from that base. Thus for some the foregrounding of culturally Christian forms has had a double function – both as polarising opposition to Muslims, but also a way of offending and rebutting woke tendencies in national life.
As regards the authenticity of Christian faith in such foregrounding, much depends on what is being expressed. Across Europe, populist groups that have wanted to appeal to a residual Christian heritage have used loose phrases such as ‘faith’, ‘Christian morality’, ‘heritage’, ‘church’, alongside non-verbal insignia such as crosses, and well-loved music. (Though, as with carols, very little attention is paid to the actual meaning of the words). On the other hand, populists have been wary of expressions of faith which carry too much content or call for discipleship. In this respect the earliest and most central Christian confession, that ‘Jesus is Lord’, may be a touchstone. That baptismal declaration, to submit ourselves decisively and entirely to trusting ourselves to Jesus and following him, has massive downstream consequences for how we live, how we treat others - not least strangers and those in need. Robinson’s carol service, as I said in my previous blog, leaned – to the surprise of some – towards this specific element of living faith in Jesus, not the invocation of a supposed Christian heritage.
Will a nationalistically focused cultural Christianity be the source of greater conflict and division in the midst of increasing fragmentation, or might it (perhaps to the surprise of both itself and its critics) become a source of balm and healing?
3. Necessity.
About fifteen years ago I knew two students who did similar courses on the history of political thought (one at Manchester and one at Imperial, to name and shame the guilty institutions). Both courses began with the Greeks, moved on to the Romans and then straight to the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment: nothing on the Old Testament’s wrestling with the concept of kingship, nothing on Paul, Augustine or Aquinas, nothing on the theology behind the Magna Carta, nothing on the political theologies of Luther or Calvin. The courses were acts of intellectual exclusion worthy of the Index of Prohibited Books.
But historians, like history, move on. If the new atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris Dennett) were once the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, we now have three wise men (Seidentop, Holland and Henrich) whose reading of western history has pointed them to the rise of Christianity in Europe not as the source of a desolate Dark Age that is best passed over as speedily as possible, but rather the source of a new and radical understanding of ourselves, of society and of the world which has been radically beneficial for humanity. Cultural Christianity then becomes neither a comforting and inspiring memory, nor a strident slogan for white English re-affirmation, but something essential to be revitalised if we are not to drift back into cultural darkness.
Glen Scrivener’s excellent popular summary (in ‘The Air we Breathe’) of this recognition of the positive endowments stemming from the gospel lists them in his chapter headings as Equality, Compassion, Consent, Enlightenment, Science, Freedom, Progress. The central point is that these characteristics are not, as secular liberalism is inclined to assume, the givens of a fundamental and fairly uniform human nature, rather they are the very specific consequences of a mindset and culture that came about from the rise of the Christian faith.
Whilst Henrich (in ‘The Weirdest People in the World’) identifies Christianity’s distinctive contribution in the theologically very peripheral extension of prohibited marital relations, as a means to inhibit the emergence of clans that could contest its power, Holland and Seidentop relate the emergence of a distinct and more humane society to central theological convictions. For Holland (in ‘Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind’) ‘it is the audacity of it [the centrality of the cross] -the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the Creator of the universe - that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth’ (p 524). From this comes the emphasis on humility and service, and which leads Holland to see Christianity as a central source of wokeness. Nonetheless Holland (as I understand him at present) draws back from the full supernaturalism that alone makes Christianity transformative. In an episode of ‘The Rest is History’ he gave an excellent exposition of the historical rootedness of the Gospels, but then excluded regarding the physical resurrection of Jesus as historically true with the weak suggestion that just as science and faith inhabit different domains so too do history and faith. A concept wholly alien to the thought world of the New Testament
‘Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism’ by Larry Seidentop (2014), one time Oxford Professor of Political Thought, is more challenging in its conclusions than Holland’s book. He begins by stressing how alien to our ways of thinking was that of the Roman society, with its strong emphasis on the determinating responsibilities of the paterfamilias, giving very little agency for individual self determination. The breakdown of that hold and the growth of ideas of individual responsibility comes with Paul, notably his understanding of justification through making the individual directly responsible to God. Seidentop then goes on to depict how the impregnation of this vision into European life led to the emergence of ideas of human equality, universality of law, limitations on power, and an ethic of charity and humility. Failure to see the Christian roots of these ‘secular’ ideas inhibits a sense of their distinctiveness and undermines our capacity to defend them in a world where they are by no means universally assumed.
Cultural Christianity’s theological roots mean that, contrary to the assumptions of nostalgic or nationalist subscribers, it is by no means a taken-for-granted phenomena. Its important, indeed essential values could grow only in specific theological ground. Serious historical study, then, heightens the stakes. For the well-being of our society, cultural Christianity is essential. But so are its roots.
But is cultural Christianity enough; or ‘Christianity without God’ (Kemi Badenoch)?
Whether parked as a comforting memory away from the pressures of real life, or as an identity prop for smiting progressives and Muslims, or as an intriguing case study in the history of ideas, is cultural Christianity simply going to be our society’s last tune played before the Titanic goes down? Or can it be saved by elements that come from the very heart of the Christian faith to bring hope and vitality to a jaded and anxious world?
One word has been omitted from discussions of cultural Christianity. Grace. Grace points us towards a God who acts, a God who is supernatural. Grace speaks of a God who raises the dead, who answers prayer, performs miracles, forgives sinners and will finally ‘make all things new’. A God who has come to us as Jesus – to draw us into friendship with him, to know forgiveness, and through his Spirit to form a new people, bound together by love and experiencing his power.
Paul wrote to the church in Corinth: ‘For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength’ (1 Corinthians 1:22-25). It is that infusion of God’s wisdom and strength that can energise cultural Christianity to be a revitalising source in our society.