Richard Dawkins may want to take God out of public life, but don’t try to take the Christ out of his Christmas carols.

In the Christmas issue of the New Statesman, published this week, the eminent zoologist and author of “The God Delusion” began an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain by heartily wishing him “Merry Christmas!,” adding that he will accept no substitutes.

“All that ‘Happy Holiday Season’ stuff, with ‘holiday’ cards and ‘holiday’ presents,” is a tiresome import from the United States, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than atheists,” Mr. Dawkins wrote.

As a “cultural Anglican,” Mr. Dawkins continued, “I recoil from such secular carols as ‘White Christmas,’ ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and the loathsome ‘Jingle Bells,’ but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige — only from the King James Version, of course.”

But atheists (as the angel Gabriel might put it), be not afraid! Mr. Dawkins, who guest-edited the issue, is hardly going soft. In the letter, he goes on to blast government support for religious schools, the “faith-labeling” of children, and even Mr. Cameron’s own Christianity, which Mr. Dawkins sees as less a genuine faith than a cynical embrace of beliefs many of the elite see as good for society but not for themselves.

“A depressingly large number of of intelligent and educated people, despite having outgrown religious faith, still vaguely presume without thinking about it that religious faith is somehow good for other people, good for society, good for public order, good for instilling morals, good for the common people even if we chaps don’t need it,” Mr. Dawkins writes. “Condescending? Patronizing? Yes, but isn’t that largely what lies behind successive governments’ enthusiasm for faith schools?”

The issue also includes a column by Bill Gates, essays by the atheists Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, a short story by Kate Atkinson, and a six-page interview with Christopher Hitchens, in which Mr. Hitchens, who died on Thursday, inveighs against the “totalitarian impulse” behind religion.

“The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy — the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes,” Mr. Hitchens said. “And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously.”

The interview is getting mixed reviews from religious readers. Writing in The Daily Mail, the Rev. George Pitcher, a former adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, praised Mr. Hitchens’s “thoughtful” discussion of C.S. Lewis but cried foul at an aside by Mr. Dawkins about wanting to “destroy Christianity.”

“It’s good to know, at last, where Professor Dawkins really stands — and, incidentally, it’s not where the gracious, generous-spirited and libertarian Hitchens stands,” Mr. Pitcher wrote. “Hitchens hates totalitarianism. And it’s totalitarians who have tried and failed throughout history to ‘destroy Christianity.’ Dawkins now sees that as a measure of winning. Good luck with that, Richard. And happy Christmas.”