This article is republished from Salvo 72, 2025.

Recently, two very well-known figures, Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins, have announced that they are “cultural Christians.” Is this a passing fad, or does it reflect a heartfelt wish to preserve something that is at risk in our culture?

A bit of background: Musk told Jordan Peterson that he is a cultural Christian in an interview broadcast on X last July. Musk said he read widely in religious and philosophical texts in his youth but found no enduring answers. At last, guided by Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he decided that he adheres to the “religion of curiosity.” Later he added, “So I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity. I think they’re very good.”

He summed up, “I would say I’m probably a cultural Christian.” He went on to say that Christian values “are going to lead to a better society, I think, a society that we would prefer [to live in].” But elsewhere he has said that he believes in “the God of Spinoza,” essentially the deistic god of the philosophers.

And what of Dawkins, author of — among other anti-theistic writings — The God Delusion (Mariner 2006)? It sounds even more improbable that he would say, “I call myself a cultural Christian.” He did not used to say that, or certainly not very loudly anyway. But now he does.

Some of his qualifiers are helpful. He does not believe “a word of the Christian faith,” but he prefers Christianity to rising Islam, and he likes its cultural outcome: “I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”³

What about Jordan Peterson’s “pragmatic Christianity”?

Less improbably, Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has been orbiting Christianity for years but has never said that he is a confessing Christian. He calls himself a “pragmatic Christian.” Significantly, his latest book is We Who Wrestle with God (Portfolio 2024). Attempting to assess his position, the staff at FaithIt conclude, 

Peterson’s views on God, prayer, and morality reflect a commitment to grappling with life’s deepest questions in a manner that is intellectually rigorous, personally transformative, and fundamentally oriented towards the pursuit of truth. This exploration of Peterson’s beliefs reveals a thinker who navigates the complexities of faith with a blend of reverence, skepticism, and a ceaseless quest for understanding.

Pragmatic is noncommittal.

Recently, Peterson debated cultural Christianity with Dawkins. Dawkins made clear that he did not “value Christianity as a truth system at all.” But he appreciated the fact that Christians do not throw gays off buildings or practice clitoridectomy. Peterson took issue with his approach but could not articulate a clear position himself.

But is it enough?

Last summer at New Statesman, Madeleine Davies took a look at the rise of cultural Christianity. Her article focuses on the decline of churchgoing and creedal belief in Britain but asks broader questions as well:

A question that animates [historian Tom] Holland is whether Christian morality can survive the loss of belief in the biblical story — the “supernatural framework” that some cultural Christians abjure — underpinning it. What does the future hold for those, such as Elon Musk, who believe in “the principles of Christianity”? Can we, as Tolstoy did in The Gospel in Brief, remove the miracles while finding in its Scriptures guidance on how to live?

Despite the hopeful tone of Davies’s article, the answer is, again, probably no. One gets a sense of why from the historic ceremony for the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, which was ravaged by fire during Holy Week in 2019 and reopened on December 7 last year. Commentator Mark Steyn writes,       

There was, I thought, a palpable absence of the divine. As you may recall, “terrorism” was ruled out even as the building was still burning — and yet no plausible alternative source of the fire has been offered in the years since while the deliberate targeting of other churches has continued uninterrupted day after day after day.⁷

He muses, “The builders who raised up those stones through great vaulted spaces soaring to heaven were primitive, ill-educated men who nevertheless had a sense of something beyond themselves and the present tense.” Yes, that’s what’s gone.

The French government has yet to admit to any curiosity about a possible motivation behind the fire, even though two thousand churches had been vandalized in the previous two years and that trend has continued. The government seems to want to preserve the building it owns but discard the civilization that motivated it.

The basic problem

Belief is the engine of civilization. A Scripture verse puts it like this: “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). People cannot reconnect with a view on life that they don’t believe, simply to save the things that only such a view can create and maintain. This is not even an explicitly religious issue. For example, neither the Greeks nor the Romans could, in the end, save their Republics once most people ceased to believe in the values that had created them.

Notre Dame was created by people who, with all their faults, really believed in Christianity — so much so that only the distant descendants of those who started the project would see its finish nearly two centuries later.

People today who really believe that the universe came to exist by accident, that we are merely the third chimpanzee — and that he who dies with the most toys wins —cannot create Notre Dame or anything similar. Such a culture may be able to preserve it for a time but cannot imagine something similar. Instead, new “cultural heights” become cultural depths: Mona Lisa is succeeded not by “high-tech Mona Lisa” but by Piss Christ (a plastic crucifix in a jar of urine, infamously displayed in 1987 as an object of art).

What Musk, Dawkins, and Peterson all want is the outcome of Christian practice without the input of Christian belief. But that works out no better for the works of the Spirit than for any other works. Those who do not believe the Creed cannot really preserve, let alone add to, the civilization it created. 

Featured image credit: Guillaume de Germain – Unsplash