Charles Murray: I Thought Religion Was Irrelevant to Me. I Was Wrong.

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Political scientist Charles Murray has written many well-known books over the course of his lifetime.

Many of his works—including “Losing Ground,” “The Bell Curve,” and “Coming Apart”—have deeply influenced the intellectual discourse and zeitgeist of our times and provoked heated debate about the roots of major social problems in America.

His latest book covers a topic that he has never covered deeply before: religion.

Murray writes in the foreword of his book “Taking Religion Seriously,” “Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant. We grew up in secular households or drifted away from the faiths in which we were raised and never looked back. For them, I think I have a story worth telling.”

In our conversation, he recounts how he slowly came to question his assumption that there was nothing in religion for him.

He began to grapple with questions such as: How did life come to be? Why is there something rather than nothing? What happens to purely secular societies? What happens to art that no longer acknowledges beauty, truth, and the good?

He said: “I finished the book by comparing myself to a kid whose nose is pressed against the glass watching a party that’s going on inside that he can’t join. I have had the good fortune to meet a number of people who have had a very full, rich spiritual experience. … I look at the kind of people they are, and I say to myself: I want more of that.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Charles Murray, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Charles Murray:

My great pleasure.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let me start with a quote, “Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant. For them, I think I have a story worth telling.” What’s the story? 

Mr. Murray:

First, let me just characterize a little bit more of what that quote summarizes, which is, I’m not talking about people who are ardent atheists. I’m talking about people for whom the college experience probably taught them that smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. And it was just in the air. I don’t know about your experience, but I went to Harvard in the fall of 1961. That’s a long time ago. 

And when I went there, it wasn’t that I took courses on religion or that I had professors haranguing me. It just was the zeitgeist. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. And so religion simply wasn’t of any particular interest for the next 25 years for me. And the story is, well, it’s actually pretty interesting, if I can say so myself. 

In 1985, my wife Catherine had our first child together, Anna. After a couple of months, she said to me, I love Anna so much that I have a hard time telling where I stop and where she begins. Either then or a few weeks later, she came up with a line that has since been quoted by Michael Gerson and David Brooks because it’s such a beautiful line. Namely, I love Anna more than evolution requires, which is what you get with an Oxford and Yale educated woman who says, I understand evolutionary biology. I buy into it. I know that to pass on genes, women better love their babies. 

But she was saying, no, I’m experiencing something beyond that. And that led her to say that she would try to find a faith tradition that she could rejoin. She had grown up as a Methodist and felt comfortable doing it. All of this, I watched, saying, well, I’m happy for her. I hope it works out, but it has nothing to do with me. 

And she found Quakerism, met her needs, and over the next several years, she became a very active Quaker, not in the social activist sense, but in contemplative prayer, meditation, and also digging deeper and deeper into Christian beliefs, focusing not on the miracles of the resurrection or anything, but focusing on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Again, that was all going on independently of me. I stayed home on Sundays and took care of our babies. And about the middle of the 1990s, having been exposed to this for so long, I had reached a couple of thoughts that became very important. 

One was that I had to recognize there is such a thing as a quality known as spiritual perception. You know, it’s easy for most people to accept that some people are tone-deaf. They hear a Beethoven sonata and it just sounds like discordant noises. People who have very high IQs go to a museum and see a great painting, and they pass by it in five seconds because they don’t really see anything there. They aren’t moved by it. 

People like us understand that, but when it comes to spiritual perception, I think a lot of us tend to assume, oh, they’re kidding themselves. They’re deluding themselves. There isn’t really this access to spiritual insights that they have that I don’t have. I didn’t have that option because, as I’ve suggested, my wife has an extraordinary intellect. She is entirely self-possessed and does not delude herself about anything. And it was me who had to accept that I couldn’t follow her on this trip that she was taking, but I kind of wanted to. 

Then there followed a series of nudges where I had to suddenly call into question my unreflective assumption that religion can’t possibly have anything in it. I don’t want to get into too much detail on those because it would take us too deep into the weeds. But such things as, for example, why is there something rather than nothing, which is a phrase that I should have known existed. Heidegger said it a long time ago, and others had said it in previous centuries. 

