Richard Dawkins is admiring and eating the fruit of Christianity. He is happily tasting the sweetness and embracing the aromas and feeling the textures of the fruit, but he still denies the reality of the living tree from which the fruit has grown. The tree is no more dead or invisible than is the fruit we eat.

“When you give up Christian faith, you pull the rug out from under your right to Christian morality as well. This is anything but obvious: you have to keep driving this point home, English idiots to the contrary.” (Nietzsche)

Richard Dawkins is now a self professing, “cultural Christian”.

Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous atheist of my lifetime. He is a noted scientist, author of the best-selling book, The God Delusion, and fanboy for many an ardent God nonbeliever. For more than 20 years, Richard Dawkins has provided millions with reason not to believe, and with an ammunition dump of rhetorical flares for dismissing theism, and especially Christianity.

“You know I love hymns and Christmas Carols. I feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense”.

The new atheism, like earlier thought movements and ones yet to come, arrived on the scene, peaked, and is now crumbling. There will be devotees who will hold onto splintered rocks as they come hurtling down. Dawkins, however, seems to have jumped.

Okay, ‘jumped’ is an overstatement, but Dawkins’ version of atheism seems to have changed tack, and in a positive way (or at least in this interview). He has left behind the stinging attacks and is gently embracing the world that Christianity has provided.

To some, Dawkins must have suffered a brain aneurysm. 

Aaron Bastoni tweeted,

“Bizarre from Dawkins, who wrote a book called ‘The God Delusion’ claiming religion was a deeply malevolent, dividing force in the world. 

Now he’s calling himself a ‘cultural Christian’? Find it odd to use religion to extend your secular political points.”

In comes Tom Holland, the super historian to the scene of the crime. 

“Not really, because secularism & Dawkins’ own brand of evangelical atheism are both expressions of a specifically Christian culture – as Dawkins himself, sitting on the branch he’s been sawing through and gazing nervously at the ground far below, seems to have begun to realise.”

Holland is spot on. My initial response was this,

“Richard Dawkins wants to keep the fruit of Christianity while rejecting the beliefs of Christianity. 

Of course that’s not logical or desirable. Nonetheless, is Richard Dawkins moving away from his past rhetoric and a priori assumptions?”

The fruit of Christianity, the ethics and architecture, the music and its role in shaping political theory and the marketplace, all have an origin story in the Bible and especially in the God-Man Jesus Christ. The fruit comes from somewhere and that somewhere is more audacious and stunning than 21st Century observers realise.

The claim of Christianity is that there is a God behind all the fruit we taste and eat and enjoy. He is not an error or grumpy old jack-in-the-box who loves to surprise us with horrible things. 

Dawkins admits that the social good has an origins story and it is integrally tied to the Christian faith, although he is still unwilling to believe in the Divine.

“There is a difference between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian”.

Yes,  there is one who enjoys the fruit and gives thanks to the giver, and those who eat and have their fill while not giving thanks to the provider.

Dawkin’s admission is an intellectually and morally honest one. Read Holland’s, ‘Dominion’; or Glen Scrivener’s ‘The Air We Breathe’.  For those who wish to press more eagerly into the bedrock that gives our culture form and substance, read Dr Christopher Watkin’s masterpiece, ‘Biblical Critical Theory’. 

The beautiful and the good, the necessary and the true, haven’t altogether disappeared from our culture. And while these depend upon a God of such quality, excising God has not yet fully removed them from the scene.

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