Cultural Christianity

Is Richard Dawkins having a moment of weakness?

Richard Dawkins has recently and surprisingly described himself as a “cultural Christian.” Of course, he protests, he doesn’t believe a word of it and doesn’t want you to, either. But he does want the churches and cathedrals of his country to stay standing. He wants Christmas hymns to be sung and remembered. And if any religion is going to define the culture of his country, he wants it to be Christianity.

The reason he gives in the interview for this apparent moment of weakness is a twofold antipathy, typical of much of the Right, towards Islam and critical gender theory. This raises two questions. First, what threat, if any, do these foes present? And second, is Dawkins’ prospective “cultural Christianity” enough to counter them?

Let’s start with Islam. Dawkins is hardly alone in his concerns with the growth of numbers of Muslims in Europe, both by immigration and conversion. His reasons for opposing that growth follow the typical Enlightenment narrative against Dark Age superstition, a narrative itself inherited from Protestant anti-Catholic polemic, and substantively the same as his usual arguments for why intelligent people should also reject Christianity. Religion as a whole is a sort of adolescent phase in the history of humanity, a pubescence of barbaric superstition and oppression which the West has happily grown out of, while the Islamic world’s development was arrested at the mediaeval stage of  teenage brutality.

This narrative has to account for the historic detail of the Islamic world’s golden age of scholarly and scientific advance. The account its descent therefrom is often told through the conflict between the mediaeval Muslim philosophers Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Al Ghazali. Averroes is portrayed as an enlightened modern empiricist (which he wasn’t) and Al Ghazali as a crude fundamentalist (which he wasn’t), then the victory of the latter over the former is lamented as the death of Islamic philosophy (which it wasn’t). I have written about this in greater detail in my book, the Lost Way to the Good. Suffice it to say here that the narrative is false. Far from dying, Islamic philosophy continued to flourish. The difficulty for Western moderns is that it flourished in a direction they do not like: namely, in the direction of philosophical realism rather than nominalism. By realism, I mean a more Platonic philosophy, in which abstract categories (like man, beauty, green or courage) are considered real in themselves (hence “realism”) rather than arbitrary and external signs “nominally” imposed by the human mind - that’s “nominalism.” Nominalism implies that universals are nothing but mental constructs, with not reality of their own. There’s no such thing as “humanity,” for instance: only particular things called “humans.” The particular exists in itself, the universal only as a mental map. This nominalism tends towards materialism, the idea that only material things exist. This is obviously problematic for theists, whether Muslim or Christian, since God is at least in traditional theology not considered to be a material entity.

Nominalism and materialism are typical of how Westerners understand things today, but we should remember that it has not been so in most times and most places. And it is actually only as recently as the 19th century that Islamic fundamentalism began to flourish, notably in Egypt, when the Islamic world was confronted with the prospect of being forced into this Western mindset by force of arms and empire. It wasn’t a mediaeval development at all. Muslim critics of the West saw the damage that an influx of Western technology and the atheistic, Mammon-driven values which drive it could cause to their society. If we are level-headed, a century and a half later, we may see that they have something of a point. Incidentally, the same historic trajectory is true of Christian fundamentalism, which emerged in the United States around the same time as a response to the horrific prospect of social Darwinism, a nightmare which came true under both the Nazis and Soviets. Fundamentalism, whether Islamic or Christian, is not mediaeval, but precisely a response to such excesses of Western modern scientism as eugenics, racialism, weapons of mass destruction, and the destruction of traditional cultural norms. Not only is Dawkins’ narrative of progress is chronologically flawed, but the “science alone” approach he advocates is the least likely, either emotionally or intellectually, to persuade the Islamic world: emotionally, because it is too closely bound with the West’s historic sense of superiority and its impositions on the world, and intellectually, because it is manifestly failing to ground social stability or happiness in the lands where it prevails.

Dawkins’ second bugbear, critical gender theory, is a potent token of that failure, the most divisive element of the ongoing culture wars in the West. All would be well, he thinks, if everybody could simply grasp the “science” of the biological sexual binary. And indeed, the UK’s recent Cass Report recommends that the West should take the biological sexual binary more seriously than it has done of late, to the particular relief of many parents of daughters. Yet Dawkins does not seem to see that science alone is not enough to discuss, let alone answer, questions of identity and cultural practice. This is because, fatally for his position, critical theory is fuelled by precisely the same nominalist and materialist assumptions which fuel his scientism (that is, the exclusive reliance on empirical method). Critical theory can be highly critical of science, to the extent that science and so-called “theory” may be seen as rival disciplines, but they are cousins, they have a shared ancestry: namely, the presumption against the independent reality of universals. Hence, for the gender critical theorist, the binary of male and female is a nominal social construct, established purely by the exercise of power – and here, one may detect the social Darwinian influence on critical theory’s Marxist genealogy.

Dawkins’ scientism cannot answer either religious fundamentalism or critical theory because the very presuppositions of his worldview have removed the means of establishing any absolute meaning to anything, and delegated the definition of reality to the assertion of brute force, whether by bomb, book or scalpel. A cultural veneer of Christianity over an essentially meaningless world is just one more assertion among many, and an unconvincing one, especially when called for by someone who has spent his life discrediting it. Christianity shorn of any metaphysical underpinning is proving incapable even of standing up by itself, let alone against anything else, as the rapid decline of liberal churches, those which share most closely Dawkins’ scorn of the supernatural, is showing. Nominally Christian institutions are the quickest to kowtow to the latest demands of modernity. This is because their professed “Christian values” are built on the shifting sands of a culture which is implicitly nominalist, materialist, relativist and therefore functionally atheist. The Christianity that Dawkins wants is exactly the kind that is dying out most quickly.

The only way to resist the atomising tendencies of critical theory is to return to something like a philosophy of Platonic realism, and the most credible vehicle for that philosophy in the West is Christianity (for the record, Islam can actually help in that return, when it turns away from modern fundamentalism back to the heights of mediaeval philosophy). That Christianity will, as Dawkins desires, need to be resolutely cultural, preserving the literary, musical, artistic and historical heritage of the West both broadly and at the local level, both national and parochial. Deracinated offshoots hostile to tradition, expressing a supposedly universal and pristine faith through suspiciously modern and American cultural idioms are not going to win back the hearts of Europeans. This is why Orthodoxy, the Traditional Latin Mass and the Prayer Book are winning converts among the young. Religion is foolish to despise heritage. But heritage is not enough. Christmas carols and beautiful buildings are valuable and vital means, but not an end in themselves. If Dawkins wants a culture where the truth, goodness and beauty he needs in order to justify the reality of reason, on which his whole scientific endeavour depends, he will need to follow his erstwhile disciple Ayaan Hirsi Ali, recant his atheism and adopt the faith. The only reasonable alternative is to accept that his views are matters of mere taste and opinion, with no privileged immunity against whoever or whatever takes over the public space he used to occupy.