But I heard it first from Charles Krauthammer, the late columnist, and I thought it was original with him, but it struck me. It said it’s not good enough to say the universe exists. You’ve got to ask how it came into being, and that pushed me toward thinking about a creator. Not very far toward it, but a little bit toward it. 

And then in the 2000s, I guess the early 2000s, I read a slim book called Just Six Numbers, by Martin Rees, who is astronomer Royal for the British Royal Society. He’s not a religious man, but in the book, he describes the anthropic principle, which some people watching us know and others have never heard before. 

So real quickly, the anthropic principle is a set of findings in physics, not really in dispute among physicists, which says that in the moments of the Big Bang, in the first fractions of seconds of the Big Bang, a whole variety of parameters that were not determined by theory had to have certain settings, as it were, in order for the universe to exist, in order for there to be galaxies and stars and planets. If those settings had been slightly different, you would have had a universe of black holes. You would have had a universe of radiation. No life. 

Well, this sort of sets up a problem because the odds against those settings being just right are literally trillions to one. So what are our options? We can say, well, we’re alive and we live in a universe that permits life, so why worry about it? That’s kind of like being in front of a firing squad with 100 expert marksmen, and they all fire and they all miss. Yes, you’re still alive.

Mr. Jekielek:

But why did it happen, right?

Mr. Murray:

It’s okay to be curious about it. And there the two options are, it was by chance, and the other option being that a higher authority directed that everybody miss. That seemed to me a lot more plausible. Now, the physicists have another theory, which is called multiverse theory, which says that this isn’t the only universe. There are millions of universes. I have a very hard time with that one. Every time I go outside at night and look into a cloudless night sky and say, there are millions of these? No, I can’t make myself say life. So that was a pivotal event. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I found myself wondering as I was reading, you know, you obviously have written quite a number of books, and some of our viewers will be familiar with them. But what strikes me is that it makes me wonder if you had had this journey earlier in life, whether these books would have been written in the first place. But maybe let’s start here. Why don’t we talk about what you’ve done with your life up to now a little bit for those that might not be familiar? 

Mr. Murray:

The question you just asked I find very interesting. I’ve never thought about it before. Suppose, how would it have changed things? Okay, basically I spent, after I graduated from college in the mid-60s, I went to Thailand in the Peace Corps, was in the Peace Corps for two years, stayed on for another three years. And so essentially, I was out of the United States for the last half of the 60s. And this last half of the 60s is what people think of when they think of the 60s. So I missed all that. 

I went back to graduate school, and was fascinated at that point by quantitative social science. So I went to MIT and took every quantitative course known to man and got my Ph.D. and worked during the 1970s for a non-profit, non-partisan research institute. I got very frustrated with that for reasons I won’t go into. I left it and decided I had a book I wanted to write. 

And it was, God Looking Out for Fools and Drunks, because for me to do that when I had two children, and child support to pay, and alimony, and to quit a very successful job was kind of stupid, but it worked out. And the result of that was, Losing Ground, which was an unexpected success back in the early 1980s. And I never looked back from there. 

So I haven’t been to an office regularly since 1981. I’ve been working at home all that time, and I have been writing books and I have been supported by, first, the Manhattan Institute, and subsequently, for the last 35 years, by the American Enterprise Institute [AEI]. And so there’s been a series of books. The one that probably is, no, is definitely the most notorious is, The Bell Curve.

Mr. Jekielek:

Why don’t you tell me what you think the message of The Bell Curve is as the author, just because I think there are tons of people that think they know what the message is, but they’ve never looked at the book.

Mr. Murray:

The subject of the book is the subtitle. The subtitle is, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. And my co-author, Dick Herrnstein, and I argued, and it’s an argument that’s held up very well, that over the course of the 20th century, IQ took on a different role in America’s social structure. It became much more important in determining affluence, much more important in determining who’s successful than it had been previously, for complicated reasons I won’t go into, and that we’d also had things such as the university system start to go out and vacuum up the kids with the most intellectual potential and send them off to a set of elite colleges where they formed a critical mass that tended to produce a culture of its own that had not existed before. 

