Charles Murray traces his 1961 Harvard dismissal of religion as irrelevant to his wife Catherine’s 1985 spiritual awakening after their daughter Anna’s birth, revealing a "perceptually deprived" mindset toward faith. His 1990s Quaker meetings and Six Numbers by Martin Rees (2011) challenged accidental multiverse theories with the anthropic principle’s fine-tuned universe, while near-death experiences and terminal lucidity suggested consciousness beyond the brain. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity later reshaped his skepticism, exposing an instinctive reverence for Jesus. In Taking Religion Seriously (2014), he frames faith as a rigorous intellectual pursuit, urging young minds to engage with it like a PhD—though prayer remains secondary in his own life. The episode reveals how science and personal experience can collide with secular assumptions, leaving even hardened skeptics reconsidering religion’s role. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Charles Murray.
For many years, as most of you know, I've been predicting a Christian revival and one that would be different from earlier revivals in that it would have its center, not on the street, but among intellectuals, something like the Oxford movement in the 19th century that re-legitimized Orthodoxy in England.
And I think that revival is well underway.
Obviously, tragically, it was kind of supercharged by the murder of Charlie Kirk.
But it has been attended, as I predicted, by the revival of faith in very bright, thoughtful men.
And there is no one more thoughtful or bright than Charles Murray.
He has been an honest and fearless intellectual.
He has been excoriated and attacked physically, in fact, for his straight-up, non-bigoted talk about race and books like The Bell Curve and Facing Reality and Coming Apart.
He has written a new book, which I am into, but I have not quite finished yet.
But I can say it is equally fearless and also deeply personal and just a terrific read.
It's called Taking Religion Seriously.
It is well worth taking a look at.
Charles, it's good to see you again.
Thank you for coming back.
Good to see you again.
It's been a long time.
Yes, it's been a while.
And I have to tell you, I was not expecting this book from you.
It took me off guard, and I was really excited by it when I saw it in the encounter catalog.
I sent for it right away, and it's gripping.
And I want you, you know, I had a very similar experience of being, you know, in a class of people, in a group of people, who dismissed religion entirely so that I didn't really think of it in a serious way.
You call this Dead Center.
Can you explain to people, especially to people who were cradle Christians, what Dead Center was for a person in your situation?
Dead Center, I think, is shared by millions and millions of well-educated, successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant.
In my case, I went to church as a child to the Presbyterian Church, but I got to Harvard in 1961, and I quickly learned that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore.
And I wasn't persuaded of that.
That was just in the air.
That was the zeitgeist.
None of my friends were religious.
None of my professors were religious.
People treated it dismissively.
And I went along.
And it was not that I was hostile to religion, but for the next 25 years, I just didn't think about it very much.
And I was working out of a catechism, a secular catechism, that I think is very common.
We're human beings on this little tiny planet on a nondescript part of the universe in a small galaxy.
And the idea that there is a personal God that has anything to do with the lives of individual human beings, just silly.
That was, well, I did not subject any of that to examination.
And the book is about the slow process of re-examining my priors in this.
Yeah, it's hard to describe to people who grew up in a religious background with a kind of faith implanted in them.
It's hard to explain how everyone around you is saying the same thing, kind of snorting at religion, rolling their eyes at it.
You talk about a turning point that comes from your wife, which is also not that uncommon, one spouse or another, having an effect.
Can you talk about where that came from with her?
Sure.
It was decisive.
Yeah.
In the book and the acknowledgments, I mentioned that Catherine, my wife, has edited everything I've written since the 1980s.
But this is different.
She's the only reason I had anything to write about.
Catherine had our daughter, Anna, our first child, in 1985.
She was just like me.
She'd grown up Protestant, had fallen away from it, hadn't thought about religion.
And a couple of months after Anna was born, she came to me and said that she loved Anna more than so much that she had a hard time telling where she stopped and Anna began.
And she also then came up with a wonderful line.
