What in hell is a ‘cultural Christian’?

Thanks to Kemi Badenoch’s loquacity, we now know how she feels about God. Personally, I’d be more interested to know how God feels about Kemi Badenoch, but He isn’t talking – yet.

Second-guessing God is a losing proposition, and I can’t guarantee that he’ll consign Mrs Badenoch to the fires of hell. But I am sure perdition awaits the Conservative Party, specifically because it’s led by Mrs Badenoch and similarly unimpressive politicians.

In broad strokes, Mrs Badenoch says she used to believe in God but doesn’t any longer. In itself, there is nothing remarkable about this loss of faith: apostasy from Christianity is as old as Christianity itself.

Religious faith is a gift, something presented by an outside donor. Or perhaps that’s not quite accurate: a gift, once presented, becomes one’s irrevocable property.

Faith, on the other hand, is more like a loan, something the lender grants but can also foreclose. Since we can’t know God’s reasons for either giving or taking away, we can no more rebuke a man (or in this case a woman) for losing faith than we can praise him for acquiring it.

We can, however, be horrified to see that our venerable political institution is led by a woman who talks about Christianity like a 10-year-old child. And not a particularly bright one at that.

St Augustine said, and St Anselm repeated, that we don’t understand in order to believe. We believe in order to understand, which establishes the proper sequence of religious experience.

To be valid, any rationalisation of faith has to be post-rationalisation. No amount of study, however intensive and extensive, will lead one to faith. Faith, however, may activate one’s intellectual faculties and lead one on a lifelong quest for the truth (and not just religious truth).

But this is strictly derivative and ultimately unnecessary. A tiny majority of egg-headed believers apart, billions of devout Christians over the past two millennia never read any patristic literature, theology, Christian philosophy or for that matter Scripture. This didn’t make their faith any less strong and pure.

However, one should expect an intelligent and educated Christian to have some basic understanding of doctrine. After all, intuitive, mysteriously acquired faith doesn’t put one’s mind on hold. Faith activates the mind, lets it soar to new heights – and not just in religious thought.

The reverse is also true. If a supposedly intelligent and educated believer is pig-ignorant about Christianity, then that person is neither intelligent nor educated. And when an unintelligent and uneducated person leads a major political party, its future is bleak.

Kemi Badenoch was a Christian who lost her faith in 2008, after reading about that Austrian monster Josef Fritzl. He kept his daughter imprisoned in the cellar for 24 years, raping her regularly and producing thereby seven children of whom six survived.

Throughout, the woman prayed for her deliverance, but her prayers went unanswered. Reading about it “killed” Mrs Badenoch’s faith, but I don’t think it died hard.

As she explains, “I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades. My hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something. It’s like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman’s prayers?”

In other words, Mrs Badenoch, whose parents were Christians with advanced university degrees and whose grandfather was a Methodist minister, grew up without having a clue about Christian prayer, what it does and what it’s for.

Making supplications to God isn’t like ordering a meal in a restaurant, expecting it to be to one’s liking and sending it back if it isn’t. Every prayer is ultimately a version of the Lord’s Prayer, a statement of faith.

By talking to God and asking him to do certain things, a Christian reaffirms his belief in a loving deity. He knows his prayers will be heard, and he hopes they will be answered.

But he doesn’t expect to have a transactional relationship with God, exchanging prayers for favours. God has his own ways and his own reasons, which our own reason can never grasp. The very definition of God precludes any possibility of complete intelligibility: a higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa.

When an adult (Mrs Badenoch was 28 in 2008) loses faith because God didn’t keep his end of the bargain, that adult isn’t very bright. Losing faith can happen to anyone, but when it happens for that reason, neither the believer’s faith nor her mind can be especially strong.

Mrs Badenoch served up a version of the traditional gripe: “If God exists, then how come he allows [insert your favourite calamity]?” Such questions have been asked even by people manifestly more intelligent than Mrs Badenoch, such as David Hume.

He applied his intellectual gifts and literary brilliance to the perennial issue of reconciling God with the existence of evil. If God is merciful and good, Hume kept asking, then why does he allow suffering? If that’s beyond his control, then how omnipotent is he? And if he doesn’t know what’s going on, is he really omniscient?

Countering such questions is called theodicy, vindication of God. Its principal argument is based on free will, God’s gift enabling us to make our own free choice between good and evil.

We are free to make it, just as God is free to punish us if we choose wrong and, one hopes, reward us if we choose right. And, though Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, we remain free to take that path or not.

Josef Fritzl chose not to take it, thereby abusing God’s gift of free will. But the gift remained on offer, which puts the blame not on God but on Fritzl.

Be that as it may, if Mrs Badenoch chose to follow Hume’s faulty logic, I wonder why she had to wait so long. Surely she must have heard about other acts of evil, those committed on an infinitely vaster scale?

Millions of Russians also prayed on the way to the NKVD’s shooting cellars, as did millions of Jews marching to the Nazi gas chambers. And yet their gruesome fate didn’t shake Mrs Badenoch’s faith. It took the plight of one continually raped woman to do that.

It then got even worse: “I rejected God, not Christianity. So I would still define myself as a cultural Christian.” She is clearly not a cultured one, but let me repeat the question in the title. What in hell is a cultural Christian?

If you reject God, you may still be a wonderful, caring, intelligent person. But you can be no kind of Christian. That breed is defined by the Creed first enunciated exactly 1,700 years ago at Nicaea. It starts with the words “I believe in one God…” and goes on from there. That’s it, in a nutshell.

Does Mrs Badenoch mean she likes Christian culture, say Byzantine iconography, Dante’s poetry and Byrd’s motets? I doubt she is familiar with such recondite things, but I’ll take her word that she is.

But one doesn’t have to be any kind of Christian to have such tastes. For example, a friend of mine, a successful icon trader who genuinely loves his wares, is an atheist. Another friend, a brilliant performer of Western, which is to say Christian, music is himself no Christian.

Mrs Badenoch lists Roger Scruton among her influences, which may shed some light on her curious statement. He was what I’d call a Christianist, someone who believed Christianity was essential for keeping the masses in check, but he himself was above it.

I recall arguing with him, saying that Christianism meant believing that a successful society could be built on a false premise. That was a long time ago, and I don’t remember how Roger replied, although I’m sure he was more eloquent and precise in his statement than Mrs Badenoch was in hers.

More recently, I heard similar arguments from a French friend who, unlike Scruton, actively dislikes Christianity. My point is the same: if you think that Christianity is a pernicious lie, which is nonetheless essential for civilised society, you despise not only God but also people.

You see them as a mindless herd that can be duped by any old lie, provided its sounds good. Is that how Mrs Badenoch sees her electorate? If so, I hope for her sake, and also her party’s, that she doesn’t say that out loud. If she did, I wouldn’t rate her electoral chances highly. Come to think of it, I don’t anyway.