October 14, 2025 | Charles Murray

Is the West experiencing a religious revival? Some say yes—or at least, that it needs one. Young generations have become spiritually bankrupt, they say, consumed by technology and social media, desperate for something bigger than themselves.

But how can religion compel the secular? Political scientist Charles Murray knows the answer better than most—because it happened to him. For much of his life, he explains in his new book, Taking Religion Seriously, out October 14, he was one of the “well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant.”

But that’s changed. And in the following exclusive excerpt, Murray explains the very beginnings of his tiptoe toward religiosity. It all began, he says, in the early 2000s, with a series of nudges threatening to topple the secular catechisms he’d held all his life. —The Editors

I graduated from college in early June 1965 and flew to Hilo, Hawaii, for Peace Corps training the day after commencement. I left Hilo for my assignment with the Thai Ministry of Public Health’s Village Health and Sanitation Project in September. Except for a two-week visit home in 1968, I didn’t return to the U.S. until August 1970. In effect, I missed the years that Americans have in mind when they talk about “the ’60s.”

Over the course of those five years in Thailand, I got caught up in my generation’s attraction to transcendental meditation and set out to become enlightened or, failing that, reach some sort of meditative state. I tried, but it didn’t work. On those rare occasions when I came close to a meditative state, I could feel myself resisting. The idea of giving up that much of my autonomy scared me.

My failure got me to thinking about something that expanded into a semi-coherent theory: Just as people have different levels of cognitive ability or athletic coordination, so too they have different levels of perceptual ability. That’s true in the appreciation of music, the visual arts, and literature. I’m not talking about IQ. People with stratospheric IQs can be tone-deaf, unmoved by great art, bored by Shakespeare—and clueless about anything spiritual.

Thirty years later, watching my wife, Catherine, become increasingly engaged in Quakerism in the last half of the 1990s, that thought forcefully returned to me: People vary in their ability to apprehend spiritual truths.

Most atheists I have known reject that proposition. They are certain that people who hold deep religious beliefs are deluding themselves. Being married to Catherine, I didn’t have that option. She had an extraordinary intellect, was fully self-aware, and wasn’t deluding herself in any way. Through her own example and the example of people I got to know through her, I had come to accept that I was the one with a problem. I suffer from a perceptual deficit in spirituality.

Catherine observed once that she likes being in control as much as I do (which indeed she does). The difference between us, she said, was that her sense of need for belief was greater. I agreed with that, and I also had a suspicion about why. I had distracted myself with Western modernity.

I am using Western modernity as shorthand for all the ways in which life in the last hundred years has shielded many of us from the agonizing losses, pains, and sorrows that came early and often in human life since the dawn of humankind. Most people still suffer at least one such agonizing event eventually, but often not until old age and sometimes never.

So far, that’s been the case with me. I’ve lived my life without ever reaching the depths of despair. I’m grateful for my luck. But I have also not felt the God-sized hole in my life that the depths of despair often reveal. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a hole; it’s just that I’ve been able to ignore it. In the 21st century, keeping ourselves entertained and distracted is easy. And that, I think, explains a lot not only about me but about the nonchalant secularism of our age.

Catherine did not require despair to recognize her God-sized hole, and she did not ignore it. As the ’90s went on and I watched her progress on her spiritual journey, I realized that I couldn’t keep up with her. I didn’t get it. At the same time, I yearned to participate. I couldn’t do it in the same way, but I could deploy alternative strategies. That’s what I’ve done and that’s what I’m about to describe.

My secular catechism from college through the mid-1990s went something like this:

The concept of a personal God is at odds with everything that science has taught us over the last five centuries.

Humans are animals. Our thoughts and emotions are produced by the brain. When the brain stops, consciousness stops too.

The great religious traditions are human inventions, natural products of the fear of death. That includes Christianity, which can call on no solid evidence for its implausible claims.

I look back on that catechism and call it “dead center” because it was so unreflective. I had not investigated the factual validity of any of those propositions. They were part of the received wisdom of most Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century. I accepted them without thinking.

In describing how I got unstuck, I will make the process sound more orderly than it was. The actual process was a series of doubts about my settled answers that bubbled up periodically throughout the last half of the 1990s and the early 2000s. I experienced a series of nudges spread over many years, and they do not form a coherent whole.

