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July 23, 2024 - 7:00am
Elon Musk has identified himself as a cultural Christian in a new interview.
“While I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise… I would say I’m probably a cultural Christian,” the Tesla CEO said during a conversation on X with Jordan Peterson today. “There’s tremendous wisdom in turning the other cheek.”
Christian beliefs, Musk argued, “result in the greatest happiness for humanity, considering not just the present, but all future humans… I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity. I think they’re very good.”
Musk went on to note that the collapse of religion is leading to low birth rates that could drastically alter the future of civilisation. “When a culture loses its religion, it starts to become antinatalist and decline in numbers and potentially disappear,” he said. The father of 12 added that Paul Ehrlich, author of the highly influential 1968 book Population Bomb, which argued against having children, was a “genocidal maniac” who had done “great damage to humanity”. “Having a child is a vote for the future,” Musk said. “It’s the most optimistic thing somebody can do.”
Peterson, who wore a jacket decorated with various portraits of the Madonna and child, discussed the competing religious iconography of men and women. Christ, he said, is the West’s sacred image of a man, while the sacred image of a woman is the mother-infant dyad exemplified by the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. “Unless the feminine is conceptualised as the combination of female and infant,” argued Musk, “then the culture has lost its attachment to the traditional sacred images and is probably on its way out.”
During the conservation, Musk did not address whether he believed in God, but noted that he was not a practising Christian. Although he was baptised and brought up Anglican, he explained to Peterson that he experienced a crisis of meaning in early adolescence that prompted him to read the texts of major religions and philosophical movements, but at the time, “none of them really seemed to have answers that resonated.” He found a more satisfying answer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s message that what matters is asking the right questions — that curiosity itself is more important than finding the answers.
The X owner noted that if his beliefs were a religion, they might be called “the religion of curiosity, the religion of greater enlightenment,” the goal of which is to expand consciousness — a goal that ties in with his work in artificial intelligence.
Musk joins a growing cohort of public figures either converting to Christianity or professing to be cultural Christians. Renowned atheist Richard Dawkins, for example, recently identified as a cultural Christian while others, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have gone further.
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SubscribeI’m going to extrapolate my own ideas from this and say that I suspect it’s got something to do with a growing realisation that secularism on its own contains the seeds of downfall for the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.
Everyone (well, every westerner anyway) older than about 40 grew up in what we’d now call a secular-Christian world – one in which our institutions and cultural assumptions were tacitly shaped by the Christian tradition and the crystallised ethics of Christianity, while not being explicitly religious in nature.
The rise of cultural relativism and the associated belief that our culture and institutions can absorb non-christian ethics without changing our shared assumptions and without damaging our collective ability to deal with emergent challenges and threats, it now very much appears, is a dangerous mistake.
We cannot simply write out new and arbitrary ethical rules and expect them to be taken seriously and collectively, as the proponents of Woke ideologies seem to expect, and we cannot permit other religions such as Islam to start adding their own moral priorities to our secular culture and for it still to actually work fairly and effectively, as the absurd blind spot around blasphemy laws makes obvious. There are doubtless entire books that could be written in defence of this little paragraph here and doubtless plenty that might be written rejecting it too, but the point is that it seems clear that at least some important people might now agree that there’s something to the idea at this stage.
So it’s belated but welcome, when people like Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk start saying things like this. It isn’t happening because they have developed a belief in God or an affection for churches and vicars. It’s happening because they are starting to see the enormity of what may happen if the elimination of Christianity from the secular-Christian equation proceeds to completion.
Good.
This sounds rather like a way for people who are too Western and elite for Christianity to embrace it anyway.
That’s probably most of us in most Western countries nowadays.
Well they have to start somewhere, and there are many ways up that particular mountain.
”too Western” probably, but “elite” not really relevant.
No. It’s a straightforward way to assert cultural values without the historical drag of a ‘belief system’ which no longer has any relevance for many.
If one is going to argue that you can’t endorse Christian values without belief in a deity, let’s just call them human values to save us all a lot of umproductive time and effort.
There. We’re saved.
I’ve read hundreds of your comments and every time I’m impressed by your sincere commitment to “human values” and yet astonished that they’re always just a hair off the mark. The values, the goodness, the basic human dignity all come together perfectly when you turn your attention fully to what you call “a deity”. It has nothing to do with belief. You can efficiently cut out all that “unproductive time and effort”.