Actually, people who have read Coming Apart encountered the same argument in Coming Apart. I virtually lifted a couple of chapters of The Bell Curve and put them into Coming Apart. I didn’t mention it to anybody, and none of the reviewers caught it. Because so few people actually read The Bell Curve as opposed to hearing the stories told about it, they weren’t aware of the argument. But that was the basic argument. And if I can say so, it’s been borne out, I think, by what we’ve looked at in the last 15 years. You have a cognitive elite that kind of lives in a world of its own culturally and to a large degree politically.

Mr. Jekielek:

Absolutely. So let’s talk about Coming Apart briefly because I think of that as your most influential book, probably, yes. But you know, it’s sort of one of the first to show that there’s this malaise in America that, you know, arguably has resulted in the current political realities. But maybe just tell briefly, if you could.

Mr. Murray:

The segregation of the educated elite from the rest of the country, which had been quite minor in the early 1960s, had become stunning. Which is to say that you go to northwest Washington, D.C. now, and for that matter, throughout the 21st century, northwest Washington, D.C. is just very dense with graduates of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the other Ivies, Duke, Stanford. It’s incredible how densely they’re packed. And if you look at San Francisco, Manhattan, and parts of L.A., you see the same thing. 

You have people from these elite schools in an elite culture with differences in everything from their child-rearing practices to the media they watch to the books they read; the television they watch, everything is a completely different culture. That all happened in a relatively short period of time and created an enormous sense of isolation, which was abetted by the fact that we were looking at second and third-generation upper middle class.

So I am upper middle class. My father technically was not that affluent, but he probably qualified for the upper middle class; however, he only had a high school diploma.And that was not uncommon. I had grandparents who had never gone to college as well and who had very ordinary pedestrian jobs, including agricultural jobs. And that was very common among people who were successful in the 1960s. Our parents and grandparents had not been that way, and we knew what the rest of America was like. 

By the time I was writing Coming Apart, you had kids coming to full adulthood in their 20s and 30s who had never known anything except this quite affluent, highly educated upper middle class living in enclaves. And that has produced a lot of what we see when the cognitive elite talks about flyover country, when they talk about rednecks, and more recently when they talk about MAGA people. And they are doing so without the slightest idea of what they’re talking about. 

One of my daughters went to Middlebury College, where I subsequently had certain difficulties. But at the time she went to Middlebury, it was a very good school. But she encountered lots of kids from Manhattan and other enclaves who would talk sneeringly about rednecks. Well, Anna had grown up in a town of 150 people in an agricultural working-class area. 

And she would say to them, I can use that word because I know what I’m talking about. You don’t. You can’t use that word. It created a division, the coming apart that’s the source of the title that looked pretty bad when I wrote the book. And that was 2010 and 2011. And now it’s dreadful. I mean, the split is just dreadful. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, this is a whole fascinating discussion to be had. And then the advent of social media right into the middle of that and the siloing of different groups. It’s just a perfect storm. And a topic I would love to follow up, but when I jump back to the original question, which was, you know, you’ve written quite a number of other books, one of which I find really fascinating called, Human Accomplishment, which I just want to flag for people if they’re interested in Charles Murray. But what do you think would have happened if you had started your journey into, well, I guess, becoming faithful? 

Mr. Murray:

I think it wouldn’t have had much effect, which I say for this reason: because I never felt antagonistic toward religion. Not only that, I’ve had for a long time, forever thought that religion plays a very important cultural role in civil society. And I recognized fully the degree to which the philanthropic activities that are associated with churches are a huge portion of all philanthropic activities. 

I grew up in a town where a great many of the town community activities were being done by voluntary organizations affiliated with churches. So there wasn’t any antagonism that was going to contaminate my writing. The one thing that comes to mind is a book I wrote called, In Pursuit, which nobody has heard of, but it is one of my favorites. 

In that book, I argue that the sources of human satisfaction, of deep and lasting human satisfaction, are remarkably constrained, that they boil down to family, community, and vocation. And I remember at the time asking myself, well, should I add faith into that as well? And I didn’t think about it very hard. I just sort of said to myself, well, this is a secular book, so why muddy the waters by bringing in faith? And now subsequently, whenever I talk about the sources of deep human satisfaction, I put faith in there as well. 

