Taking Religion Seriously

"Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant," Charles Murray writes. "For them, I think I have a story worth telling." Taking Religion Seriously is Murray's autobiographical account of a decades-long evolution in his stance towards the idea of God in general and Christianity specifically. He argues that religion can be approached as an intellectual exercise.

His account moves from the improbable physics of the Big Bang to recent discoveries about the nature of consciousness; from evolutionary psychology to hypotheses about a universal Moral Law. His exploration of Christianity delves into the authorship of the Gospels, the reliability of the texts that survive, and the scholarship surrounding the Resurrection story.

Murray, the author of Coming Apart and coauthor of The Bell Curve, does not write as an expert. "If you are taking religion seriously for the first time, you face the same problem I did: We are forced to decide what we make of a wide variety of topics that we do not have the option of mastering." He offers his personal example of how the process works. "Maybe God needs a way to reach over-educated agnostics and that's what I stumbled into," he writes. "It's a more arid process than divine revelation but it has been rewarding. And, if you're like me, it's the only game in town."