On the edge of faith

Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute is one of the most provocative political scientists of the last half century. In his books he’s argued, for example, that social programs like welfare hurt society as a whole (Losing Ground, 1984); that intelligence is a better predictor of success than factors like education (The Bell Curve, 1994); and that white Americans have divided into a powerful, enclave-dwelling New Upper Class and a rapidly eroding New Lower Class (Coming Apart, 2012).

He wrote these as an empiricist: If you couldn’t measure it, it probably wasn’t important. But now Murray is having second and even third thoughts about faith. His new book is Taking Religion Seriously (Encounter Books, 2025), an autobiographical account of coming to realize over many years that, as he told me, “If we are stuck with strict materialism, then you are really stuck with nihilism and depression and Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘no exit.’ It’s bleak and lifeless, and it’s got to be wrong. It cannot be true.”

You write that for most of your life you viewed religion as irrelevant. Why? An awful lot of the people to whom I’m addressing this book are people like me. I was socialized into believing that smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore. The implication is that people who do profess deep religion are either stupid or they are deluding themselves. I went to Harvard from a small town in Iowa, and I wanted to be part of that tribe.

The beginning of your change was largely because of the influence of your wife, Catherine. What happened? In 1985 Catherine had just given birth to our first child together, Anna. A couple of months in, Catherine comes up with a brilliant line: “I love her far more than evolution requires.” She was saying that in full acceptance of evolutionary biology. That led her to start thinking about God again. So she started going to church services, and then she found Quakerism.

In the mid-1990s I started getting a series of nudges that eventually led me to read a book called Just Six Numbers by astrophysicist Martin Rees.

At the time you were wondering, why is there something and not nothing? Rees was expounding the anthropic principle, which says that in the Big Bang a combination of settings needed to be exactly right in order for our universe to exist. The odds of our universe existing, one that permits life, are trillions to one. And so I had to ask myself, which is more likely: that we are the beneficiaries of a trillions-to-one chance or that some kind of intention guided the creation of the universe. I don’t think there’s much of a contest.

I come to a belief, not only in a god, but also a personal God through arid, empirical means, rather than through spiritual means. That sounds awkward, but we live in an era in which empiricism is providing more and more evidence that the supernatural is real.

You realized at one point that the ­supposed war between science and faith is a fraud. How did you feel when you realized that you’d been had? I was writing a book called Human Accomplishment, and I came across Thomas Aquinas and how he taught, in contrast to Islam, that God delights in the exploration of His creation. Then I discovered, when I read Rodney Stark’s book For the Glory of God, that the war I assumed existed between science and religion was a fraud. I learned how the Catholic Church, in many ways, underwrote the Scientific Revolution.

The first half of your book is about taking God seriously, and the second part is about taking Christianity seriously. The historicity of the Gospels was a big factor for you, and you also felt misled by the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar was concluding that virtually nothing in the New Testament really represented something that Jesus said. And then in 2006 I came across a book titled Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham, a British theologian. The thesis is that the New Testament, the Gospels especially, emphasize the degree to which they are reporting eyewitness testimony. After I read that, I started to encounter more work that had been done, and I also began to encounter a lot of very good reasons for thinking that the Gospels are what they purport to be.

If the Gospels are historically reliable, that suggests that the Resurrection is real. Is that not where you’re ending up? As somebody who came to it with extreme skepticism, the scholarship on that is, wow, I mean, it’s amazing. The depth with which that has been examined, and the alternative explanations seem to all have very serious problems. So it seems that the evidence leads you to conclude that at the least something transformative happened on Easter.

But I am an eccentric Christian. This is just me. I think that Jesus’ teachings are the critical thing for transforming human lives. I am not dismissive of the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus’ death as redemptive, that He died for our sins. [But] I associate myself with John Polkinghorne, the Anglican bishop and theoretical mathematician. He believes that Jesus remains alive today in the church in a way that is historically continuous with the person who lived 2,000 years ago in Palestine, and that He was resurrected. What we think and what we know [about the Resurrection] is probably not fully comprehensible to us.

What has been the reaction to this book from people in your former tribe? I knew that if I [published this book], a lot of people who I admire and think well of are going to stop thinking well of me. But you know, I’m 82 years old, and at some point you can’t worry about that too much.

I recall in the 1990s thinking about something I’d done when in my 20s, of which I was very ashamed. I was thinking, I shouldn’t be forgiven. I should feel awful about this for the rest of my life. But in the last couple of years I realized I’ve changed. I look back at that now and think, how arrogant and silly. Who am I to decide whether I can be forgiven or not? All you can do is be repentant, and you can be forgiven, and you need to accept that. That’s what receiving God’s grace is all about.

Yet you say you haven’t experienced the joys of faith in the same way that your wife experiences these things. I say I have beliefs rather than faith. My beliefs are things I have arrived at through ratiocination and evidence and so forth. Faith implies a leap, and I think that leap is essential to experiencing the joys of belief. For whatever reasons I have not made that leap. But I haven’t given up hope.

Well, to make the leap, you’ve got to get up to the edge, and it looks like you’re pretty close. Well, I would like to think you’re right, and never underestimate Catherine’s ability to jerk me off the edge of the cliff eventually.