But had this evolution occurred earlier, faith would have been included in 1988 when I published, In Pursuit. Other than that, I don’t see a major effect. For example, I’ve written a couple of books, a book called Facing Reality, one called Human Diversity, and another one called By the People, all of which occurred when my evolution was pretty well along. Coming Apart was written when my evolution regarding religion was pretty far along. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What makes it very interesting is that, you know, going back to what you said earlier, is that you believe that there are some of us who are better at perceiving the spiritual dimension than others. I’ve had that exact same observation. I’ve never thought about it quite that way because I think, again, I think we’re alike in this respect. I don’t think my sensitivity is particularly high. You know, in my own journey, I had to, you know, kind of be hit over the head, so to speak, with some things to say, okay, well, maybe I should, maybe I need to, okay, I got it, I got it, message received. 

But it fascinates me that we’ve gone through several generations now where the default, sort of the correct view is supposed to be that this is not a rational part of life, that this is not, and what is the impact of that if you actually do believe that that connection with God is a central element of human existence, which I believe. I believe it because it happened, right? But how radically did that transform our societies to start believing that this is…

Mr. Murray:

Oh, I think that it’s profound. I don’t want to get political about this because taking religion seriously, the book, is I rigorously did not make the case for religion in general or Christianity in particular as being socially expedient and useful. The book is about me trying to come to my own beliefs about the truth value of religion. But the question you have raised is, I’ll just say very briefly, we have watched an experiment going on in Europe now for the last several decades of advanced societies that are effectively secular. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Europe and Canada, I’ll just mention.

Mr. Murray:

Yes, and Canada. In human history, there has never been an advanced society that was secular the way that Europe is now. And I will antagonize some viewers, maybe get supported by others when I say I think the results are very troubling. There are all sorts of secular humanists who live lives that are as virtuous as any Christians or Jews, but I think that secular humanism has a real problem in that it has no bedrock, it has no bottom, and it’s very easy to get on slippery slopes when there is not a bedrock underneath it, as I believe there is for the great religious traditions. And I think the effects of that slippery slope are visible now.

I’ll just take one example. As we look at a policy that I initially supported, physician-assisted suicide, because it seemed to make sense to me. And it still makes sense to me, except that we have seen that slippery slopes produce some very disturbing results. And I would say that similar policies related to crime and a variety of other institutions suggest that secular societies do not have a lot of staying power. 

I am not optimistic about the long-term prospects for Europe, and increasingly not for the United States, except on the evidence of, guess what, a whole lot of American intellectuals seem to suddenly have found religion. I mean, in some cases, they are people who have longstanding commitments to it, like Ross Douthat and David Brooks and others. But there are lots of newcomers professing, in most cases, Christianity, and still others who are speaking respectfully of religion in ways that they didn’t before. So it may be that there is a revival in the wings here someplace.

Mr. Jekielek:

Most stunningly, if I may, Richard Dawkins.

Mr. Murray:

Yes, he even said something very recently about the cultural value of Christianity, I think.

Mr. Jekielek:

And he said it was something, again, paraphrasing that, you know, if you don’t, I mean, it was kind of a grudging, I read it as a kind of a grudging thing, that if you don’t have it, something worse can come in its place, or something like that.

Mr. Murray:

I can understand why really enthusiastic Christians try to proselytize because they think they’re saving people’s souls. Why does an enthusiastic atheist want to persuade other people to become atheists? I mean, what’s the upside? If you take Pascal’s wager, that the downside of being right about the truth of religion vs. the upside of, I’ve got it wrong, there’s a big downside if you’re wrong in dismissing religion. There’s an even bigger upside if you’re right. And I just don’t see where the motivation comes to convert people to atheism. 

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s this whole nihilism that has emerged in these, I think mostly in the secular, these secular societies. And I wonder if there isn’t kind of a fervor around that. I don’t understand it.

Mr. Murray:

I agree with you about the nihilism. I think all you have to do is look at what happened to high culture, meaning in music and in the visual arts and in literature in the 20th century. The popular culture was vibrant, but what did we get in terms of the high culture of music? We got John Cage, we got Arnold Schoenberg. I’m sorry, I can’t listen to them. What did we get in art? I find some abstract expressionism to be quite beautiful, but not the performance art, the conceptual art, and Andy Warhol’s soup cans.

Mr. Jekielek:

Duchamp’s funeral.

Mr. Murray:

Duchamp’s funeral, yes. No, I’m sorry. You take a look at the great art, the high culture art of everything from the 1500s through the 19th century, and it is incomparably superior to 20th-century art. And serious novels during the 20th century? Sure, of course you have a few exceptions. Faulkner is considered serious, and he wrote some pretty darn good stuff. But an awful lot of the serious novels, particularly the postmodern ones, are lifeless.

Mr. Jekielek:

Something that characterizes that earlier body of work that you’re describing is that a lot of it was revering God. In fact, right? 

Mr. Murray:

Of course, revering God. But even among those who came in the 19th century when secularism and the Enlightenment were starting to have their effects, the ideals of truth, beauty, and the good, which are central, of course, to Catholicism and Christianity in general, were still in the air. They were still taken as ideals, transcendental ideals that people who engaged in the arts were in service of. 

And artists themselves were seen as being in service of some higher things, as opposed to 20th-century artists who see their duty as to challenge their audiences, and for that matter, to be contemptuous of their audiences. I think that what we have proved by the secularization in the fine arts is that when the transcendental qualities of truth, beauty, and the good are no longer relevant, people tend to do things that are based on their own preferences, and their own preferences are often nihilistic or banal. 

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s very interesting too, as I was reading your book, okay, it struck me that, you know, I’ve read, I have not read your entire body of work, by any stretch. 

Mr. Murray:

Nobody has, except my wife. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But it just struck me, I felt like I was actually getting to know you personally, reading this, which is not characteristic of at least any other book that I’ve read. I mean, you’re cataloging a personal journey, but also in a very kind of academic way.

Mr. Murray:

This is the sort of thing I do. My wife jokes about this sometimes as well.

Mr. Jekielek:

But what prompted you to want to catalog this publicly? 

Mr. Murray:

There was a trigger for it in the form of an interview that was conducted by one of my colleagues at AEI, Nick Eberstadt, and another colleague, Karlyn Bowman. It was a two-hour interview videotaped largely for me to describe the things I’d done at AEI. It was sort of institutional history. And toward the end of the interview, we got to talking about religion for some reason. And I conveyed some of my kind of haphazard and eccentric ideas. 

Nick, who is a devout Catholic, was entertained by these. And he said, when they turned the cameras off, he said, well, that ought to be your next book. And I heard that and I said, what an interesting idea. Because I was kind of stuck on another book project that I had gotten started, and this just sounded like fun. But it wasn’t going to be fun if I just made it into the ordinary detached analytic thing. 

I hate to use the word journey. In the first place, spiritual journey has become a cliché. But second, it was not so much a journey as it was stumbling around. And believe me, people can pick up this book with no fears that I’m going to try to tell them, do what I did because it’s the blueprint for how you can change your life through religion. 

No, this is going to be watching a guy who has been unable to keep up with his wife, who is making big progress, and is forced to cobble together, using the things that I am good at, ways of digging into religion that work for me. And that’s what I did, and that’s what I described. 

And I will add to that that my dear wife, my soulmate, watches me do this affectionately but rolls her eyes because she is engaged in the stuff of Christianity at a very deep level, spiritually. And from her perspective, I am being the social scientist, in her perspective, a very roundabout way of doing it. And it is. 

But I compare it to me and my ability in math. I’m a quantitative social scientist, and I know how all the statistical procedures work. And to that extent, obviously, I’m not terrible at math. But I’m nowhere close to the ability of mathematicians who can look at the equations and understand what’s going on. That calls on skills I do not have. 

And so I have workarounds there that I use concrete examples to make sure I understand what’s going on in the innards of the math. And similarly, in this case, I know that I do not have this access to spiritual insights that my wife has. And so how is it that I can nonetheless, in some ways, drill down and at least get a simulacrum of those insights for myself? It has to be personal because the evolution itself has been so idiosyncratic.

Mr. Jekielek:

See, if I may, I think I understand a bit of the way of thinking, because, so myself, I have this type of mind that anything I hear, anything I come across ever, I’m skeptical. I wish I was more credulous. I mean, quite honestly, in some cases, it’s really a problem. It’s been helpful at other times, to be fair, very helpful at other times. But it’s just, I think it’s a kind of disposition, right, that some of us have and can be a much more analytical process to come to deeper understandings than most people would find reasonable, right?