Problem is that the values we’re probably in general agreement about are not universal human values, but Christian/post-Christian Enlightenment ones.
. . . without faith or commitmen, while maintaining authority over their own lives!
Stoicism is sooo 2023.
So true!
Sounds ok to me as long as people continue to cherry pick which bits they believe in and which ones they don’t, which bits are literal and which ones are allegorical. And to continue to interpret the bits they don’t like in ways that make them sound ok in our day and age. Or ignore them completely as many do. Otherwise we all would have to contend with awfulness, contradictions, pure immortality, nonsense and more.
My preference is to leave the bronze age concepts repackaged as christianity behind and continue to build and evolve our ideas as we have been in the western world for a while.
When will it begin to work?
What irks me about the whole “cultural Christianity” thing is that I just don’t buy our future lies in ruminating on the past. In this way, it has too much in common with the “woke” ideology that many of its proponents see it as a remedy for.
The real problem is that we’ve been heavily discouraged from celebrating who we are in the present, in Western societies, so people look backward for belonging and meaning. I wrote about this recently (from a Canadian perspective).
Looking backward isn’t the answer; we need to look forward to a better future together. We should celebrate how our open values, where we question everything and hold nothing sacred, have moved us beyond insular thinking.
You can’t fight fire with fire, or regressive ideologies with more of the same. We’re lucky to live in a better place because people before us moved away from restrictive and sectarian cultures to build a more open one.
Whether you use the past as an excuse for bad behavior today or are enthralled with a particular piece of it because you don’t like the present, it won’t make this a better place for any of us.
GK Chesterton had a great response to open mindedness; something like, “the purpose of having an open mind is similar to that of having an open mouth: to close it again on something firm and nourishing “.
What is it about yourself that you believe wasn’t allowed to be expressed? There are many forms of expression.
I don’t think it’s about self-expression. It’s about being discouraged from expressing pride in what makes Western societies better places to live. Being more open and evolving than other places is a big part of what we need to amplify, more openly and proudly. Pushing any one belief or ideology over another doesn’t help; it only drives us further apart. Instead, we should focus on what unites us and celebrate the uniquely adaptive aspects of our successful societies that we can all be proud of, much more.
Essentially he’ll pick the nice bits but ignore anything inconvenient because deep down he believes it’s a load of b****cks
If that is his view, then all power to him.
As someone said in a BBC article a while back…
“The next step in mankind’s evolution is when it learns to dispense with religion”.
This in my credo.
Way ahead of you. I dispensed with it when I was as child.
Go one further and learn to dispense with ideology, this will include humanism.
I have embraced Martin M-ism, but I wouldn’t call it an “ideology”.
If you have a ‘credo’, you have something kinda like a religion, no?
My “credo” is “Have a good time all the time”. I wouldn’t call it a “religion”.
I wonder would that person on the BBC have continued to assert that point if told that Marxism and all its various offshoots is a religion?
Nihilism?
If he means aspiring to live by the morals, ethics and principles as portrayed in the new testament then l guess l’m also a cultural Christian.
What l can’t accept is the concept of an all powerful, all knowing God who is aware of everything l do and think. I also see no reason to believe anyone can speak to God or know what God’s words or commands are.
As for the Christian concept of heaven – the very idea of spending eternity surrounded by do gooders and pearl clutchers repels me. Give me Valhalla every time.
You are a Deist then.
I apologize in advance for the weirdly pedantic tone in what follows as I feel very strongly about this because of my life experience.
If you could see past Valhalla you’d become aware that ‘heaven’ is not how you describe it.
If you bowed your head in truth for even five minutes you’d hear the “still, small voice” that would crack you in half with its thunder.
To truly live by the “morals, ethics and principles” of Christ would banish any doubt about what ‘culture’ really is in the first place.
Yep. Never any peace with all those blaring trumpets and yowling choirs, nothing to eat but manna, ‘orrible old granny popping up again (what was St Peter thinking?), probably bloody freezing unlike the other place….
I don’t know, maybe I’m just a very different person, but to me Valhalla sounds even more repugnant. An afterlife in which, to gain entry you must murder/be murdered in the heat of battle, and then spend eternity surrounded by drunken murderers bragging about how great murder is, comparing murder stories and trophies, and training for the great, grand Murderfest that will end all of reality in a giant, blood-soaked orgy of existential death doesn’t sound like my idea of a ‘fun’ time.