She said, I love Anna far more than evolution requires, which is the kind of line that somebody educated at Oxford and Yale will come up with.
Say, I understand evolution.
I believe in evolution.
I know that women love their children because we've evolved to.
Something else is going on here.
And she thought she was a conduit for a greater love.
And that prompted her into eventually Quakerism.
And she has become a very serious Quaker, which doesn't mean a social activist.
It means deeply spiritually involved in the Christian faith.
And I couldn't follow along.
And this is raises something, Andrew, that I think that what people who ignore religion have a hard time understanding is that a great many of us, including me, are perceptually deprived.
I mean, we have no problem believing, we meaning agnostics who don't care about religion, we have no problem believing there's such a thing as being tone deaf.
We have no problem believing that some people who may have very high IQs don't get great paintings.
But we have a hard time understanding that it may be we are the equivalent of tone deaf when it comes to religion, that we are lacking the ability to enter into a certain kind of sensibility that other people are better at.
And in my case, my wife was good at it.
I'm really bad at it.
But you had had, you were in the Peace Corps famously.
I think it was a Thailand you were in.
Right, right.
And you had kind of experimented with Buddhism.
So you knew there were, you must have felt there was something, some mystery beyond what we know, or maybe you didn't.
Maybe you're just fooling around.
I was attracted by meditation.
And one of the reasons I was attracted by meditation was that it was trendy in the 1960s.
But also, I was perfectly willing to believe that people can enter into other kinds of mental states.
You know, I believed in hypnosis and other kinds of things, and I really wanted to do that.
And I was also attracted to Buddhism, Andrew, because I was told Buddhism doesn't require you to take anything on faith.
That if you get in a meditative state, you will have insights about how the world works.
And lo and behold, they correspond to Buddhist teachings.
And that said, that's what I want.
Something where I don't have to make a leap of faith.
You know, it's funny.
I did a lot of Zen meditation along the way.
And one of the things that made me stop was I realized that if you meditated on a toothpick, the world would seem like toothpicks.
So it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But so now you accompanied your wife to Quaker meetings.
And for those people who don't know, Quaker meetings are kind of odd.
I mean, you just sit there silently.
And every now and again, somebody feels moved to say something, but you don't really have to believe in anything, do you?
I mean, you don't have to.
No.
And that's the reason Catherine could go there because she really had trouble with the Nicene Creed, with the Apostles Creed.
And she just didn't want to go to a service where she was asked to recite that because she couldn't do it in good faith.
And Quakerism is sort of halfway between Unitarianism, where people believe in one God at most, as a friend of mine once put it, and mainline Protestantism.
So most people who go to Quaker meeting are attracted to Christian teachings, and a fair percentage of them are Christians in their doctrinal beliefs.
Right, right.
So was that, if you have a perceptual deficit and you go to a Quaker meeting where you're supposed to sit there and wait till the spirit moves you, does that put you at a disadvantage?
Well, I don't know.
Well, I'm afraid I sort of semi-cheated, which is I would read the Bible because whereas you aren't supposed to take a thriller with you to read, it is okay to, instead of sitting in quiet contemplation, to read the Bible.
So over the course of the 1990s, after I started going to Quaker meeting regularly, just because I wanted to participate, I did a lot of reading in the Bible.
I know the Bible pretty well by this time, Old Testament and New.
And did that have an effect on you?
Not really.
The nudges I got that moved me toward faith were the kinds of things that I'm good at intellectually.
And the things I'm good at intellectually is exploring new topics and being receptive to new topics.
So in this case, the Road to Damascus moment was really a little book called Six Numbers by Martin Rees, who was the astronomer royal.
Six Numbers Insight00:05:32
And it's not himself religious.
It's a book for lay people on the anthropic principle.
And that may not be a familiar term to many people who are watching.
It refers to something that physicists started to find in the 1970s as the Big Bang theory had been verified and they were exploring the nature of the Big Bang more carefully.
And it's hard to summarize this in a non-technical way, but I'll try.
What they essentially discovered is that along with all the things they could predict from theory about what happened in the first few fractions of a second after the Big Bang, there were a variety of other things that happened that they couldn't predict by theory.
They were like settings of parameters.
Say you've got 30 settings on a big board.
And in effect, those settings had been set at extremely precise levels that permitted stars to form, that permitted galaxies to form, that permitted planets to form.
And if any of those had been a little bit off, none of that would have happened.
We would live, we wouldn't live.
The universe would be black holes.
It would be radiation.
It would not be the universe that permits life.
Well, that is not theory.
That's simply true.
And you won't talk to any physicist who will deny it.
And so this posed a real problem.
Are we supposed to believe that we lucked out in a one in a trillion chance?
Because that's the odds against our universe existing.
Or are we to believe that there are millions of universes just like this one, which is the multiverse theory, which I had a real hard time accepting?
That doesn't seem real plausible to me.
Or is it more plausible to say that it was an intentional universe?
That some force had something in mind.
And for me, that's really the only plausible way to think about it.
There's a wonderful analogy that a Canadian philosopher came up with.
Suppose that you were about to be, you were executed, supposed to be executed, by 100 expert marksmen, and they all missed.
Well, in one sense, you'd still be alive.
So you could say, well, it doesn't matter how it happened.
I'm still alive.
But you'd be entitled to be curious.
And the plausibility that they all missed by accident and that some higher authority directed that they all miss. doesn't seem like a close call to me.
Well, once you admit we live in an intentional universe, that opens up a whole new range of possibilities.
I've heard somebody once compare it to a poker game where a guy pulls five straight flushes in a row and says, well, this just happens to be the universe in which that happened.
You know, you make a comment in the book, which I had never thought of before, of how simple also all these mathematic, these central mathematical theories are, like things like E equal MC squared, which is, it is kind of shocking when you think about it.
And when you talk to scientists, they'll often say that something is not right because it's not graceful or it's not beautiful.
It's amazing how much of that goes into science while newspapers pretend that science is this kind of empty, objective look at the world.
That simplicity is amazing too.
It's completely anti-intuitive that you should have simple laws.
And yet it's not only so consistently true, it's not only that it happens a lot, it is so consistently true that when there is not simplicity, that's a sign to the mathematicians, as you said, that something's wrong.
And oftentimes something is wrong.
And also mathematicians who will not profess conventional religious faith see mathematics as something transcendent in its beauty.
And that, again, points to me to an intentionality in the universe.
I like fruits and vegetables.
I do, but you can't get enough of them on your own.
You'd just be stuffing stuff in your face all the time.
Your beard would get all juicy.
It would be disgusting.
Balance of nature, fruits and veggies is the most convenient way and the least disgusting way to get whole fruits and vegetables daily, especially if you're focused on creating a healthier, happier lifestyle.
Nature's good at giving us the nutrients we need through our fruits and vegetables.
So Balance of Nature takes fruits and vegetables, freeze-dries them, and puts them into a powder and then puts the powder into a capsule.
You take your fruit and veggie capsules every day, and then your body knows what to do with them.
Balance of nature is just one ingredient of a balanced lifestyle.
It has no intention to replace a healthy diet, exercise, sleep, or any other healthy habits.
It's intended to be used in concert with those healthy habits.
I use it all the time.
I also exercise.
I work out.
I take long walks.
So do the same.
Go to balanceofnature.com and get a free fiber and spice supplement plus 35% off your first set as a new preferred customer by using discount code Clavin.
That's balanceofnature.com, promo code Clavin, and you say to yourself, that sounds great.
How do you spell Clavin?
I'm glad you asked.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Journey Through Belief00:11:26
So you're going to Quaker meetings and you're reading the Bible, but you're also noticing, as you say, these things that you're really good at, which is learning these new scientific, I mean, your stuff on genetics looks like it's written by a geneticist, which you've never claimed to be, but it's incredibly precise and exact.