Mr. Murray:

Let me give you an example of the kind of thing I did. There is a materialist view of consciousness that I just bought into lock, stock, and barrel because, again, it was in the air. Consciousness exists exclusively in the brain, and the brain stops and consciousness stops. And since consciousness stops when the brain stops, therefore there’s no afterlife, and all the major religions are wrong on this very fundamental question. Well, is it true that we can be confident that consciousness exists only in the brain? And the funny thing is, we actually cannot. 

Two examples, near-death experiences, which I’m sure most people have heard of. I just want to assure people that the evidence on near-death experiences did not consist of a few new-age aging hippies. It’s thousands of cases very seriously documented by very serious scientists who are looking at this sort of thing with really hard-to-explain-away evidence of people having acquired knowledge when their hearts were stopped and their respiration was gone and their brain waves were quiet and they nonetheless were when they woke up, they remembered conversations and events in the operating room or the emergency room or the scene of the accident that they should have no way of knowing. 

And another phenomenon, which is called terminal lucidity, where people after years of severe dementia, after years of not recognizing their spouse or children in a day or two before their death are suddenly back. Their personalities are back, their memories are back. 

What’s that all about? If you have a brain that everything that neuroscience knows is documented to be dysfunctional and incapable of organized thoughts, where are those brief periods of terminal lucidity coming from? So does this rise to the level of immediately concluding that we all have immortal souls? No, it doesn’t. 

Should it make you say science is facing the same kind of anomalies in 2025 that it faced in 1887 with the Michelson-Morley experiment when that experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave the way that Newton’s law said it should? And it took another 18 years for Albert Einstein to explain it. If you are a confident materialist in the current era, it’s because you have not been paying sufficient attention to what is being learned. 

Mr. Jekielek:

No, absolutely. And these whole new kind of, well, with the complicated areas of inquiry, right, where you talked about the speed of light and the theory of relativity, you know going down to the other side micro, like the way these particles behave, it strains credulity when you hear about what’s actually happening, what’s being described, right?

Mr. Murray:

Yes. I characterize this as a major shift in the relationship between science and religion when science systematically explained a lot of things that had formerly been attributed to a god: earthquakes, thunderstorms, I mean, you name it, natural phenomena. But then you also had, in the Enlightenment, Newton’s clockwork universe that did not require a deity to make it function. Subsequently, you had Darwinian evolution and Freudian psychology, and then Einsteinian relativity, all of which— and not to mention geological discoveries that, you know, the Earth is not 5,700 years old. 

So in each of these cases, you had criticisms of religion as basically being God of the gaps. So God continued to exist only for those things that science could not yet explain, but science was going to be able to explain the rest of them later. And it sure looked that way up through the 19th century. In the 20th century, beginning with the astronomical discoveries that led to the verification of the Big Bang, science has been uncovering mysteries that we never knew existed before, quantum mechanics being a huge part of that, and religion has had answers, parsimonious answers, to things that have baffled science. 

When the Big Bang theory was first proposed back in the 1920s, it was derided in part because it was so obviously an attempt to put a scientific gloss on Genesis. Let there be light. Well, guess how it worked out. Similarly, with other aspects that I just mentioned about consciousness, it is true that since the Enlightenment, intellectuals all over the world have bought into the materialist explanation of consciousness, so that I never really considered that there was an alternative. 

Well, actually, Charles, yes, there was. Up until the 17th century, everybody thought otherwise. Everybody thought that humans had souls. And I’m saying, gee, it just may turn out that that’s true too. When I’ve talked to people like me for whom religion is not important, what I want to say to them is, don’t be afraid to start looking into this stuff. It’s fascinating from a purely intellectual standpoint.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, right. And I think that’s what comes out when I read your book, actually. It’s very much, you seem like you’re enjoying yourself through this process, which is quite wonderful. I want to touch on one thing. So the book is kind of in two parts. One is looking at in general, basically the question of whether it’s worth it looking at it in general, and then more focused on Christianity, the second part itself. I’m very interested in the fact that it’s kind of C.S. Lewis, who I myself have enjoyed reading for all sorts of reasons, especially lately. 

