The preponderance of the Western intellectual class approaches religion with an incoherent mixture of ignorance and condescension and, often, hostility. There are, to be sure, notable exceptions. In his new book, Taking Religion Seriously, the distinguished libertarian-conservative social scientist Charles Murray — author of such groundbreaking (and, one must add, controversial) books as Losing Ground (1984), The Bell Curve (1994), and Coming Apart (2012) — pleads guilty to past ignorance and smugness in confronting the “God question,” but he was never contemptuous of religion. This spared him of one obstacle on the path that eventually took him to faith.
Brought up in a Presbyterian family but educated at Harvard University, where secularism was the default position, Murray had never given the question of religion the serious attention it deserves. His thoughtful and intellectually curious wife, Catherine, had found in Quakerism the dignified and “nondoctrinaire spiritual environment she was looking for,” and Murray was in no position to dismiss such longings as leftovers from an era of superstition. His short, substantive book describes his “meandering pilgrimage to belief,” the result not of sudden “divine revelation” or a “born-again moment” but of experience culminating in a reasonable affirmation of faith. His spiritual journey is instructive precisely because it is so thoughtful and utterly devoid of the emotivism and fideism typical of contemporary conversion stories.
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