Christopher Henry Dawson FBA (12 October 1889 – 25 May 1970) was a British Catholic historian and independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and emphasized the necessity for Western culture to be in continuity with Christianity not to stagnate and deteriorate. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century" and was recognized as being able to expound his thought to "Catholic and Protestant, Christian and non-Christian."

The 1988–1989 academic year at the College of Europe was named in Dawson's honour.

Christopher Henry Dawson was born to an Anglo-Catholic family in the Bevan ancestral home of Hay Castle, during the waning years of the Victorian era, and spent most of his childhood among the ruins of the Yorkshire countryside. His parents were Captain Henry P. Dawson and Mary Louisa, the eldest daughter to the Welsh Archdeacon Bevan. Captain Dawson, although an army officer, was more of an explorer than a soldier, and the closest he ever came to actual combat was behind the front-lines in the Franco-Prussian War. He joined a field-ambulance unit with his cousin Herbert Kitchener, later Lord Kitchener of Khartoum.

Dawson was raised in a devout Anglo-Catholic household. Dawson's childhood was reported to be a happy one, spending most of his time in the place which would set the course for his interest in history: The Yorkshire countryside. It is here where Dawson would roam around through abbeys and castles for numerous hours. Dawson experienced the past not as an object of distant sentimentality but as something near to the present which one can find meaning in.

In 1899, he was sent to Bilton Grange for public school. As a consequence of living predominantly secluded from any social interactions besides that of his family, he was frightened of germs. Dawson was exceptional in only History and English. Dawson suffered from internal torment when facing the world outside his cherished home life. The pain which he had suffered during his time there stuck with him. His daughter recalled an incident when he neared the gates of a school she was about to attend, Dawson murmured "I can't face it"; he left the car and sat in the wood reading a book. In 1903, Dawson's father enrolled him to Winchester College. Dawson was a schoolmate of Arnold J. Toynbee but they never encountered each other. Dawson cultivated "a strong historical consciousness that was fed by the aesthetics of that ancient place of worship" Dawson later wrote of his experience at Winchester Cathedral:

I learnt more during my schooldays from my visits to the Cathedral at Winchester than I did from the hours of religious instruction in school. The great church with its tombs of the Saxon kings and the medieval statesmen-bishops, gave one a greater sense of the magnitude of the religious element in our culture and the depths of its roots in our national life than anything one could learn from books.

However, he later stated that Winchester College "was the best of English schools".

He was brought up at Hartlington Hall, Yorkshire. Dawson was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, where he obtained 2nd class honours in Modern History in 1911. After his degree he studied economics. He also read the work of the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch.