A respected philosopher who spent his career arguing against religion recently announced that he considers himself a “cultural Christian.” A podcaster whose audience numbers in the tens of millions says the same. And in the pages of First Things, evangelical scholar James Wood has offered the most serious intellectual defense of the concept in recent memory — arguing that a society whose institutions, norms, and moral expectations are shaped by Christian commitments produces better outcomes than one that has abandoned them, even when many shaped by it have never personally believed.[1]
The argument deserves a fair hearing. The instinct behind it — that a culture formed by Christian moral and intellectual traditions is preferable to one that has discarded them — is widely shared. We should not dismiss it.
But before we decide whether cultural Christianity is worth defending, we should ask the people who know it best — not its architects and advocates, but the people who lived under it without its protections. Their testimony has been waiting a long time.
What Cultural Christianity Claims
Wood draws a careful distinction at the outset of his essay. Cultural Christianity, he insists, is not tribal religion or weaponized faith. He is describing something more specific: a society in which, to borrow Abraham Kuyper’s phrase, “the ruling ideas, the moral norms, the laws and customs…clearly betoken the influence of the Christian faith.”[2] A society saturated with Christian moral formation, the argument continues, creates what sociologist Peter Berger called a “plausibility structure” — a shared framework of assumptions that makes the gospel not only comprehensible but believable. Cultural Christianity, Wood argues, functions as an on-ramp to genuine faith: the person drawn to Christianity through civilizational recoil may eventually encounter the Christ who stands behind that heritage.
The question of how gospel and culture relate has occupied serious thinkers for centuries, and Wood is engaging it with more care than most. The question before us is not whether his argument is coherent. It is whether the historical record supports it. But the distinction that matters most isn’t Wood’s. It is the one between cultural Christianity and genuine gospel faith — between a Christianity of social inheritance and a Christianity of transforming conviction. What follows is about the former.
The Problem with Wood’s Own Evidence
Wood marshals three conversion examples as his best evidence for cultural Christianity as an on-ramp to genuine faith: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Louise Perry, and the catechumens of the early church. These, he argues, represent people drawn toward Christianity through a kind of civilizational recoil — sensing that the Christian framework offers something the alternatives cannot.
But look closely at what these examples actually show. Hirsi Ali converted in a culture that had largely abandoned its Christian heritage. Perry arrived at faith while the broader cultural current was moving in the opposite direction. Wood himself describes the early catechumens as pagans whose “theological frameworks and moral reflexes were alien to the gospel” — which is to say, they came to faith in a world without a Christian plausibility structure.[3] In each case Wood offers as his strongest evidence, the person is converting against the cultural current, not carried along by it. The absence of dominant cultural Christianity did not impede these conversions. It may have clarified the choice.
Jesus himself raises a question Wood does not fully answer. In Matthew 23:3, he tells his disciples that the scribes and Pharisees occupy Moses’ seat and should therefore be obeyed — though not imitated. Wood cites this to suggest that even insincere cultural conformity can serve legitimate social ends. This is a fair observation, but the text invites another question: what was life like for those who lived under the Pharisees’ cultural authority without choosing it? The people who paid the cost of that cultural Christianity were not the Pharisees.
The Track Record
Cultural Christianity is not a theoretical proposal. It has been tested across centuries and continents. The witnesses most qualified to evaluate what it produces are not its architects. They are the people it could not protect — and the people it actively harmed.
In the American antebellum South, cultural Christianity was not incidental to the institution of slavery. It furnished the arguments for it. Slaveholders opened their Bibles to justify the ownership of human beings. Churches that met every one of Wood’s criteria for a Christian culture — Christian holy days observed, biblical morality functioning as the social baseline, the Scriptures treated as the moral foundation of civic life — produced theological defenses of chattel slavery that circulated through denominational publishing houses. The same cultural canopy stretched over a century of Jim Crow, over churches that refused membership to Black Christians, over communities that lynched men on Saturday and received communion on Sunday.
The experience of Native Americans is, if anything, more damning still. “Christian civilization” was not merely the backdrop of assimilation policies — it was their explicit justification. The boarding schools that stripped children of their language, their names, their families, and their identities were institutions that would have satisfied every one of Wood’s definition. They were not aberrations of cultural Christianity. They were its deliberate institutional expression.
South Africa provides the most theologically pointed exhibit, because its apartheid church history runs directly through the Reformed tradition Wood draws on throughout his essay. The Dutch Reformed Church — rooted in Kuyper’s own theological lineage — provided the theological foundation for apartheid for nearly five decades. Its own national moderator later acknowledged what the record already showed: “We provided the theological base for apartheid.”[4] It was not until 1998 that the church’s general synod formally declared that the theological justification of apartheid was “a travesty of the gospel and, in its persistent disobedience to the word of God, a theological heresy.”[5]
Rwanda may be the starkest case. At the time of the 1994 genocide, ninety percent of the population identified as Catholic, Protestant, or Seventh-day Adventist.[6] Rwanda was not culturally Christian in some residual or nominal sense. It was, by any sociological measure, one of the most thoroughly Christianized nations on earth. The Catholic Church has since acknowledged that its members planned, aided, and executed the genocide, and that churches became sites of mass killing.[7] Scholars who have examined the structural causes find that the contributing factors are precisely what Wood most values: close church-state relationship, social conformity to Christian identity, and a theology that emphasized obedience to civil authority over prophetic responsibility.[8]
The Diagnosis
These are not isolated failures. They are not cases where cultural Christianity was sound in theory but poorly executed in practice. They are the consistent record of what cultural Christianity produces when it reaches full institutional power.
