In the scramble to understand the numerous cultural currents that are constantly running through the United States, one of the most instructive ideas to emerge in recent years has come from political science professor Ryan Burge. His project, Graphs About Religion, provides interesting details on the growing number of Americans who identify as evangelical while rarely attending church—if they do so at all.
In 2008, a mere 3 percent of self-identified evangelicals reported never attending religious services. By 2023, that number had grown to 10 percent, with an additional 17 percent saying that they seldom attended. This means that more than a quarter of America’s evangelical devout actually show little devotion, attending church once per year or less—a startling idea when we consider the outsize role that evangelicals have played in America’s postwar political life. It points to a wider trend that we’re seeing in elite (though they would reject that term) influencers who have lurched dramatically to the political right in recent years, under the guise of “cultural Christianity.”
While not all cultural Christians identify as evangelical, they embrace a secular vision of Christian values—tradition, conventional families, and small government—all without the spiritual commitment or conviction. Cultural Christianity’s true believers tend to be drawn to the idea that the faith exists strictly as a rejection of liberal cultural hegemony; that whenever they turn on the television, a Taylor Swift or LeBron James is telling them how to vote or a transgender influencer like Dylan Mulvaney is advertising their all-American beer. Pop culture represents deeper political grievances, such as liberal gender and identity expression; the corporate drum of diversity, equity and inclusion; the intervening state of the pandemic; and overt multiculturalism.
And while it might be tempting to view this movement as the domain of conservative old white guys, last week’s election highlighted that it is home to an increasingly potent coalition.
Ironically, cultural Christianity’s St. Paul is Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist whose 2006 book, The God Delusion, was one of the canonical texts of the “new atheist” movement that took shape after 9/11. Only a year after his book denouncing all faith was released, Dawkins described himself as a “cultural Christian,” lamenting that there was an “increasing feeling” that festivals such as Christmas were being marginalized. “I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history,” he said. “If there’s any threat to these sorts of things, I think you will find it comes from rival religions and not from atheists.”
Those skeptical about cultural Christianity might note that it bears the hallmarks of some of the more robust reactionary strains of secular politics without any of the Christ-like obligations—such as communal rituals, an emphasis on humility and forgiveness, and a dedication to serving others—that might conflict with the practitioner’s simultaneous adherence to a reactionary and antisocial brand of conservatism. In order to fill the void where religious faith might otherwise reside, cultural Christians are inculcated in a stew of sermons without questions about their own behaviors, beliefs shorn of moral foundations, and moralizing without scriptures. At its crudest interpretation, it could be argued that cultural Christianity is a home for those who don’t necessarily believe that Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins, but rather, that they are heirs to his victimhood. Persecution didn’t only happen to Jesus—it’s happening to me.
It’s of little surprise, then, that the towering cultural—and financial—figure of the 2024 election, Elon Musk, came out as a cultural Christian in July. Musk, who used to be a liberal of sorts, took his first steps on the road to Damascus during the pandemic. It was the time when, in addition to publicly railing against lockdown orders, he was “tricked,” he claims, into signing papers for gender-affirming care for one of his children. Following the gender transition of the child, now an adult called Vivian, he told Canadian pop psychologist (and fellow cultural Christian) Jordan Peterson that he’s a “big believer in the principles of Christianity” and “a cultural Christian,” for his estranged daughter had been “killed by the woke mind virus.”
Others in Musk’s milieu appear to be attracted to this nonpracticing version of Christianity for its disciplining effect on wider society. Joe Rogan, host of America’s most popular podcast, said earlier this year in a conversation with NFL player Aaron Rodgers, “We need Jesus,” adding that now’s a good time for Him to come back, because “we’re kind of fucked.” There might be a point, he added, where society is “so unmanageable and so chaotic that something comes down and gives us a guideline.”
On closer inspection, other prominent cultural Christians appear to be motivated more by Western cultural chauvinism than their own personal circumstances, a route similar to the one the new atheists followed out of the smoke plumes of the September 11 attacks. Bellicose British commentator and new atheist Douglas Murray, who has been outspoken about the righteousness of the destruction of Gaza, now describes himself as a “Christian atheist.” Last November, his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch American writer and fellow former new atheist, wrote an essay on her outright conversion to Christianity, citing reasons such as wokeness and Islam—while not once mentioning Jesus.
