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

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

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.

We have watched an experiment going on in Europe now for the last several decades of advanced societies that are effectively secular. I think the results are very troubling. In this episode, I sit down with political scientist Charles Murray, who is perhaps most well known for his watershed works, Coming Apart and The Bell Curve. His latest book is titled, Taking Religion Seriously. 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. Why is there something rather than nothing?

He shares his journey from a secular perspective to a deeper understanding of religion and faith and why it matters. Is it true that we can be confident that consciousness exists only in the brain, and the funny thing is we actually cannot. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. Charles Murray, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. My great pleasure. 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.

And I'll just add that that's kind of was like me for a lot of my life. For them, I think I have a story worth telling. What's the story? 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 not talking about, 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 isn'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 just 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, and after a couple of months, she said to me, you know, I love Anna so much, I have a hard time telling where I stop and she begins. And then, 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, to find, try to find a faith tradition that she could rejoin. She'd been grown up as a Methodist and feel 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 contemplative prayer, meditation, and also digging deeper and deeper into Christian beliefs, focusing not on the miracles or the resurrection or anything, but focusing on the teachings of Jesus, 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 to, 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 dilute 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 the others had said it in previous centuries, but I heard it first from Charles Crouthammer, 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 2000s, I guess the early 2000s, I read a slim book called Six Numbers, just Six Numbers, by Martin Rees, who is Astronomer Royal

for the British Royal Society. And he's not a religious man, but in the book he describes the Anthropic Principle, which some people watching us know that, and others have never heard it 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 the universe which permits life, so why worry about it? That's kind of like being in front of a firing squad with a hundred expert marksman and they all fire and they all miss. Yeah, you're still alive. Why did it happen? It's okay to be curious about it. And there the two options are it was by chance and the other option being a higher authority directed that everybody mess. That seemed to be 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, millions of these? And no, I can't make myself say that. So I came away from that, having much to my surprise, said, I think that some mysterious force created an intentional universe that permits life. So that was a pivotal event. 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? The question you just asked, I find very interesting. I've never thought about it before. Suppose how would it have changed things? Okay. Of basic Basically, I spent, after I graduated from college, in the mid-60s, I went to Thailand and Peace Corps, was in 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 that's the last half of the 60s, which people think of when they think of the 60s, so I missed all that, went back

to graduate school, 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 PhD and worked for during the 1970s for a non-profit, nonpartisan research institute. I got very frustrated with that for reasons I won't go into, 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 an 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 and so there's been a series of books the one that probably is no is definitely the most notorious is the bell curve which why don't you tell me what you think the message of the bell curve as the author, just because I think there's tons of people that think they know what the message is, but they've never looked at the book.

The subject of the book is a subtitle. The subtitle is intelligence and class structure in American life. And my co-author, Dick Herenstein 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 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 in Coming Apart, didn't mention it to anybody, and none of the reviewers caught it. Because so a few people actually read the Bell Curve as opposed to heard the stories told about it, that 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 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. No, absolutely. And so let's talk about coming apart briefly, because I think of that as your most influential book? Probably was, yeah. 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. Well, 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, the other Ivey's, Duke, Stanford. It's incredible how dense, how dense. They're packed.

And if you look at San Francisco, Manhattan, parts of LA, you see the same thing that you have people from these elite schools in an elite culture with differences in everything from their child-raising practices to the media they watch to the books they read, the television to 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 was probably qualified from the upper middle class, but he only had a high school diploma. that was not uncommon. I had grandparents who had never gone to college as well and who'd 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 enclase. 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 maggots,

people, and they are doing so without the slightest idea of what they're talking about. My daughter, one of my daughters, went to Middlebury, 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 that 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 11, and now is dreadful. I mean, the split is just dreadful. 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. A perfect storm. And the topic, I would love to follow up, but what I jump back to the original question, which was, you know, and you've written quite a number of other books, which I, one of which I find really fascinating, called Human Accomplishment, which I just want to flag, battle 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? 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. And 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, of which nobody's heard of, but is one of my favorites. And in that, I argue that the sources of human satisfaction, of deep and lasting human satisfaction are remarkably constrained, that they boil down to family and 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. And 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, another one called by the 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. What makes it very interesting is that, you know, going back to what you said earlier, is that you believe that there is this, some of us 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 where I don't I don't think my sensitivity is

particularly high you know I in sort of in in my own journey I had to you know kind of be hit over the head so to speak with some things to to say okay well maybe I should maybe maybe maybe I need to okay I got it I got it message received but it fascinates me that that we've gone through you know several generations now where the default the 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 was sort of because it happened right but how radically did that

transform our societies to start believing that that 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 this the book is about me trying to 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. Europe and Canada, I'll just mention. Yes, in 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, well, 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. It still makes sense to me, except that we have seen that slippery slope 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

there 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 Douthit and David Brooks and others but there are lots of newcomers to 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 there is a revival in the wings here someplace. Most stunningly, if I may, Richard Dawkins. Yes, he even said something very recently about the cultural value of Christianity, I think. And he said, I said, it was something, again, paraphrasing that, you know, if you don't, I mean, it was kind of a grudging, that's, 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. I can understand why really enthusiastic Christians try to proselytize because they think they're saving people's souls. What does an enthusiastic atheist want to persuade

other people to become, I mean, what's the upside? If you take Pascal's wager, Pascal's wager, that the downside of being right about the truth of religion versus 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 it's, I just don't see where the motivation comes to convert people to atheism. There's this whole nihilism that has emerged in these, I think, mostly in the secular societies. And I wonder if there isn't kind of a fervor around that. I don't understand it.

