Can you really be a Christian without believing in God?

On Monday morning Tom Holland, the historian who co-presents the hugely successful podcast The Rest Is History, guest-edited Radio 4’s Today programme. In an interview with Amol Rajan he was asked about his relationship with Christianity and his recent cancer diagnosis. What followed was a conversation as compelling as it was moving, in which Holland recalled being told that a cancerous tumour in his bowel had metastasised and was likely to have spread to his lymph glands.

Holland is an old friend — we used to play cricket together — but I had not known about his diagnosis, which came late in the pandemic. After being told the devastating news, Holland sought solace in an ancient church, the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, the only place in London where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared. There, he offered a “wholehearted prayer for the first time since the age of ten”.

In the event Holland’s diagnosis turned out not to be as grave as first believed. He is now cancer-free after a successful operation but is profoundly changed by the experience. “I really feel I massively dodged a bullet there,” he told Rajan. “My rational side says it’s a reflection of luck, or of privilege [his brother recommended a surgeon] … but the other part of me did think, ‘Goodness me, I’ve been part of a medieval miracle.’”

Holland has previously described himself as a Protestant agnostic, or cultural Christian, rather than as a committed believer. Even now, he likens his relationship with Christianity to a dimmer switch: it can be turned up or down. I was reminded of David Cameron’s wry remark, when he was leader of the opposition, about his faith: “Like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns, it sort of comes and goes.”

In his 2019 book Dominion, Holland argues persuasively that to live in a modern western democracy is “to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions”. The respect for the equal dignity of every human being that has shaped the rule of law and individual rights is itself a profoundly Christian idea. Even our supposedly secular universal belief systems — Marxism, wokeism, neoliberalism, progressivism — can be understood as surrogate forms of Christianity, with their own telos, eschatology, priesthood and faith in moral progress. As Holland puts it, “Christianity spreads in two ways: through conversion and through secularisation.”

The Church of England is increasingly enfeebled, a diminished, often anguished presence in public life that struggles to contain its internal divisions. Fewer than half of Britons (46 per cent) now identity as Christian, and not many of those attend church services. What is keeping churchgoing alive in many towns is the commitment of migrants from eastern Europe and Africa, especially among Catholics.

And yet, paradoxically, there are signs of a Christian revival or at least renewed interest in the UK’s Christian heritage, especially among Gen Z. Twenty years ago the so-called New Atheists were in the ascendant. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith were influential bestsellers. Militant atheism enjoyed a kind of radical chic. Hitchens, suave and supremely articulate, took on all comers in debate and invariably won.

But that moment has passed. A growing number of prominent public figures, among them Holland, Kemi Badenoch, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Nick Cave, Philip Pullman and even Dawkins, describe themselves as cultural Christians or praise the civilisational and moral inheritance of Christianity without affirming belief in God. As Dawkins has put it, “You can be a cultural Christian, a political Christian, a believing Christian or any combination of the three. For Dawkins the chief value of Christianity, and of the Church of England in particular, is its cultural inheritance: the sacred music, the beauty of the language of the King James Bible and the solemn majesty of our churches and cathedrals. To which a believing Christian would retort: cultural beauty, yes, but also transcending culture?

When I listen to sacred music or enter an empty village church on a quiet winter afternoon, I feel the pull of cultural Christianity myself but also something more than that — a longing for transcendence and for what Philip Larkin, in his poem Church Going, calls a hunger in oneself “to be more serious”.

Cultural Christianity is not a new idea. Clement Attlee, Labour’s greatest prime minister, was inspired by the ethics of Christianity as his government set about creating a new economic and political consensus, the “New Jerusalem”, after the Second World War. But he emphatically rejected what he called the “mumbo-jumbo” and Holland calls the “weird stuff”.

In The Gospel in Brief, a book of such importance to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his service on the eastern front in the First World War, Tolstoy retold the Christian story in lucid, novelistic form but excluded the miracles, the virgin birth and the resurrection. What interested him most was not the supernatural aspects of Christianity but its spiritual and moral teachings.

Wittgenstein bought the book in a shop in a town now in southern Poland and carried it with him even under fire in the trenches, where he became known as “the man with the gospels”. Wittgenstein was not a Christian and yet in a letter to a friend he wrote of Tolstoy’s book that it had “virtually kept me alive”.

There are two principal arguments against the rise of the cultural Christians. The first, made by Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, in a recent Spectator interview, is that the very point of Christian belief is that the spiritual and moral teachings are linked to the supernatural.

Christianity is not something one can pick or choose from at will: it demands full embrace and obedience. Williams thinks that the phenomenon of people like Badenoch who call themselves cultural Christians without being Christian in practice misses the whole point of belief. These people like the ethics but not the metaphysics. “At the end of the day,” he said, “the cultural Christian thing misses out on the excitement of Christianity — the life.”

The second argument, made by left-wing progressives, is that the cultural Christianity promoted by Musk and Peterson is merely a proxy for hard right-wing nationalism, cynically deployed in the culture wars. At the extremes, far-right agitators such as Tommy Robinson have gone further still, invoking Christianity as a bulwark against what they see as the assertiveness of Islam in Europe and as a weapon against multiculturalism.

This is a long way from Holland’s recollections on the Today programme of asking for mercy as he sat alone in a London church.

For Badenoch, who says she rejected belief in God but not Christianity in 2008 after the revelations of Josef Fritzl’s crimes against his daughter, identifying as a cultural Christian means valuing the Christian foundations of British society without making the leap into faith. Many Britons would share her position.

Our churches may be emptying, and the Church of England ever more distant from daily life, yet something vital of our Judaeo-Christian heritage endures in the culture. However it is expressed, it remains meaningful and worth cherishing, whether one believes or not. Where would we be, and who would we be, without it?