I’d take playing mahjong on a cloud with great-great-great-great-great-grandmamum for eternity than having to sulfur-wrestle a hairy naked viking named Sven for the next quadrillion years any day of the week.
I’m pretty sure heaven, whatever it is intended or believed to be, isn’t an eternal and continuous sunday morning at church.
I do get your aversion to the pearl-clutchers though. They’re a bit like eco-zealots, who aren’t selling a hair-shirt existence as a practical means of living sustainably, they’re peddling it as an end in itself. No civilised, intelligent person wants to listen to that nonsense.
“While I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise… I would say I’m probably a cultural Christian”. Hey, I believe the teachings of the man who became known as Jesus Christ are “good and wise”, but they have been bastardised by the various Christian Churches to the point that they are now devoid of merit.
Elon always has something to contribute and in a meaningful way. Christianity has much to offer and the teasing out of the Madonna/Child dyad feminine and the Christ/Father masculine by Jordan with him is interesting. Oh that our surgical and hormonal minded gender brothers and sisters had thought more of this before medically mutilating and delaying the workings and outward signs of puberty and onwards in adolescents.
Our Elon is v fortunate to have been born a male in the latter half of the 20th century such that he can have such a benign view of Christianity. And western Christianity was forced to become more benign by the growing values of the West. He just almost can’t bring himself to go the whole hog and say it. Now the intriguing thing is whether clever marketing, and he knows his audience, or whether he actually believes this cultural christianity stuff.
Musk seems happy enough with growing inequality of course. How many coats did JC say to give away? The v rich been pulling away from the average Joe in the US for 3 decades now. Perhaps he should have a look at that a little more.
As regards his views on women and birth rates, perhaps he should also expand his horizon and ask why the trend isn’t that dissimilar in non Christian countries? Japan perhaps, or even China.
No this was all about clever marketing, although I do agree with the ‘curiosity’ point.
One of the most vain men in the world announces to the world that he’s a deep believer in Christian principles. Spot the deliberate mistake.
What you mean Russell Brand?
Perhaps a dead heat between him and Musk, with a short half-head to Jordan Peterson.
“And western Christianity was forced to become more benign by the growing values of the West.”
You have this exactly backwards. Christianity – or to be exact the secular-Christian system of ethics – is what caused the growing wealth and power of the West to be partly diverted into creating societies and institutions which valued human beings implicitly instead of simply regarding them as a collection of mouths to feed.
If Musk had any real sympathy for Christianity, his children would have the same mother.
How is that relevant to anything? The Religious Right keep carrying on about how people should have more children. Well, Musk has had a lot of children.
And, presumably, supports them and their mothers. I don’t hear of them on benefits, expecting other people to pay for their upkeep.
If we had more sympathy for Christianity we’d have more sense of our own failings and not be quick to judge others.
I’m not judging Musk (even though I am not kindly disposed towards him). He can have as many children as he likes. He can at least afford them.
You have to start from where you are in life. Musk cannot erase his past, and neither can the rest of us.
Besides, we don’t know the extent of his ‘Cultural Christianity’.
Good thing the early Christians didn’t obsess over this principle too much, given that Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s real father.
Excellent!
CS Lewis: if to travel hopefully were better than to arrive – and known to be so – who could travel hopefully?
This is the problem with the “religion of curiosity”.
The world needs more C S Lewis.
The error here is in assuming that experience never triumphs over hope. It does eventually, in all of us.
I’m a Christian, I mean one who believes it all and goes to church but the more I get into it the less, well, straightforward it is. We have this image of Jesus as a nice bloke, but the more I read the more I get the sense of irritability in his exchanges.
He was tough and shrewd and undoubtedly compassionate. But meek and mild nice guy. Hmm. Not so sure.
The current elitists (those who run the country) cannot accept a God because their secular values mean they are the new ‘gods’, the ones who determine right from wrong, and the ‘acceptable’ from the ‘non-acceptable’.
The hallmark of cultural Christianity is that upholders seem to fall over themselves in their support of zionists even though the zionists are, provably, given to acts of terrorism. For them it may be a case of loving the sinner, not the sin. Or perhaps it is just a case of continuing the Crusades by other means.
If you become a Cultural Christian then you are faced with the reality of an Argentinian Pope of Socialist leanings as the ultimate Earthly authority, endowed with infallibility to boot. And looking back, you must grapple with autos-da-fe and the burning of Bruno. Good luck with that.