Does that move you in any direction religiously?
In any specific direction religiously?
No, but the other nudges came, again, from contemporary science.
I just back off here and let me say that one of the lessons I took away in writing this book is that the relationship between science and religion has shifted fundamentally in the last, especially half century, but maybe century.
And in this sense, from 1500 to 1900, we had science explaining one mystery after another that formerly had been assigned to God.
You know, hurricanes, thunderstorms, earthquakes, all of these things that before had been taken as evidence of a higher power were explained away.
In the last century, science has come up with mysteries that we didn't know existed for which science does not have an answer.
The Big Bang is one.
I mean, it's the story of Genesis.
The Big Bang is a scientific gloss on the story of Genesis.
What caused the Big Bang to come out of nothing?
That's a really big problem for science.
And another thing that has been coming out of science is the nature of consciousness.
So that I think probably most of our viewers are familiar with New Death experiences.
They've gotten a lot of attention.
But if they haven't paid much attention to it, I will point out we're not talking about a handful of new age reports from people who've been taking psychedelic drugs.
We're talking about literally thousands of extremely well-documented cases of people who were in cardiac arrest, no heartbeat, no respiration, et cetera, who have been aware of all sorts of things that have actually gone on around them.
And there's another phenomenon called terminal lucidity, whereby people with advanced dementia haven't spoken to any word for years, don't recognize their spouse or relatives.
A day or two before death, they're back.
Their personalities are back.
Their memories are back.
Where's that coming from if they have non-functional brains?
So the whole question of a human soul takes on a different probability if you have a good evidence that consciousness can exist independently of the brain.
So all of these things have been happening when one day in 2005, I was introduced to Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis's book.
Great book, yeah.
Yeah.
And for people who have not read Mere Christianity, and especially if you are not religious, pick it up.
And the reason I want you to pick it up is not that you'll be swept away by his passion and depth of belief.
You'll be swept away by the fact that this is a really smart guy who still believes that stuff.
And as he talks about this, he drives you nuts because you say, oh, I see the flaw in this argument.
And then the next paragraph says, you may be thinking that.
It's a wonderful book.
It is so lucid.
And he says so many things that you can't get out of your head.
And in my case, it drew me into reading way more literature about the New Testament than I ever expected to read.
And also, I want non-believers who are watching this to understand it's fascinating.
You are getting into material that is as intellectually challenging as anything you've ever read.
You know, one of the things that I found interesting in my conversion is that until you believe, all you can do is break things down, which is useful.
It's useful to break things down into their component parts, but it goes on forever.
And it's basically this endless system of breaking because nothing, there's always some smaller piece that you can go down, but you can't see things whole.
You can't actually put things together and experience them as one does in real life.
And I have found that like just personal growth, which I think we're both around the same age, is an amazing thing to still be going through personal growth, which I don't think exists at some level without that wholeness that you get from experiencing God.
I am still at the stage whereby I am putting it all together.
And again, we are talking about I think that if you take the normal distribution of perceptual spiritual ability, and it does form, I think, a normal distribution from low to high, I think you're pretty high on it, and I think I'm pretty low on it.
The analogy I use to close the book is that I sometimes feel like a kid watching a party through the glass, and my nose is pressed to glass against the glass, and I want to join, and I can't.
And you're on the other side of the glass.
But I want to make the case that even when the pieces haven't been put together, it can have a profound effect on the way you think about your life and profound effects for the better.
So just be patient if you are like me and you have to struggle with this.
You know, I was wondering actually, I mean, you read, I don't know how much of Lewis you've read, but his nonfiction work is unbelievably great.
I'm not a big fan of the Narnative stuff, but like his essays and sermons are unbelievable.
But now you've got, I don't want to put, I don't want to speak for you, but it seems to me that a man with a mind like yours is now confronting this, the existence of a person, Jesus, who is, you know, has qualities that are beyond the things that you and I have seen.
