Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray, Encounter Books, 2025, pp. 152, $29.99 hardcover.
The Monk by the Sea, a painting by the nineteenth-century German artist Caspar David Freidrich, is the jacket cover illustration of this book. An enormous dark and lonesome body of water reaches endlessly away. The figure silhouetted on the land is fixed on the vastness of nature and the presence of God.
Countless men throughout history have confronted the same questions raised by that image: whether human existence points beyond itself to some transcendent reality. Some have arrived at the conclusion expressed by the twelfth-century philosopher and physician Moses Maimonides, who wrote, “The basic principle is that there is a First Being who brought every existing thing into being, for if he did not exist then nothing else could possibly exist.” Others, like Charles Murray in Taking Religion Seriously, have journeyed from agnosticism toward an acceptance of the kind of first cause described by Maimonides.
Murray’s journey began with his rejection of the Presbyterianism of his upbringing and adopting the preference for unbelief when a student at Harvard and MIT. He writes that, so far as he knew, all his friends and professors were agnostics. He says the mantra in this secularized company was that “Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.” In an interview with me, he said he has not seen any recent research on the subject, but his impression is that the flag of agnosticism is the one waving highest in academia.
Charles Murray is the Hayek Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the renowned author of a number of influential works that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Among them are Losing Ground (1984), in which he argues that social welfare programs often harm both society and the individuals they are intended to help. The Bell Curve (1994), co-authored with Richard Herrnstein, contends that intelligence is a stronger predictor of outcomes such as income, job performance, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and criminal behavior than parental socioeconomic status or educational background.
Taking Religion Seriously is a warm and well-written, easily accessible thing. There are no declarations of “you should,” “you must,” or “you ought to.” Instead, Murray writes as if he is simply saying, “Here is the path I traveled, and perhaps it is worth considering.”
The tone is conversational rather than strident, almost as if Murray were responding to a curious question posed in a faculty lounge: “What led to your change of heart? ”It is certainly not a manifesto, something that becomes even clearer in his live interviews, including one with me, where the mood is reflective and exploratory rather than evangelical. The book unfolds as a mosaic of observations, intellectual discoveries, and moments of sudden realization—what might be called a series of “Aha!” moments. Murray himself describes it as “an odd little book,” a description that captures both its modesty and its personal character.
Murray’s seriousness about his intellectual quest is evident in the eighty-two works he consulted, many of which are presented in nifty boxes integrated throughout the text. What makes the book especially engaging, however, is Murray’s candor. He repeatedly cautions readers not to assume he is correct about anything and encourages them to think independently rather than defer to his conclusions.
Murray is also notably open about his own limitations and uncertainties. Although he describes himself as a smart person, he readily admits that his expertise extends only to his own academic field and that many of the subjects he explores remain difficult for him to fully understand. Some ideas he accepts tentatively, while others he openly doubts or rejects. For example, he told me during our interview that he remains undecided about miracles and “goes back and forth” on the question of whether God intervenes directly in human life. He also makes clear that he does not believe in an anthropomorphic God—that is, a deity possessing a human form, emotions, or personality traits.
In a charming way, Murray tells us the origin of his decades-long investigation was not a lightning strike but a sweet and soft opening—the faith of his Quaker wife, Catherine, and her sensible questioning. This was a trickle, for Murray says that his existence was one of smiling days and he “had no sense of anything lacking in my life, least of all religion. I was a happy agnostic.” A bump in the road occurred when a friend asked him: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” This question was startlingly new to him. “Surely,” Murray thought, “things do not exist without having been created.” Thus began his study of the materialist view that reality is no more than what the brain knows. Is there consciousness, he wondered, beyond the brain? Perhaps one has a soul. In time this path led him to see that, as the British writer C.S. Lewis put it, some smart people indeed believe “that stuff.”
The reader will encounter far more intriguing ideas than can be fully discussed here. Some readers, for example, may be most drawn to the way Murray explains and interprets what scientists have concluded about reality, the universe, and belief. In this regard, Murray devotes considerable attention to the Big Bang theory, a term introduced in 1949 by Fred Hoyle during a BBC broadcast, which holds that the universe expanded from an extremely hot and dense initial state.
Other readers may find themselves more interested in Murray’s discussion of cultural and intellectual history. He argues, for instance, that many artists beginning in the late nineteenth century increasingly rejected religious belief and traditional ideals. Beginning in the late 1800s and extending through World War I, Murray writes, many artists engaged in “high art” consciously abandoned the idea that art should pursue Beauty and instead dismissed Truth and Goodness as meaningful standards by which artistic work ought to be judged.
Still other readers may identify most strongly with Murray’s personal reflections and uncertainties. He openly admits that his own spirituality is weak, concedes that some of his conclusions may ultimately prove “foolish,” and worries that he may be influenced by “confirmation bias,” the tendency to embrace information that supports what one already wishes to believe. Those admissions give the book an introspective and unusually honest quality.
