File this under Things You Can't Make Up.

Richard Dawkins is now making the case for cultural Christianity.

Welcome to Grace and Truth. My name is Owen Strand, and I will be your host.

File under the strange

but true realities. In a recent interview with Rachel Johnson broadcast, Richard Dawkins, the famous

atheist, really the leading atheist of the last 50 years or so, said that he was horrified to

learn that Oxford Street in London was promoting Ramadan and not Easter in that great

city, London. Now, Dawkins made very clear in his interview with Rachel Johnson that he doesn't

believe, air quotes, a word, end air quotes, of the Christian faith. But he did say that he calls himself

a cultural Christian. That was his term.

Here's what he said.

I do not think we are culturally a Christian country.

I call myself a cultural Christian.

I'm not a believer, but there's a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian.

So that's his key distinction that's operating in this interview and apparently in his life and his thinking, which is absolutely fascinating to learn about.

He doesn't think of himself as a believing Christian, like someone like me, I assume, but he does think of himself as a cultural Christian.

And how does he define being a cultural Christian?

What texture did he give to that idea?

This, I love hymns and Christmas carols,

and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that

sense. Okay, that's very helpful. There is some sort of functional value to Christianity, as Dawkins

is articulating it here. It has civilizational value in a general sense. He's not meaning the gospel of grace. He's not talking about regeneration. He's not talking about healthy local churches full of regenerated people, any of that. He is saying, though, that there is something to the Christian ethos and something to a country having some vestige of that Christian ethos.

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