Consider Elon Musk calling himself a “cultural Christian” in an interview with Jordan Peterson as confirmation of a thesis I am making with increasing frequency: Christianity—and Christianity alone—has the moral coherence to it that serves as a dam holding back the full force of progressive ideology. We dare not overlook the significance of this development.
We are seeing more and more affirmations of the cultural elements of Christianity. From Peterson to Richard Dawkins to Peter Thiel to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, some of today’s most influential intellectuals and cultural architects recognize that Christianity is the only antidote to Western civilization disappearing over the abyss of progressivism. They have done so mugged by the reality that progressivism has taken its long march through all of Western civilization and undermined every decent pillar of import. Its academics espouse moral relativism. Sexual ideologues pulverize any concept of chastity. Feminism, sexual debauchery and license, abortion, critical theory, homosexuality, identity politics, transgenderism, and the regime of the therapeutic all consider human experience and human desire to be the currency of human interaction. All of these are acids to the worldview of revelational Christianity and its teaching about creation order. Where Genesis 1 communicates a worldview of existence, identity, purpose, and family life—in other words, the essentials for cultural stability—progressivism overturns them all.
We have seen progressivism hollow out civilizational decency and wear its skin as a suit.
And, finally, some are waking up.
What this means for the possibility of a Christian awakening or renaissance remains to be seen. Surely, if anything, it should be a signal to today’s pastors that one massive plank in their preaching should be Christianity as the antidote to cultural despair.
While it is possible to argue, perhaps, that the eclipse of Christian culture allows for a more vibrant and self-conscientious Christianity to flower, it also means material harm to human dignity, the natural family, and the common good. It should come as no shock that we live in an age of explosive rates of suicidal ideation, family decline, and opioid addiction alongside precipitous drops in church attendance. Let me suggest that this is one instance where correlation is causation. Produce a civilization without purpose and weaponized by an obsession with identity while at the same time gutting the world of Christianity’s teaching on the transcendent basis of creation order, and you should expect to see what we are seeing.We should be thankful for the civilizational force that Christianity has had on our culture, but we should press for something more—conversionist Christianity.
How evangelicals tackle cultural Christianity is a careful balancing act. We should never dismiss cultural Christianity or hasten its demise, as is popular to suggest in some evangelical quarters. But let me suggest that the aim of Christianity is not primarily cultural impact. The cultural leavening effect of Christianity should be downstream from its redemptive promise.
C.S. Lewis once observed, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” There’s a corollary here worth considering. If we aim at the salvation of human souls, we will get culture thrown in. But if we aim at culture as the primary focus of our witness, we can miss both culture and souls. The objective should be both but in the correct sequence.
This is why considerations of cultural Christianity are more nuanced than the discourse sometimes allows. We want to commend it on the one hand and continue to long for it while at the same time not making it our primary objective. We should see—and value—the transformation of culture as a result of the transformation of souls having been converted.
The response to Elon Musk calling himself a “cultural Christian” is not to belittle it. In fact, he may be what I have described as a “taovangelical.” A taovangelical is someone who channels Lewis’ concept of the “Tao” in Abolition of Man, a grasp of natural law principles without going so far as committing themselves to Christianity proper. But we should view this as an opportunity for cultural apologetics and, even more, a hopeful opportunity that Musk would dig into something deeper than just surface-level cultural Christianity.
Musk is increasingly borrowing from the moral capital of Christianity in recent public stances, and it would be right and good to connect those stances to the coherence of the authentic Christian worldview. We should be thankful for the civilizational force that Christianity has had on our culture, but we should press for something more—conversionist Christianity. The anguish that Musk and others like him have over the pathological ideologies of this culture will not be extinguished by mere tradition—important and valuable as that is—but by surrender to the risen Christ.