I mean, that can be an argument for belief or disbelief.
I mean, that the reason we think he's special is because he's special, but the reason people don't believe in him is because stuff like that doesn't happen.
And I'm wondering, as a person whose mind is so hooked in to science, how much of a stumbling block that is.
I have made progress.
First place, you have to understand that when I write, as I do in the book, about what do I think of the miracles?
What do I think of the resurrection?
What do I think of the historical accuracy of the accounts of Jesus' teachings?
My wife looks at me lovingly and sympathetically and rolls her eyes.
Because as far as she is concerned, that's kind of beside the point.
That she is engaged in a lot of spiritual insight and a deep, what I consider a very deep form of Christian belief that is focused on the teachings and on the implications of that for living a good human life and our place in the cosmos.
And what I am doing is her husband's stick.
And her husband's stick is looking at data and trying to analyze it and make sense of it.
And so I am in a state of worrying about things like the reality of the physical resurrection, which she doesn't worry about at all.
And she doesn't deny it.
She just, that's peripheral to what she thinks.
In terms of what I have taken away from that with regard to the person of Jesus, I have had an evolution in my head that I didn't realize was going on.
I have for 30 years at least had wakeful periods in the small hours of the morning.
I will wake up at about 3 o'clock in the morning and I'll stay awake until about 3.45.
That's pretty typical for me.
And for a while, I really spend all my time trying to go back to sleep.
But then I realized, you know what?
I'm getting a lot of good ideas during those 45 minutes in the middle of the night.
And so I quit fighting it.
And that's a lead-in to something that happened while I was writing the book, I think sometime last spring.
I was thinking about what would it be like to actually meet Gautama, the Buddha, to actually meet Lao Tzu, who wrote the Tao Tijing, the Taoism, the basic of Taoism.
Moses, what would that be like?
Or Jesus.
And I was thinking about that and how fascinating that would be.
And I would treat all of them with the utmost respect.
And then, Andrew, out of nowhere, I suddenly realized I would treat Jesus differently with reverence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I didn't decide to revere him in a way that I would not revere the others.
I just realized I did.
Yeah.
Think of that what you will.
It's a very, very strange thing.
I mean, I'm the same way.
You know, to get me to believe in ghosts, a transparent figure in chains would have to walk in with an echoic voice.
And yet, the fact that everything you deduce from the resurrection turns out to be spiritually true, whether it happened or not, does sort of point to the fact that it's probably true.
I mean, that's where I've come down eventually.
You call this book— There's a man you might enjoy reading.
Excuse me.
Interrupted.
No, no, say again, I didn't catch it.
There is a man named John Polkinghorn, who's a bishop, or was a bishop.
He may not still be alive in Britain, who was previously a theoretical physicist at Oxford.
And he has a wonderful description of where he comes out on the resurrection.
He acknowledges all the difficulties associated with figuring out what the nature of the resurrection was, but he says that he has accepted that the way of looking at it that fits the facts most closely, that Jesus was brought back to life in some sense.
We aren't quite sure exactly what it was, but such that the Christian church in the 20th century, in the 21st century, is still has the living presence of that Palestinian preacher from 2,000 years ago.
Bowl and Branches Bed Bundles00:02:03
Well, I think that's a nice way of looking at it.
It allows for the difficulty in us understanding exactly what happened in what was undoubtedly something really powerful and really strange.
As summer's busy pace gives way to autumn, many of us find ourselves embracing the slower season, quiet weekends, hot drinks, and cozy evenings with our favorite shows.
I thought this comfortable routine was perfect until we transformed our bedroom into a true sanctuary that made these crisp fall nights with blankets and movies even more extraordinary.
I'm talking about bowl and branches bed bundles.
They make it incredibly easy to upgrade your entire bedding setup with just one click this fall.
Whether you're looking for a simple refresh with new sheets and blankets or want to completely transform your sleep space, there's a bundle designed specifically for your needs.