Murray lays out five categories of inquiry: 1. An Intentional Universe, 2. Interconnectedness, 3. The Moral Law, 4. Forgiveness of Sins, and 5. Death and the Afterlife. Here is my much-boiled down brief of the evidence and reasoning Murray applies to these categories in this rich-on-every-page book.
* Although a few near-death experiences are reported to be dreadful and gloomy, the vast majority of validated ones tell of joy, comfort, serenity, welcoming. How can this be, he asks, if there is no consciousness beyond the brain? After six fascinating pages on near death experiences, Murray arrives here: “It is difficult to reconcile these facts with the materialist position that consciousness cannot exist independently of brain function.”
* Murray has studied the idea that paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance are real. He acknowledges that these phenomena have been severely attacked, but he concludes that at the very least the evidence is strong enough to imply a “supernatural force,” that these phenomena are more than just a notion. They are a “statistical reality.”
* A major “Aha!” point is his being led to moral law by the writing of C.S. Lewis. Some readers will likely consider these eight pages worth the price of the book. There is far more in these eight pages than I am relating, but in short: in all religions there is the core belief of “an eternal force that represents the natural order of the universe and all [religions]proclaimed principles of human flourishing.” The universe was designed to permit life. Concepts of right and wrong come from God. The concepts are written on our hearts. Humans everywhere, always, had concepts of right and wrong. The principles are not man made.
* Further: if moral law were something that evolved, what would be the authority to believe a given act is wrong? Yet, we know when we do something wrong. Moral law is a factor in confronting our instincts. Murray explains that when he once came upon a burning car wreck, his instinct was to not want to help, believing there could be an explosion. He and another man rescued the driver. “I have been relieved ever since that I did. Not stopping, he claims, would have haunted me for the rest of my life—even if someone else had rescued the driver.” We are flawed but we have a “demand to live up to the Moral Law.” Genuine altruism, says Murray, “seems to be a fundamental component of human psychology.” In this Lewis-inspired realm, says Murray, “I am driven to accept not only that God has a relationship with humans, but that God is Goodness.”
So now there is a different Murray. Once agnostic, he has surrendered some of what he calls his “extreme individualism.” He looks back at once never having thought he had “a God-sized hole in my life.” Nothing was missing. There were “nudges” about the great questions but at the outset there was for him just “the most famous of Quaker precepts: ‘There is that of God in everyone.’” The new Murray has now addressed the idea of many universes and “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false.” Murray takes the reader into his confidence by telling what taking religion seriously has done for him, conceding that those things “are idiosyncratic and probably irrelevant to your situation.” This review will not be a spoiler about what he says in summing up.
For me and some readers of this review, Murray is a man of common sense. One then wonders why there are strident criticisms of him. It may tickle some that in our interview he said this: “I’m not sure but I think it likely is because some on the left can’t stand it that my writing is careful and cautious and not angry. I am not a polemicist. It seems it irritates some that I am not nasty or a hardheaded ogre conservative. In Losing Ground it irritates some that they can’t show that I am a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
It could be said that religion is the continuing effort to understand and repair the relationship between the human and the divine. It is a search for meaning—an inquiry into what humanity, the universe, and any supreme being might ultimately signify. In that sense, Taking Religion Seriously is fundamentally a book of inquiry: an exploration of how a thoughtful modern skeptic came to reconsider questions once believed settled.
Readers who begin Murray’s book may also find worthwhile companions in the works of Stanley L. Jaki, the physicist and historian of science whose writings similarly explored the relationship between scientific discovery and religious belief. Among the best of these is The Road of Science and the Ways to God, which contains Jaki’s Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1975 and 1976. Another valuable work is The Purpose of It All, a concise meditation on science, existence, and ultimate meaning.
Having landed at how Murray finishes his story, I sat with the book in my lap wondering if I correctly remembered how the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno ended The Tragic Sense of Life. His words would fit Murray perfectly. I did correctly remember. Unamuno: “May God deny you peace but give you everlasting joy.” Murray: “I have, yet to experience the joys of faith…. I am not done trying to join the party. Perhaps the door will open eventually. But even if it doesn’t, I have much to be grateful for. My haphazard pilgrimage has already led me to believe that I live in a universe made meaningful by love and grace.”
John Adam Moreau, a history Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, has been a longtime reporter and editor for major daily newspapers; jaxm_@bellsouth.net. He is the author of Randolph Bourne, Legend and Reality (Public Affairs, 1966) and of published essays on such subjects as Huey Long, Francisco de Miranda, and Heywood Broun. He last appeared in AQ in the winter of 2025 with “Can Truth Ever Win Out?” a review of Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (Encounter, 2025)
Photo by Caspar David Friedrich – Google Arts & Culture — KwEv_TMiJhn5kA, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13266070