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 Schernberg. 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 the performance art and the conceptual art and Andy Warhol's soup cans and Piss Christ.

Duchamp's funeral? And do Champs, Yenol? Yeah. No, I'm sorry. You take a look at the great art of 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. Falkner is considered serious, and he wrote some pretty darn good stuff. But an awful lot of the serious novels, particularly the postmodern ones, as are to me, life. steryl. You know, something that characterizes that earlier body of work that you're describing is that a lot of it was revering God, in fact. Of course.

Right? Revereing 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, of which are central, of course, to Catholicism and Christianity in general, they 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, that people tend to do things that are based on their own preferences, and their own preferences are often nihilistic or banal. It's very interesting to, as I was reading your book, okay, it struck me that, you know, I've read if I have not read your entire body of work.

Nobody has except my wife. But it just struck me, like 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 academic way. This is a sort of thing I do. My wife jokes about this sometimes as well. But what prompted you to want to catalog this publicly? Well, 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, Carlin 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. And Nick, who was 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. It was going to be fun if I described this, I hate. I hate to use the word journey. First place, spiritual journey has become a cliche. But second, it was not so much a journey as it was stumbling around. But believe me, this was not, 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. 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 worked for me. And that's what I did. And that's what I describe. And I will add to that that my dear wife, my soul. schoolmate watches me do this affectionately but rolling 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, zeroing in, trying to find data,

to find ways of systematically working through these problems, and this is, from her perspective, a very roundabout way of doing it. And it is. But I compare it to me and my ability in math. I am 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. 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 it can be a much more analytical process to come to deeper understandings than most people would find reasonable, right?

Well, 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-aged, aging hippies. 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 brainwaves 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 seen of the accident that they should have no way of knowing. And another phenomenon, which is called terminal lucidity, where people in, 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 acidity 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 Mikkelson-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. No, absolutely. And these whole new kind of, well, let's say, 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. none of it's sort of it strains credulity when you hear about what's actually happening what's being described right yeah yeah it's i sort of characterize this as a major shift in the relationship between science and religion so that there was a period from about 1500 to 1900 when science systematically explained a lot of things that had formerly been attributed to a god. Earthquakes, you know, thunderstorms, I mean, you name it natural phenomena, but then you also had, in the Enlightenment, you had Newton's Clockwork Universe that did not require a deity to make it function. You had then subsequently 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. And so in each of these cases, you had criticisms of religion as basically being God of the Gaps. So God continually 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. You know, 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. And 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. 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. Right, right. And I think that's what comes out when I read your book, actually. It's very much, it's that you seem like you're enjoying yourself.

I am. Through this process, which is quite wonderful. I want to touch on you know one thing so you have the book is kind of in two parts one is looking at you know 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 who i myself have enjoyed reading for all sorts of reasons uh especially lately um and i well the thing that i find really interesting is there's he looks at kind of the universality of some morality like this idea of the

tao which he you know postulates and that's like I want to kind of touch on this a little bit this moral you know the some sort of natural common morality natural law this this idea fascinates me because on the one hand there I sense there needs to be this sort of some sort of grounding the rules need to be spelled out on the other hand though there's some something that bubbles up naturally as well. And so can we just talk about that a little bit? This is all C.S. Lewis in the first five chapters of the book called 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 and 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. And 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, you say, oh, wait a minute, come on, you're saying that, uh, 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

for, 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. 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.

And 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 as struggling in the water

and other things like that. That kind of behavior is not rare. It's quite common. What's driving that? And 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 and 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 and 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 and once you start to think in that respect he can then move on to the specifics of Christian theolog and of Jesus of Nazareth and the rest, and draw the story together, he does it in ways, well, of 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, because a man who made the claims he

made about his relationship with God as the son of God is either a liar, or he is a lunatic on par with 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. You know, I want to encourage people to read your book, that 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, like, 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, you know? How should, 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? And 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 I had before, but I don't believe you can make sense of ancient texts written 2,000 years ago.

Okay, I'll buy into that. And so the things, 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. And then 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. And 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.

And a lot of times it were things that crept up on me that I wasn't aware that my thinking was changing. But, well, here's an example. For the last 15, 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. You know, I'm not sure that there's an afterlife, but I think it's actually pretty likely. And that 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's 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 as it was when I was in my 40s. Fascinating. You know, one more question, Charles. Sure.

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? 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. And so that all by itself, was probably my primary motivation. But it soon became, it took on a life of its own. So that in 2004 or five, I guess,

I was already far enough along that when I encountered a book titled Jesus and the eyewitnesses, which was a book arguing of, that the Gospels are, in fact, largely eyewitness testimony, and that they were written explicitly to convey that they were eyewis 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 Steve 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 yeah to some of both. 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 very everyone that meets her think 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 in a marriage and the most foundational relationship right of your life so and we actually we do that actively as this as an act of love or as an active connection I

don't I don't know exactly we've discussed it but it was kind of a natural thing anyway that's why I was curious yeah yeah yeah 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 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 and private as on the camera, which I would guess is probably true. A final thought as we finish? 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 finish 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, that's my final comment.

Well, Charles Murray, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. I've enjoyed the conversation a great deal. Thank you all for joining Charles Murray and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellick.