The “Cultural Christians” Are Taking Over the Conservative Movement
On closer inspection, other prominent cultural Christians appear to be motivated more by Western cultural chauvinism than their own personal circumstances, a route similar to the one the new atheists followed out of the smoke plumes of the September 11 attacks. Bellicose British commentator and new atheist Douglas Murray, who has been outspoken about the righteousness of the destruction of Gaza, now describes himself as a “Christian atheist.” Last November, his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch American writer and fellow former new atheist, wrote an essay on her outright conversion to Christianity, citing reasons such as wokeness and Islam—while not once mentioning Jesus.
Ali, along with many others in the cultural Christian movement, cite historian and popular podcaster Tom Holland’s 2019 book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, as their Bible. Holland argues, with solid historical foundations, that the tenets of Western liberalism, from human rights to secularity, are deeply rooted in Christian thought and assumptions. (Following the election, Democratic Party consultant David Axelrod spoke to Holland’s thesis from another angle, arguing that the party has become “a metropolitan, college-educated party,” which approaches the working class in the “spirit of a missionary—that we’re here to help you become more like us.”)
Holland is, however, more of a gospel-curious, reluctant agnostic than a chest-thumping, anti-woke culture warrior. The same cannot be said for the most antagonistic of those who have adopted his argument. In their kind-of coming to Jesus, Musk, Dawkins, and Ali have all rejected today’s liberal values, as they see them, and promotion of Western civilization—as they see it. Unspoken is the fact that 85 percent of the world’s Christians live in the developing world. That’s some distance from Richard Dawkins’s notion of “listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals,” which he claimed in a 2018 tweet was “much nicer than the aggressive-sounding ‘Allahu Akhbar.’” It’s not hard to imagine a Dawkins or Musk feeling as alien in an exuberant West African deliverance ministry as they would in a mosque.
