Cultural Christianity and the vulgar wisdom of memes
by Sebastian Milbank, Artillery Row:
Dawkins is caught between the pure idea of rationalism, and the messy meme of cultural Christianity.
Richard Dawkins has gone viral following revelations that he considers himself a “cultural Christian”. Of course this is not really news — he has been on record with this as far back as 2007. But the strength with which he expressed it, and the direct contrast to Islam, caught people’s imagination: he would choose Christianity over Islam “every single time”.
The statement, and the reaction to it, could find some interesting analysis in the work of the evolutionary biologist himself. Dawkins is, after all, the inventor of the term “meme”. In The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, he argued that just as biological entities exist to the extent to which they reproduce themselves, so concepts and cultures work on the basis of replication: ideas that make you want to share them, that are so compelling, useful, or simply catchy, that they persist for centuries or millennia.
The significance of this is clear — an idea need not be good, important or rationally coherent in order to thrive: it need only be highly shareable. Whether or not this theory fully explained the traditional spread of cultures and concepts, it proved an eerily prescient account of how ideas would be exchanged in digital spaces.
An important insight of evolutionary psychology has been to see human behaviour as driven by deep biological impulses, rather than rational calculation. Whatever our rationalisations, the spread of ideas is, on this reading, better explained by instincts born of the pressures of millions of years of Darwinian selection.
Cultural Christianity, and Dawkins’ account of it, takes on a different character when seen from this perspective. Even though, like Dawkins, an ever-growing proportion of Britons lacks a supernatural faith, the “meme” of Christianity, its ethics and aesthetics, are inescapable. Dawkins’ own comments reflect this sort of power of unconscious and not fully rational ideas — Christianity here provides a binding tribal logic, distinct from the truth of its beliefs. When confronted with the cultural “otherness” of Islam, Dawkins instinctively reaches for the familiar identity of Christianity. He is not a believer, but he is a self-confessed member of the Christian “tribe”.
Read also: Dawkins and ‘cultural Christianity’: what does it all mean? by Heather Tomlinson, Christian Today
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