Ali, along with many others in the cultural Christian movement, cite historian and popular podcaster Tom Holland’s 2019 book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, as their Bible. Holland argues, with solid historical foundations, that the tenets of Western liberalism, from human rights to secularity, are deeply rooted in Christian thought and assumptions. (Following the election, Democratic Party consultant David Axelrod spoke to Holland’s thesis from another angle, arguing that the party has become “a metropolitan, college-educated party,” which approaches the working class in the “spirit of a missionary—that we’re here to help you become more like us.”)
Holland is, however, more of a gospel-curious, reluctant agnostic than a chest-thumping, anti-woke culture warrior. The same cannot be said for the most antagonistic of those who have adopted his argument. In their kind-of coming to Jesus, Musk, Dawkins, and Ali have all rejected today’s liberal values, as they see them, and promotion of Western civilization—as they see it. Unspoken is the fact that 85 percent of the world’s Christians live in the developing world. That’s some distance from Richard Dawkins’s notion of “listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals,” which he claimed in a 2018 tweet was “much nicer than the aggressive-sounding ‘Allahu Akhbar.’” It’s not hard to imagine a Dawkins or Musk feeling as alien in an exuberant West African deliverance ministry as they would in a mosque.
Yet while many of cultural Christianity’s public figures are tub-thumping Western supremacists, there’s a quietly growing number of Americans who describe themselves as non-Christian evangelicals. Using data from the Cooperative Election Study in 2022, Ryan Burge highlights a group of people—including 14 percent of Muslims and Catholics, 12 percent of Hindus, 9 percent of Buddhists, and 5 percent of Jews—who would also describe themselves as “born again” or evangelical Christians.
Breaking it down further, he found that Republican Muslims self-identify as evangelical at a rate of 32 percent, compared to 11 percent of Democratic-leaning Muslims. Republican Jews identify the same way three times as much as Democratic Jews. Republican Buddhists and Hindus also identify as evangelical much more than their left-leaning co-religionists, while 19 percent of Republican “Nones” call themselves evangelical and only 9 percent of Democrats do the same.
This trend is best encapsulated in the brief Republican presidential primary candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy. Seeking to court Iowa’s powerful evangelical block, he closed his stump speeches with the hyper-online invocation that “God is real.” Finding common ground between Hindu faith and evangelical Christianity, he declared that faith is under attack by “new secular religions: wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, Covidism.” More persuasively, a 2021 essay for The American Conservative by authors of faith, “In Defence of Cultural Christianity,” argued that “liberal consumerism” is leading to “ever greater cultural absurdities” that do not sincerely reflect modern society.
False nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but this taps into a wider dissatisfaction with economic life that is critiqued by paleoconservatives and fourth-wave feminists alike. Young families are being squeezed at every turn by cost-of-living pressures. Breaking glass ceilings has obvious appeal, but for a lot of women, that can mean placing 6-week-old babies in childcare. In some spheres, particularly a certain strain of the newly culturally Christian online right, it tends to be accompanied by a desire for an AI -image-generated ersatz past, where men sired large families and their wives happily stayed at home.
Either way, the great American marketplace of faith, which for so long saw American Protestantism thrive free from the constraints of the state, is welcoming new customers, with their souls as an added extra. Spiritual converts usually arrive in the evangelical movement seeking personal salvation, but cultural Christians are flooding in thanks to a profound shift in a modern evangelical movement: Trump’s prophets, who are less interested in saving your soul than radically transforming society.
Cultural Christians are joining spiritual Christians in feeling besieged by the liberal culture around them—from everyman Hollywood hero Robert De Niro yelling, “Fuck Trump” at a 2018 awards ceremony to evolving ideas about diversity and inclusion—a culture that is strongly backed by our corporate overlords. Suffering and sin become less important than finding a sense of order in a changing world and the ideas of a real and imagined past that underpin them.
After all, if there’s one lesson from two millennia of Christianity, it’s that true believers have been called to reject the prevailing secular culture when it does not conform to their hearts. It instructs us, instead, to heed the lessons of the good book. For cultural Christians, which book that is is another question.