The first nudge, so soft that it barely registered (I cannot recall when it did more than cross my mind) was the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena—most famously E = mc2. There’s also Newton’s second law of motion (which is just F = ma), Galileo’s law of free fall (d = 1/2gt²), and many other examples.

It just seemed extremely odd that so many basic phenomena were so mathematically simple. It was almost as if someone had planned it that way.

The first unmistakable nudge involved the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I first heard it put in those words by the late columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer during a session of a chess club we started in the early 1990s. That I thought Charles had come up with it himself is proof of how unreflective I had been. Anyone who had taken any interest in theology would have encountered it long since. It’s one of the most famous questions in metaphysics.

But I hadn’t heard it, and it caught me by surprise. When I had thought about the existence of the universe at all, I had taken it as a given. I am alive, I am surrounded by the world, the fact that I can ask the question presupposes that the universe exists. There’s nothing else to be said. It is a mystery with a lowercase m.

Hearing the question stated so baldly and so eloquently made me start to take the issue seriously. Why is there anything? Surely things do not exist without having been created. What created all this? If you haven’t thought about it recently, this is a good time to stop and try to come up with your own answer.

Whatever that answer may be, it is vulnerable to an infinite regress. What created the force behind the creation? Even if your answer is “God,” you must ask how God came to be. At that point you’re stuck with saying that it’s turtles all the way down.

“It’s turtles all the way down” is the punchline for a joke with variations that go back centuries. Modern versions of it begin with a distinguished scientist giving a lecture on astronomy. Here’s how Stephen Hawking told it in A Brief History of Time:

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Some eminent thinkers have argued that the question about existence is meaningless; others, that the universe did not require an act of creation. I couldn’t buy either answer. I decided that the existence of something rather than nothing is a mystery with a capital M.

I haven’t any good explanation for what could have caused the universe, but I believe there must have been a cause, and I recognize that any answer the human brain can comprehend runs into the turtles-all-the-way-down problem. What Mystery really means is that the universe was created by an unknowable creative force that itself has no explainable source, a concept Aristotle referred to as the “unmoved mover.” By the late 1990s, that sounded to me like a description of God I could accept.

My ruminations about “Why is there something rather than nothing?” had a side effect. They helped me to stop anthropomorphizing God and instead give him the respect he deserves.

The Bible relentlessly anthropomorphizes God, starting in Genesis with the assertion that God created man in his own image. The God of the Old Testament has the full range of human characteristics—he gets angry, changes his mind, is remorseful, commands people to take vengeance on enemies, and tests the faith of Abraham and Job in ways that look a lot like cruelty.

The New Testament’s verbal imagery of God as a father and Jesus sitting at God’s right hand reinforces the anthropomorphic view of God. That image has been reinforced still further by Christian art—think of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel depiction of God as a formidable old man with flowing hair, touching Adam’s finger.

None of that had ever made sense to me. Once I decided that there had to be an unmoved mover and was intellectually committed to accepting that conception of God, I was free to think about a truth that, once you stop to think about it, must be a truth: Any God worthy of the name is at least as incomprehensible to a human being as I am to my dog.

The analogy is better than it may seem at first glance. My dog is smart enough to perceive a few things about me—the fact that I exist as a distinct individual and that I feed her every morning. She also has some perceptions about my moods and what I want her to do. But these understandings represent only a few trivial aspects of who I am. I am not invisible to my dog, just as God is not invisible to me (I have come to believe), but I am nonetheless unknowable to my dog in any meaningful sense. God is just as unknowable to me.

Two other useful concepts entered my thinking sometime during the 1990s. One was that God exists outside of time—as taught by Aristotle but elaborated by Thomas Aquinas. Just trying to get your head around the concept of existing outside time is a good way to realize how unknowable a being we are talking about.

Quaker teachings are also helpful in de-anthropomorphizing God. They emphasize that God is not a being with a location. He is everywhere—not just watching from everywhere but permeating the universe and our world. And there is the most famous of Quaker precepts: “There is that of God in everyone.” It is not the same as saying, “There’s some good in everyone.” God is in you in some sense, along with permeating everything else. These are not concepts that can be fully processed (at least by me), but they are powerful antidotes to thinking about God as an especially wise and powerful grandpa.

Such were my cautious, tiptoeing steps into the shallow end of the pool as of the early 2000s. I was about to find myself in the deep end.