And the thing that I find really interesting is he looks at kind of the universality of some morality, like this idea of the Tao, which he postulates. And that’s like, I want to kind of touch on this a little bit, this moral, you know, some sort of natural common morality, natural law. This idea fascinates me because, on the one hand, I sense there needs to be this sort of grounding, the rules need to be spelled out. On the other hand, though, there’s something that bubbles up naturally as well. And so can we just talk about that a little bit?

Mr. Murray:

This is all C.S. Lewis in the first five chapters of the book, Mere Christianity, of which I highly recommend. I’m not the first person to recommend it. I doubt if there was a book in the 20th century that drew as many people to Christianity as Mere Christianity did. It started out as radio lectures, actually, in World War II. The first reason to read it, by the way, for people like us, because we are very similar as you’ve talked about it, is that if you’ve been thinking that smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore, you very quickly realize when you read Mere Christianity, here is a very smart guy who still believes that stuff. He has his way of writing where he’s persuasive, but then you say, oh, I think I see, I think I see why I disagree. 

And then in the next paragraph, he says, you may be thinking that. And he goes ahead and responds to your inner thoughts about why he was wrong. His argument starts out in the simplest way. He says, listen to people quarrel. Listening to people quarrel, they say things like, that’s not fair, or why did you do that? He didn’t do anything to you. 

And other kinds of statements which imply a common understanding of what decent behavior consists of. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to be talking that way unless they, in fact, did have a common standard. And then he extrapolates that first to saying that it’s also true across cultures. And so then you say to yourself, oh, wait a minute, come on, you’re saying that Western European culture is the same as Muslim culture or Confucian or Taoist culture. 

And then he says, well, people have disagreed across cultures about whom you should be unselfish to, whether you should be unselfish and altruistic toward your family or toward your tribe or toward everyone. He said people have disagreed whether a man should have one wife or four, but no culture has ever held up selfishness as a virtue. No culture has said that a man may have any woman he feels like. 

And so he said, there’s an underlying something there, which is common across cultures. It’s not that human beings always behave correctly—they don’t—but rather, they are working from something that is very hard to explain completely by evolutionary biology, and that is real altruism. Now, evolutionary biology can explain kin selection. It actually increases your evolutionary fitness of the species if you are altruistic toward blood relations. 

Similarly, there is reciprocal altruism, which works out to, I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine, which can be evolutionarily fostered. You have a real problem coming up with why people fairly routinely dive into rivers to rescue a complete stranger that they see is struggling in the water and other things like that. That kind of behavior is not rare; it’s quite common. What’s driving that? 

His argument, I will truncate this because I find it fun to show the way he spins this stuff out. He says, if God were a God of love and mercy and so forth, and he wanted to convey what he wants of us, how could he convey it to us? He could convey it to us by instilling in us certain instincts that are not explained by evolution but that are explained by his nature. 

Now, the way I’ve explained it is probably not going to persuade many viewers who don’t already believe it, but what I did with me is I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The more I have thought about it ever since and tried to probe into it, the more I have decided that he was essentially right. Once you start to think in that respect, he can then move on to the specifics of Christian theology and of Jesus of Nazareth and the rest, and draw the story together. 

He does it with his famous trilemma. C.S. Lewis argues that the one thing he must not say about Jesus of Nazareth is he was a wise moral teacher. That’s the one thing he must not say, akin to the person who considers himself to be a poached egg. And so he’s either a liar, or a lunatic, or he’s the Son of God. 

Well, there are lots of reasons. You can say he’s wrong about those being our only three choices. Maybe Jesus didn’t really say those things. Maybe the Gospels aren’t trustworthy, this, that, and the other thing. But it drives you into having to respond to those challenges rather than simply dismiss the trilemma as meaningless. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I want to encourage people to read your book, to kind of, you know, experience your, I guess, struggle and discovery. And I found it quite illuminating. You know, actually, at the end, this is the funny part. You get to the end, and you ask yourself, so what’s the point of all this? Which I found highly amusing because for me, it’s obvious there’s a point. That’s why I’m reading the book in the first place. What is that section about? 

