Ariadne concludes its review of how late twentieth-century animal behaviorists shaped public perception of whether humans are naturally altruistic — an argument made most famously in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins today prefers to be known as an evolutionary biologist and an atheist. Yet The God Delusion (2006) remains his most successful book, outselling all his scientific writing, and the challenge to religious belief has occupied the greater part of his career. Recently, he has attempted to reconcile that career with a new label: “cultural Christian.”
The Cultural Christian
On Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024, Rachel Johnson interviewed Dawkins on LBC, a national talk radio station.1 Dawkins — author of The God Delusion and founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science — lamented the Ramadan lights then illuminating Oxford Street. When Johnson asked whether declining church attendance alongside mosque construction across Europe troubled him, he said it did. He told Johnson he was not a believer, but that he loved hymns and Christmas carols, felt at home in the Christian ethos, and would be sorry to lose the cathedrals and parish churches. Asked to choose between Christianity and Islam, he said he would choose Christianity every time, calling it a “fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”
It is worth recording the Britain in which he said this. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, was a practicing Hindu who had lit Diwali candles on the doorstep of 11 Downing Street. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan — the man who had switched on the lights Dawkins was lamenting — was a Muslim, elected three times by the capital’s voters. The monarch, at his coronation the previous May, had pledged to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs could live freely. The lights themselves came down in mid-April, replaced in due course by the Christmas displays that have decorated the same streets for seventy years. Nobody had proposed removing a cathedral.
The Position He Argued Should Not Exist
There is nothing incoherent about an unbeliever who loves choral evensong and Gothic architecture. Roger Scruton spent decades constructing exactly that position, openly and carefully. Millions of people hold it without ceremony.
The difficulty is particular to Dawkins, and it is one of self-contradiction. The thesis of The God Delusion was binary: religion is an empirical claim about the universe, the claim is false, and the falsehood matters. The book reserved specific criticism for moderate and cultural religion, arguing that mild, respectable, tradition-loving faith provides the climate in which harder belief flourishes. Dawkins described God as a delusion, characterized faith as a “virus of the mind,” and argued that raising children within a religion was a form of abuse. The comfortable middle ground — not believing, but belonging — was precisely the ground he spent thirty years arguing no honest thinker could occupy.
That is the ground he now claims for himself. And he claims it selectively. The cultural products of Christianity — the hymns, the carols, the cathedrals — earn the religion his verdict of “fundamentally decent.” Islam’s cultural products are not entered into evidence: not the Alhambra, not the preservation and extension of Greek mathematics, not algebra or observational astronomy or a poetic tradition running from Rumi to the present, not the thirty thousand lights on Oxford Street. The same test, applied to one religion through its art and to the other through its worst adherents, produces the two verdicts he gave Rachel Johnson.
The Standard Applied Twice
Dawkins’s scientific writing is exact. His writing about cultures is not, and the difference predates the LBC interview by more than a decade.
In 2013 he tweeted that Trinity College, Cambridge, had won more Nobel Prizes than all the world’s Muslims. The comparison is arithmetically true and analytically empty, and Dawkins — a career academic — knows what determines research output: laboratory infrastructure, state funding, capital, political stability, and the accumulated advantages of institutions like Trinity College. The tweet presented a measure of those things as though it were a measure of theology, applied to 1.8 billion people.
The 2024 interview completed the pattern. Ramadan commemorates events no more empirically verifiable than the Resurrection; a strict application of Dawkins’s own standard treats the two sets of lights identically. His objection was not that Londoners were celebrating the unprovable. It was which unprovable tradition had become visible on Oxford Street.
The James Watson Exemption
Why has none of this cost him his standing? The history of science offers a precedent: James Watson.
For decades the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix was extended what might be called a genius pass. His remarks on women, on eugenics, and on race were absorbed by the scientific establishment as the eccentricities of a monument. The pass was withdrawn only in stages: after his 2007 comments on race and intelligence, Watson lost his administrative role at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; after he repeated the claims in a 2019 documentary, the laboratory revoked his honorary titles. (I have written separately about Watson’s treatment of Rosalind Franklin; that piece remains among the most read in this publication’s archive.)2
Dawkins holds a comparable pass in British public life, sustained by three things.
Accent and class. Dawkins is a product of the Oxford establishment, and his views arrive in the measured cadence of an emeritus professor. British broadcasters and broadsheets accordingly file him under “provocateur” — a category that would not be available to a caller phoning LBC to say the same words in a different accent.
Accumulated goodwill. His defense of evolutionary science against American creationism in the 1980s and 1990s earned him decades of credit with liberal audiences. When his target shifted from Kansas school boards to Islam, the credit transferred with him, and the new campaign was received as a continuation of the old one.
Geopolitical alignment. Watson’s racial claims collided with the postwar civil rights consensus and eventually cost him his titles. Dawkins’s characterization of Islam as uniquely indecent collides with nothing; it runs parallel to a strain of mainstream political discourse across Britain and Europe, and so reads as commentary rather than transgression.
Conclusion
The “cultural Christian” label does not resolve the contradiction in Dawkins’s position; it relocates it. A campaign conducted for half a century in the name of universal reason has arrived at a local preference — for the hymns of one tradition over the lights of another, defended on grounds his own books ruled out of court. The man who wrote that a religious upbringing was a form of child abuse now takes comfort in the ethos that upbringing produced, and extends that comfort to one religion only. Readers of The God Delusion, including its many Muslim readers, can draw their own conclusions about what the campaign was for.
Reader note: The author is neither a Muslim nor an atheist. He stands, intellectually, closer to Richard Feynman on the shore — humbled by what is not understood, and skeptical of those who claim to have settled it.
© 2026 Farooq Hussain
