A cultural recovery?

Christianity appears to be having a little cultural recovery.

I don’t mean for a moment that the general hostility in society to Christianity is lessening. But it is true that a growing number of secular commentators are realising that Christianity is, in some sense, a thing which we cannot do without.

Tom Holland has advanced a thesis that all secularism is in fact an outgrowth of Christianity; Jordan Peterson has increasingly pointed to the Biblical roots of much that we value in the West; even Richard Dawkins has recently said that he considers himself a ‘cultural Christian’. These thinkers seem to have looked Atheism in the face, and realised that they don’t like what they see.

And yet… it is not evangelical or orthodox Christianity which they and others like them seem to be drawn to. Holland seems to commend high-church (and sexually liberal) Anglicanism; Peterson seems to have a fondness for Roman Catholicism, but more as a route to self-help than worship, with a strong Pelagian emphasis on the potential and responsibilities of oneself; and Dawkins of course still says he doesn’t believe a word of it. What are we to make of this?

What these new pro-Christian thinkers seem to have in common is that they want an ethic – a shared set of cultural assumptions about right and wrong – which they realise has only grown in the soil of Christian belief. But here is the problem: they seem to want this Christian cultural ethic without the Christian foundation for it. Sadly, there are many deficient versions of Christianity around which might offer exactly that.

It is here that evangelicals have much to offer. We know that you cannot have self-sacrifice without Christ having really sacrificed Himself for us; you cannot have human value as images of God, without the Christian God being real. We know that Christianity cannot be reduced to an aesthetic with a desirable social outcome. It is about the knowledge of and salvation by the one true God, through Jesus Christ – or it is nothing. You cannot have the second great commandment – to love your neighbour as yourself – without the first, to love the one true God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. Any more than you insist that the chef uses no eggs and still expect him to serve you an omelette.

I’m not suggesting that we should be critical. On the contrary, we should see this as a great opportunity and a call to prayer and evangelism.

First, let’s pray for these men, and others like them, that they will realise that the only source of goodness in this universe is from God Himself – and that they must therefore come in repentance to Him through the Son He sent to save us. And we should pray that they will not be drawn to the various cheapened versions of Christianity on offer.

Secondly, this is a great opportunity for evangelism. The hollowness and contradictions of secularism are becoming clear in our day. It is true that Christianity alone provides the basis for a just and safe and kind society – as many of our evangelical forefathers knew very well. We should be making that point in our churches, and in any opportunities we have with others to do so. There are a growing number of people who are thoroughly disenchanted with what an atheist society is proving to be like, and we should pray and work to show and tell them of Christ’s far better way. It may be that we need to develop a much more whole-world understanding of Christianity’s significance than we have tended to in recent years, if we are to do that as we should.

But more than that, we must never be happy with people being drawn merely to a Christian vibe. We will only see the secondary blessings which God can bestow if we are willing to come before God in worship. And that means admitting our sins, most of all our pride and self-sufficiency and unbelief; it means throwing ourselves on the mercy of Christ, crucified and risen for us; it means trusting in Him alone to forgive us and redeem us; it means our lives must be wholly reordered around Him, empowered by the Spirit to live according to His word. It means joining Jesus’ church, and committing to making His worship the central habit and central reality of our lives.

That is the great gospel which God calls us to preach. We have, perhaps, a new opportunity to preach it. Let us pray for the courage to seize and use it wisely,