Elon Musk is better known as the world’s richest man than as a spiritual guru. But this week, in an interview with Jordan Peterson, he disclosed that he is a “cultural Christian”.

“While I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise, and that there’s tremendous wisdom in turning the other cheek,” Musk said.

“This notion of forgiveness is important. I think it’s essential because if you don’t forgive, I forget who said it, but ‘an eye for an eye makes everyone blind,'” he continued, adding, “So I’m a big believer in the principles of Christianity.”

.@elonmusk shares his views on religion with @jordanbpeterson, identifying as a "cultural Christian."

"While I'm not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise, and that there's tremendous wisdom in turning the other cheek." pic.twitter.com/NQYJm9UjZz

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 22, 2024

Musk did not want to be tied down. Ultimately, he subscribes to “the religion of curiosity”, he told Peterson. Despite the vagueness of his theological views, it does seem that admitting that you are a “cultural Christian” is socially acceptable again, after a couple of decades of noisy agitation from the "New Atheists".

Even the Grand Panjandrum of Atheism, British biologist Richard Dawkins, recently described himself as a “cultural Christian”.

After he had spent decades denouncing Christianity, this was a baffling development. Dawkins explained to a bemused interviewer: “I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian. 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.” 

Musk and Dawkins are not the only public figures who come out as cultural Christians. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born defender of free speech, announced that she was a Christian not long ago. Jordan Peterson himself admires Christianity. Tom Holland, the best-selling historian, says that his outlook is Christian but that he is not a churchgoer.

This would have been incomprehensible to the builders of England’s glorious cathedrals. In the Middle Ages, there were mediocre Christians, hypocritical Christians, saintly Christians, and Christians double-dyed in wickedness. But the notion of a Christian husk without a Christian core was unknown.

Cultural Christianity emerged in the mid-19th Century as the prestige of science and Enlightenment philosophy grew. People observed forms of Christian practice and morality without believing in fundamental Christian doctrines. For some, it was a time of anguish. Poet and social critic Matthew Arnold expressed his nostalgia for Christian certainties in his famous poem “Dover Beach”:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Arnold's contemporary, the influential British philosopher John Stuart Mill, was untroubled by the view at low tide. Although he was an agnostic (or an atheist), he was happy to concede that Christianity had at least been a beneficial and civilising force. In an essay entitled, significantly, “The Utility of Religion” (not the Truth of Religion), he wrote:

“I grant that some of the precepts of Christ as exhibited in the Gospels … carry some kinds of moral goodness to a greater height than had ever been attained before… But this benefit, whatever it amounts to, has been gained. Mankind have entered into the possession of it. It has become the Property of humanity, and cannot now be lost by anything short of a return to primaeval barbarism.”

That was the middle of the 19th century. One hundred years later, after Nazism and Communism, the Holocaust, two world wars, and a hundred million deaths, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno observed: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.” History had proved Mill absolutely wrong about cultural Christianity. The 20th century showed that mankind can lose — and sometimes has lost — its reverence for the beauty of Christ’s teachings and can easily revert to “primaeval barbarism”.