The theological problem is not that cultural Christianity sets out to suppress the gospel. It domesticates it. It preserves the vocabulary, the institutions, the moral framework, and the social respectability of Christian faith — while gradually neutralizing the gospel’s most essential capacity: to judge the existing social order from outside it. Paul writes to the Corinthians that “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” (1 Cor. 1:18). The gospel is not a civilizational stabilizer. It is a word of judgment and grace that unsettles every human project — including religious ones, especially religious ones. When it is domesticated into a cultural heritage, that unsettling capacity is precisely what gets lost.
The pattern wasn’t theoretical for Paul. At Antioch, he confronted Peter publicly because Peter had withdrawn from table fellowship with Gentile believers when certain people came from James (Gal. 2:11-14). Peter had not changed his doctrine. He had simply allowed the weight of cultural expectation to override the gospel’s logic. Paul named it without hesitation: Peter was not walking “in step with the truth of the gospel.” The social pressure of that moment had done exactly what cultural pressure always does — made external conformity comfortable and gospel fidelity costly.
What the Record Also Shows
The historical record cuts in both directions. The other side is worth our attention.
The same history that indicts cultural Christianity also shows what the genuine Christian witness looks like when it refuses to be co-opted by the surrounding culture. Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect — an evangelical reform coalition that drove British abolition from the 1790s to 1833 — operated in direct opposition to the dominant cultural Christianity of the British Empire. The Black church in America — the community that dominant cultural Christianity had most thoroughly excluded — became the prophetic engine of the Civil Rights Movement, preaching a gospel that dismantled what that Christian culture had built and blessed.[9] Desmond Tutu did not oppose apartheid by making peace with the Dutch Reformed cultural establishment. He opposed it because he understood what the gospel actually demanded: “I don’t preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person.”[10]
The pattern is clear. The transforming power of the genuine Christian witness has appeared at the margins of cultural Christianity — among those who had nothing to gain from its preservation. The prophetic voice against cultural Christianity’s worst productions has come from the enslaved, the colonized, the segregated, the dispossessed. John’s vision in Revelation points toward why: the telos — the ultimate end — of the gospel is not a reconstructed Christendom but “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9). That community transcends every cultural and national boundary — and the genuine gospel has always been building it precisely where cultural Christianity was not.
The West does not need cultural Christianity recovered. It needs what cultural Christianity has consistently domesticated: the gospel itself — not a strategy for civilizational stability, but a word about a Person whose finished work creates a community that has always been most recognizably itself when it refused to be captured by the world around it.
The people who know this best were not given a choice about living under cultural Christianity. Their testimony is not a footnote to this debate. It is the verdict.
Questions for Reflection
- Cultural Christianity and genuine gospel faith can look identical from the outside. What markers — in a community or in your own life — distinguish one from the other?
- The gospel’s most transformative witness has historically appeared among those cultural Christianity excluded. What does that pattern suggest about where the church should be paying attention today?
- Wood argues that even imperfect or nominal Christianity creates conditions in which genuine faith becomes more likely. How does the historical record this article examines bear on that claim?
- Paul opposed Peter publicly at Antioch for allowing cultural pressure to override the gospel’s logic. Where are Christians today most tempted to make the same calculation — and where are you?
- The Dutch Reformed Church, Rwanda’s Catholic bishops, and American denominations that defended slavery all read the same Bible. What disciplines or commitments might help a community recognize and resist the same drift?
- What would it look like for a church to be genuinely gospel-shaped rather than culturally shaped — and what would it cost?
Prayer Points
- For discernment: Pray for the ability to see the difference between Christianity as cultural heritage and Christianity as transforming gospel — in our communities and in ourselves.
- For repentance: Pray for honesty about the ways the church has allowed cultural accommodation to silence the gospel’s prophetic voice, and for the grace to name that honestly rather than defensively.
- For the excluded: Pray for the communities who bore the cost of cultural Christianity’s failures — that the church would hear their testimony not as accusation but as witness, and respond with genuine accountability.
- For courage: Pray that the church would recover the willingness to let the gospel judge our cultural assumptions, trusting that what it produces is better than anything cultural conformity can offer.
[1]James R. Wood, “In Defense of Cultural Christianity,” First Things, April 14, 2026. https://firstthings.com/in-defense-of-cultural-christianity/
[2]Ibid.
[3]Ibid
[4]“The Dutch Reformed Church and Its Contribution to Apartheid,” European Academy of Religion and Society, December 22, 2022. https://europeanacademyofreligionandsociety.com/news/the-dutch-reformed-church-and-its-contribution-to-apartheid/
[5]“Dutch Reformed Church Calls Apartheid ‘Heresy,’” Deseret News, October 17, 1998. https://www.deseret.com/1998/10/17/19407054/dutch-reformed-church-calls-apartheid-heresy/
[6]Christine Schliesser, “From ‘a Theology of Genocide’ to a ‘Theology of Reconciliation’? On the Role of Christian Churches in the Nexus of Religion and Genocide in Rwanda,” Religions 9, no. 2 (2018). https://doaj.org/article/60d638c1213a4f9aaf6807b7cadaf5c5
[7]“Rwanda’s Catholic Church Sorry for Role in Genocide,” CNN, November 21, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/21/africa/rwanda-catholic-church-apology/index.html
[8]Schliesser, “From ‘a Theology of Genocide.’”
[9] See “Clapham Sect,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://britannica.com/topic/Clapham-Sect; and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song (New York: Penguin Press, 2021), excerpted in Harvard Gazette, March 9, 2021, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/03/the-history-and-importance-of-the-black-church/.
[10]Desmond Tutu, as quoted in God’s Mission in the World: An Ecumenical Christian Study Guide on Global Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals (2006), The Episcopal Church Office of Government Relations and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Leave a Reply