The Bulk of the World’s Atheists are Emphatically Christian Atheists

Very few atheists want to really and truly jettison the Christian tradition along with all its full implications, assumptions, and benefits. The overwhelming majority of them are completely unaware of how many of its mystical assumptions they take for granted. Such is the way with successful revolutions. Only unsuccessful revolutions get their assumptions critiqued. Successful ones get their assumptions taken for granted.

To be sure, it can be and has been done that succeeding waves of alleged “reform” can take some mystical Christian doctrines for granted with incoherently attacking others. But the real thing that unites almost all attacks on the Christian tradition in Western history is the tendency to go on taking various mystical Christians doctrines from granted. Chesterton described the process in THE THING: WHY I AM CATHOLIC:

Now, it was just here that, for me, the business began to be odd and interesting.  For, looking back on older religious crises, I seem to see a certain coincidence, or rather, a set of things too coincident to be called a coincidence After all, when I come to think of it, all the other revolts against the Church, before the Revolution and especially since the Reformation, had told the same strange story. Every great heretic had always exhibited three remarkable characteristics in combination.  First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas.  Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted.  He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible.  To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed “Psalms” or “Gospels”; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements.  If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures?  Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

Again, the Calvinists took the Catholic idea of the absolute knowledge and power of God; and treated it as a rocky irreducible truism so solid that anything could be built on it, however crushing or cruel. They were so confident in their logic, and its one first principle of predestination, that they tortured the intellect and imagination with dreadful deductions about God, that seemed to turn Him into a demon. But it never seems to have struck them that somebody might suddenly say that he did not believe in the demon.  They were quite surprised when people called “infidels” here and there began to say it. They had assumed the Divine foreknowledge as so fixed, that it must, if necessary, fulfil itself by destroying the Divine mercy. They never thought anybody would deny the knowledge exactly as they denied the mercy.  Then came Wesley and the reaction against Calvinism; and Evangelicals seized on the very Catholic idea that mankind has a sense of sin; and they wandered about offering everybody release from his mysterious burden of sin. It is a proverb, and almost a joke, that they address a stranger in the street and offer to relax his secret agony of sin. But it seldom seemed to strike them, until much later, that the man in the street might possibly answer that he did not want to be saved from sin, any more than from spotted fever or St. Vitus’s Dance; because these things were not in fact causing him any suffering at all.  They, in their turn, were quite surprised when the result of Rousseau and the revolutionary optimism began to express itself in men claiming a purely human happiness and dignity; a contentment with the comradeship of their kind; ending with the happy yawp of Whitman that he would not “lie awake and weep for his sins.”

Now the plain truth is that Shelley and Whitman and the revolutionary optimists were themselves doing exactly the same thing all over again. They also, though less consciously because of the chaos of their times, had really taken out of the old Catholic tradition one particular transcendental idea; the idea that there is a spiritual dignity in man as man, and a universal duty to love men as men.  And they acted in exactly the same extraordinary fashion as their prototypes, the Wesleyans and the Calvinists.  They took it for granted that this spiritual idea was absolutely self-evident like the sun and moon; that nobody could ever destroy that, though in the name of it they destroyed everything else.  They perpetually hammered away at their human divinity and human dignity, and inevitable love for all human beings; as if these things were naked natural facts. And now they are quite surprised when new and restless realists suddenly explode, and begin to say that a pork-butcher with red whiskers and a wart on his nose does not strike them as particularly divine or dignified, that they are not conscious of the smallest sincere impulse to love him, that they could not love him if they tried, or that they do not recognize any particular obligation to try.

It might appear that the process has come to an end, and that there is nothing more for the naked realist to shed.  But it is not so; and the process can still go on.  There are still traditional charities to which men cling.  There are still traditional charities for them to fling away when they find they are only traditional. Everybody must have noticed in the most modern writers the survival of a rather painful sort of pity.  They no longer honour all men, like St. Paul and the other mystical democrats.  It would hardly be too much to say that they despise all men; often (to do them justice) including themselves.  But they do in a manner pity all men, and particularly those that are pitiable; by this time they extend the feeling almost disproportionately to the other animals. This compassion for men is also tainted with its historical connection with Christian charity; and even in the case of animals, with the example of many Christian saints.  There is nothing to show that a new revulsion from such sentimental religions will not free men even from the obligation of pitying the pain of the world. Not only Nietzsche, but many Neo-Pagans working on his lines, have suggested such hardness as a higher intellectual purity. And having read many modern poems about the Man of the Future, made of steel and illumined with nothing warmer than green fire, I have no difficulty in imagining a literature that should pride itself on a merciless and metallic detachment.  Then, perhaps, it might be faintly conjectured that the last of the Christian virtues had died. But so long as they lived they were Christian.

I think of that as I read about Richard Dawkins, scourge of theism, declaring himself a “cultural Christian” to the dismay of some Reddit Atheists and the extremely premature glee of some Christians.

Dawkins is basically saying, “I hate Christians less than I hate Muslims” and that is music to the ears of post-Christian fascists, culture warriors, and conservatives since they don’t really care about the gospel, just about Right Wing culture war talking points.

Dawkins spent his adult life sawing off the branch he was sitting on. Now he wants the benefits of the Faith without having the Faith. Nietzsche would call him an English flathead.

Seek first the kingdom of God, Dick. Otherwise forget having the side effects of it.

Still, from an actual perspective of faith in Christ, even this pathetic step is, or has the potential to be, a step. God has had less to work with.

What remains to be seen is how much of this cultural shift is actually motivated by attraction to and desire for Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, risen, ascended, and active in the heart of his Body the Church and how much is just aesthetics, Euro-culture, longing for the past or, worst of all, longing for a vehicle for power.

It will interesting to watch how this sort of regretful post-Evangelical-Atheism plays out. It seems to be more of a European thing so far. But the MAGA cult is trying to glom on to it because a lot of these guys are useful to the white supremacy jive they sell. We’ll see if Dawkins and those in his train follow the Farages, le Pens, and similar jingos in mere right wing culture war or if he arrives at the possibility that he is wrong about Jesus.

Meanwhile, Sherry Weddell’s excellent FORMING INTENTIONAL DISCIPLES notes that conversion generally goes through five stages

1. Basic trust about something related to Christ.
2. Curiosity about Jesus.
3. Openness to the possibility of relationship to him.
4. Actively seeking that relationship
5. Intentional discipleship to Jesus.

The winding way of the infinite paths one may follow through these stages is past the mind of man to trace out and it is not for us to judge who is sincerely pursuing our Lord. My hope is that Dawkins will think himself (and ultimately pray himself) further down the path toward Jesus and not get co-opted by the countless earthly agendas (not a few of them pursued by worldly Christians) that seek to snare us. But only God know all ends.