Cultural Christians and cultured ones

In his typically thoughtful and good-natured Telegraph article, Charles Moore talks about “cultural” Christians, the type I usually call Christianists and religionists.

These are people, my late editor Roger Scruton comes to mind, who realise that a successful society can only be built on a foundation of a shared metaphysical premise and its derivative morality.

Moreover, they know that only religion, in the West specifically Christianity, can play such a unifying and edifying role. They themselves don’t believe in God but they do believe in the social utility of God’s word.

I can’t blame them for their lack of faith, just as I can’t blame anyone for any failing that’s none of his fault. Faith, after all, is a gift in the precise meaning of the word: something presented by an outside donor, in this case divine grace.

But I can blame such people for a lapse in logic or, perhaps, also knowledge. Reducing Christianity to its moral teaching, as laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in both Testaments, is simply ignorant. (I can again selfishly refer you to my book on Tolstoy, who was the chief culprit and, in the couple of decades before his death in 1910, the most influential one in the world.)

But people like Scruton know all that. That’s why theirs is a lapse of logic, not erudition.

As materialists, with or without some mystical longings, they have to believe that every word in the Bible is a lie. Well, perhaps not every word but only those that describe supernatural events, yet this is simply a pedantic qualification. Since the Bible is the word of God, everything in it is supernatural, even the dietary dicta and moral injunctions.

I’ve heard Christianists try to soft-pedal their position by saying that ‘a lie’ is too harsh a word. Perhaps ‘false’ would be kinder. Yes, I’d usually reply, it would be kinder. But it would be less accurate.

For the Scripture is full of eyewitness accounts of many miraculous events, including the one we’ll be celebrating tonight, the Resurrection of Our Lord. If someone rejects such accounts as false, he has to believe that those eyewitnesses were liars who hadn’t seen things they claimed to have seen. So yes, a lie is a harsh word, but it adequately describes Christianists’ view of Christianity.

This means they believe that a successful social fabric can be woven out of a tissue of lies, which is unsound on many levels, logical, intellectual and above all moral. And religionists are even more misguided.

They believe that a successful society can be built on any old religion, not necessarily Christianity. What, Islam? Buddhism? Animism? Zoroastrianism? The only other religion that had a profound effect on our civilisation was Judaism, but, since its spread is biologically limited, it can’t — nor wishes to — aspire to universalism.

Both Christianists (“cultural Christians” to Lord Moore) and religionists are partly right. Unlike most people, they see clearly the accelerating disintegration of the West and correctly attribute it to atheism and resultant materialism. The opposite of that is religion or rather specifically Christianity.

Yet Christianity can never succeed in its social, cultural and moral missions unless most people believe it’s true. And most people can only ever believe it’s true if it is indeed true. A false doctrine can command a wide following for a while but, as communism proves, sooner or later it’ll collapse like the walls of Jericho.

So much for what Lord Moore describes as “cultural Christians”. But another, similar type also exists, one I’d call “cultured Christians”.

These people laudably lack Tolstoy’s consistency. The good count rejected not only the Christian religion but also Christian culture, even, when in his dotage, the glorious part of it he himself had produced. By contrast, the people I’m talking about worship at the altar of Christian culture.

They crisscross the world trying to satisfy their voracious appetite for Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, mosaics and frescoes, icons and paintings on religious subjects. When they are in the presence of those masterpieces, they look at them with veneration and love.

And yet they dismiss completely, at times contemptuously, the inspiration behind those tributes to God in Christ and Christ in God.

Such ‘cultured Christians’ are less culpable than the ‘cultural’ ones, in that they correctly see that things we all love so much can’t have a formative social effect. They are too esoteric for that because most people don’t possess the requisite education and taste to appreciate great culture.

But less culpable doesn’t mean completely off the hook. If people don’t see God in, say, Rheims Cathedral, all they see is shapes, proportions, details like flying buttresses or façade sculptures (many of them headless due to modernity’s favourite genre of art criticism).

That means the most important thing goes right by them – not intellectually, because they know all about it, but spiritually and emotionally. And without its spiritual and emotional appeal, great art loses much of it greatness.

Only the technique remains, and ‘cultured Christians’ appreciate its subtleties perfectly well. They are, however, missing out on the joy real Christians feel first, before admiring Gothic ornamentation or Romanesque succinctness.

The upshot is that both surrogates of Christianity, ‘cultural’ and ‘cultured’, miss the point. But not so badly as common-or-garden vulgarians who are indifferent to such matters altogether. Which is to say most people these days.