Mr. Murray:

If you are a person who is like me, religion has never been important to you. Why should you engage in this effort that I engaged in? What’s in it for you? I wanted to be very careful not to try to claim too much for the evolution toward Christianity that I’ve experienced, because I sympathize with people who say that’s a bridge too far. I’m willing to go as far as saying that I’ve got to give the concept of God much more serious consideration than I have before, but I don’t believe you can make sense of ancient texts written 2,000 years ago. Okay, I’ll buy into that. 

I have a couple of large statements about what I think the presentation should cause people like me to take on board in their own life, short of converting to Christianity. After that, I move on and I say, well, if I’m going to write a book about this, I’ll use the word spiritual journey again; it seems incumbent on me to say what it’s done for me. I say explicitly, it’s pretty idiosyncratic what it’s done for me, and you can just skip this if you want to, and you won’t miss anything. But it has done a variety of things for me that have been very rewarding. A lot of times, those were things that crept up on me that I wasn’t aware my thinking was changing.

Here’s an example. For the last 15 to 20 years, I have been getting older and older and closer and closer to death, and I’m not frightened of death because I’m not at all certain that death is the end. Now, as a statistician, I think in terms of probabilities. I’m not sure that there’s an afterlife, but I think it’s actually pretty likely. And I know that I’m not kidding myself there because it’s so natural. 

Now, do not misunderstand me. If I go to my doctor next week and he says, oh, I got bad news, you’ve got three months left, don’t worry. I’ll be upset and shocked and unhappy and all that, but I’ll get over it because my whole attitude toward death is much less subject to existential dread than it was when I was in my 40s. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. You know, one more question, Charles. One more. And that’s just simply I’ve been thinking about this relationship with your wife and you watching her. Well, here’s the question, okay? So is it that she was entering something new that you didn’t have access to and that you really wanted to be a part of, or is it that you saw her becoming a more complete person and that’s something that you wanted, or is it a bit of both? 

Mr. Murray:

You have to understand my wife’s name is Catherine, and I do not know anybody who has met Catherine who has not fallen in love with her. I’m just the lucky guy who got to marry her. And she has been an extraordinary woman from the beginning. So in part, anything that she does and that she considers valuable, my default assumption is it is on a life of its own. 

In 2004 or 2005, was already far enough along that when I encountered a book titled, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which was a book arguing that the Gospels are, in fact, largely eyewitness testimony, and that they were written explicitly to convey that they were eyewitness testimony, which, by the way, is contrary to the conventional wisdom in modern theological seminaries, it’s quite different. 

So it was basically a defense of a traditional understanding of the Gospels. And I grabbed that book as eagerly as I grab a new book by Steven Pinker or somebody else whose work I always find really interesting because I was so engaged in the topic by that time that independently of Catherine, I was going to continue to dig into it. So yes, some of both.

Mr. Murray:

It’s just, it’s interesting. I’m blessed to have a very wonderful relationship with my wife. And I think of her actually the same way as you describe. And everyone that meets her thinks she’s amazing because she is. We also have talked about this. It’s very, it’s sort of important to stay on the same page in a marriage and the most foundational relationship, right, of your life. So, and we actually, we do that actively as an act of love or as an act of connection. I don’t know exactly. We’ve discussed it, but it was kind of a natural thing anyway. That’s why I was curious. 

Yes, I agree with everything you just said. I mean, this is, again, I’m going to encourage people to read the book. I found it quite fascinating, and I think just from having spoken to you at length here for a little bit, I do think that it really does reflect your personality somewhat, assuming that this is the same Charles Murray in private as on camera, which I would guess is probably true. A final thought as we finish? 

Mr. Murray:

Yes, I want to emphasize the degree to which I can both say that it’s been very rewarding for me, but I’ll still continue to think that there’s lots more I can hope for. And I finished the book by comparing myself to a kid whose nose is pressed against the glass watching a party that’s going on inside that he can’t join. I have had the good fortune to meet a number of people who have had a very full, rich, spiritual experience, specifically with Christianity, one of them being my wife, but others as well. And in each of those cases, I look at what they have taken away from that experience. I look at the kind of people they are, and I say to myself, I want more of that. So it’s worth the effort. That’s my final comment. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Charles Murray, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Murray:

I enjoyed the conversation a great deal. 

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.