They've thoughtfully curated collections for every type of sleeper.
So whether you tend to run hot and need cooling fabrics or you love to stay cozy and warm or simply want the softest possible feel against your skin, you will find exactly what you're looking for.
Every bundle is crafted from the highest quality, 100% organic cotton in durable, long-lasting designs.
And you can customize the colors to perfectly match your style.
I particularly like them because I lie awake all night so I can see how beautiful they are and how comfortable they feel.
And they offer a 30-night worry-free guarantee so you can rest easy knowing your investment is protected.
Bolin Branch makes upgrading your bed easier than ever with curated bundles for a sanctuary of comfort for a limited time.
Get 20% off bed bundles at bolenbranch.com/slash clavin.
That's bowl and branch, b-o-l-l-a-n-d-branch.com slash k-l-a-v-a-n.
No ease in claven.
I'm just making it look this easy.
You will save up to 20% exclusions apply.
An Amazing Moment on Friday00:04:04
It must have been, there must have been.
And no one seems to have said this didn't happen.
They were all preaching in Jerusalem.
No one seems to say, like, no, it didn't.
You know, something must have happened.
You call this book taking religion seriously, which a title which I like because it was very typical of you.
It's a very restrained title.
It's not a sensational title.
I'm wondering exactly, why did you come up with that particular title?
Back in 2014, I wrote a little book called Kurbudgen's Guide to Getting Ahead.
And this was written originally for AEI interns and research assistants who were 22 years old.
And I had a great time offering them about 30 tips to conducting their lives at that age.
And one of them was, I said, take religion seriously, especially if you've been socialized not to.
Because even at that time, I was aware that this was something that should be more important than my life than it had been.
And it was my job to do better at it.
And I was trying to say to the kids, don't spend as much time as I did ignoring this part of your life.
And that's the way, that's how I titled The Tip.
And when I came to write this book, it seemed to be the right tone for it.
I'm not trying to proselytize for a particular set of beliefs.
I am saying that this is something that should be a central part of your life and that making it a central part of your life can be as challenging as doing a PhD.
Yeah, yeah.
I only have time for one more question.
I have a million other questions I'd like to ask, but one of them is: does prayer play a big role in your life at this point?
No, it does not.
It should, but I'm afraid that I resist the kinds of things that are involved in giving up yourself, whether it's meditation.
I tell in the book, I did pray one time many years ago.
I can't remember what it was that was bothering me, but during meeting, I prayed earnestly about this thing.
And over the course of the next couple of days, my worries went away.
And it scared the bejesus out of me, as it were.
Not because prayer failed, but because prayer worked.
And so I am a work in progress when it comes to religion.
And one of the things that I should do a lot more of is both contemplation, silent meditation, and prayer.
And that's on my agenda.
Well, I highly recommend it.
I always tell people: if you walk into a room by yourself and pray out loud for 15 to 20 minutes a day, you will be amazed at the information that comes to you that you did not have before.
It is an amazing experience, and I recommend it just as an experiment.
Charles Murray, the book is Taking Religion Seriously, a gripping read and a gripping conversation.
I'm really glad you could come on.
I hope to see you again soon, and I will look forward to hearing more.
It's been lots of fun.
Thank you, Andrew.
Fascinating stuff.
I'm very familiar with Charles Murray's work.
I've read at least four of his books, and they're quite dense sometimes.
And this one is not.
It's a very great read.
But I have to tell you that if you had told me that he was going to write this book, I would have been startled.
And I was startled by the depth of his engagement with it.
Really, really interesting.
And part of what is happening in our world, in our country, and in the West and on our planet.
And just an amazing, it's an amazing, amazing moment.
Another amazing moment will come on Friday.
Oh, this Friday, I will not be around.
You're going to miss me this Friday because I'm traveling.
So you're doomed.
What can I tell you?
It's been great knowing you.
I'm sorry for the darkness you're about to be plunged into, but I will be back the Friday after that.