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[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 NTD. 

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

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. 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 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.

But why did it happen, right?

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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…

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.

Europe and Canada, I’ll just mention.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Duchamp’s funeral.

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.

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

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.

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.

Nobody has, except my wife.

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.

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

But what prompted you to want to catalog this publicly?

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