Can Christianity Be Good But Not True?
Can you have the fruits without the roots?
There are a growing number of public intellectuals who hold a curious position: that Christianity is good for society even though they don’t believe it’s actually true.
Scarcely a week goes by without some celebrity, politician, or influencer explaining how important Christianity is as a foundation for all the things we care most about as society. For example, Douglas Murray — a well-known journalist and committed atheist — now describes himself as a “Christian atheist.” Douglas doesn’t believe in God, but he thinks Christianity has been phenomenally important in shaping the things we hold dear in the West, particularly human rights. He’s not alone in this: for amazingly even the enfant terrible of the New Atheism movement, Richard Dawkins himself, in an Easter interview with LBC radio admitted:
I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos … I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself a cultural Christian.1
In all of this what you won’t find is anything much about Jesus, the Bible, or faith in God. But here’s the question lurking below the surface like a piranha in a jacuzzi: is it possible to enjoy the public goods that Christianity offers without actually believing its core claims to be true?
All this reminds me of a dream …
I once dreamt that I was strolling along a beach on a palm-fringed desert island. Suddenly my attention was drawn to a strange sound and looking up, I spied a large dodo, perched on a branch some 50 feet above the ground. It appeared to be wearing a hard hat and holding a chainsaw, which it was industriously applying to its branch.
“What are you doing?” I shouted up.
“Don’t mind me,” called back the dodo, stopping its work for a moment, “I’m just doing a spot of light pruning”. It scratched itself with a clawed foot, then began to try to restart the chainsaw — not an easy task when you don’t have opposable thumbs. Or indeed hands.
“I couldn’t help but notice,” I remarked, doing my best to project nonchalance, “that you appear to be — how can I put this — at risk of sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.”
“Kākāpō!” swore the dodo, “What is it with you humans, always thinking you know best. Look, I’m a bird. I’ve got wings, mate.”
“You’re a dodo,” I pointed out patiently. “Famous for being flightless. And also for being extinct, although apparently still alive and well in dreams.”
“I’ve got a hard hat,” the dodo huffed. “There’s nothing you can teach me about health and safety.”
“It’s a 50 foot drop!”
“Oh you’re so negative,” the dodo spluttered and, before I could say another word, it started up the chainsaw again and neatly sawed through its branch. There was a brief flurry of feathers, a minor explosion of avian curses, and then silence.
~+~
Whilst that may just have been a dream, it’s not a million miles removed from this whole cultural Christianity business. There really is something quite genuinely weird — but more than that, something almost philosophically self-destructive — about claiming that you enjoy the outcomes of Christianity while simultaneously insisting that the story behind it is nonsense. No wonder that the New Atheism has largely gone the way of the dodo.
This is not just theoretical; there’s a personal cost to it too: for trying to appreciate everything that comes from Christianity while insisting its fundamental claims are false is a painful and contradictory way to live. Indeed, the writer George Orwell had a word for this kind of thing in his classic novel 1984: doublethink, which describes the attempt to hold two entirely contradictory ideas in your mind whilst doing your best not to notice the tension between them.
But finally and most importantly, those goods that my atheist friends are rediscovering in Christianity aren’t accidental. Human rights and human dignity don’t randomly emerge from Christian culture. Rather they flow directly and deliberately from the Christian conviction that human beings are not mere accidents of chemistry and biology, but are made in the image of God and created with a value that God demonstrated when he stepped into history in the person of Jesus and gave his life for us. Take away that foundation and however uncomfortable it may make you, you’re left with the conclusion that human beings have no intrinsic value at all — that we really are just accidents of time, chance, and natural selection. You can’t have the goods without the fundamental beliefs on which they rest.
Christianity is not simply a personal moral code; or some nice hymns and carols; or a way of keeping the cultural barbarians from storming the gates; or the political equivalent of an IKEA manual, offering some illustrated steps enabling you to self-assemble a friendly liberal society from some pre-cut pieces. In fact Christianity is not good advice at all but good news — indeed, the very word ‘gospel’, chosen by the first Christians two thousand years ago to describe the life, death and resurrection of Jesus means just that: ‘good news’. And you cannot separate the ‘good’ part from the ‘news’ part.
So if you’re someone who values human rights, dignity, and justice but you’ve not seriously engaged with the Christian claims behind them then I’d encourage you to do so. Read someone like C.S. Lewis, particularly his classic The Abolition of Man. Engage with thinkers who have wrestled seriously with these questions. Because the wonderful thing about Christianity is that Jesus doesn’t ask you to leave your brain at the door. He said to love the Lord your God with your heart, your mind, and your soul. You don’t have to live in dissonance. You can have those wonderful public goods and embrace, with intellectual coherence and rational confidence, the person of Jesus who stands behind them.
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‘Richard Dawkins: I’m a Cultural Christian’, LBC, 1 April 2024, https://bit.ly/dawkins-lbc-radio; see also Adrian Warnock, ‘Is Richard Dawkins About To Become a Christian?’, 5 August 2024, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/adrianwarnock/2024/08/is-richard-dawkins-about-to-become-a-christian/.