Richard Dawkins: 'Cultural Christian'? So what?

[reACTIONary]

‘Cultural Christian’? So what?

Earlier this year, the Washington Post invited Richard Dawkins to write an 800-word article on “why you describe yourself as a cultural Christian.” Dawkins wrote the following article, but the editor invited him to revise it as follows: “We were hoping for a piece discussing in more detail, and with more reflection, what it means to be a cultural Christian.” To which Dawkins replied, “If that’s the article you want, you’ll have to write it yourself. Under your name, not mine.” Dawkins then graciously granted permission to Free Inquiry to publish this article, and we are pleased to provide our readers with this gem of an essay, which is pure, unalloyed Dawkins.


On Easter Day 2024, I agreed with Rachel Johnson on British TV that I am a cultural Christian: “Richard Dawkins now calls himself a cultural Christian.” Apparently, the author of The God Delusion, that three-million-copy bestseller attack on religion, had changed his mind and was now singing along with a Christian revival bandwagon. The truth, of course, is that I have always been a cultural Christian and have often said so. How could I not be? I attended Anglican boarding schools from age seven to eighteen. One of my recreations is to play tunes by ear on my electronic wind instrument (EWI). Hundreds of hymn tunes are inevitably lodged in my brain from childhood, and I regularly play them. Do I have Christian thoughts while doing so? Of course not. They are just nice easy tunes. Christianity itself is nonsensical wishful thinking. That has been my view all my adult life. Nothing has changed. Nor will it as long as I retain my sanity. I am a cultural Christian atheist....

Let me offer something better. Be a cultural scientist. Rejoice in your membership of a species, Homo sapiens, that over four billion years evolved a brain capable of working out the true reason for its existence on this pale blue backwater of the Milky Way. As a cultural scientist, bravely inhabit the real world, the increasingly understood universe whose swelling grandeur puts all religions to shame.

[edhopper]

1. I am an atheist

and a cultural Jew. I see no problem with this designation.

[reACTIONary]

2. Dawkins says just about...

... the same thing, but he objects to those who read too much into his self identification as a "cultural Christian." Some have mischaracterized it as being just shy of a "death bed conversion." It isn't. It's just the reality of his surroundings and the way he was brought up.