All happy conversion stories are alike. Every unhappy conversion story is unhappy in its own way. Is how Tolstoy might have put it, if he weren’t, you know, dead. Charles Murray, he of Bell Curve fame and attendant controversy, has gotten religion. Or it has gotten him. Sorta kinda.
There appears to be something of a surge of non-theist intellectuals, scientists, and activists reconsidering the claims of Christianity: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia), Nina Karin Monsen, Julie Burchill, Rosalind Picard, Sarah Salviander, among others. Murray begins Taking Religion Seriously with an apologia that more than a few of them could have written: “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.” This story, however, may feel like one with lots of exposition and rising action but short on climax. St. Augustine’s Confessions it is not. But that’s what I found most captivating.
As has often been the case in Christian history, a husband’s religious journey begins with his wife’s and, in this case at least, the birth of a daughter. “Catherine discovered that her love for her daughter surpassed anything she had ever known,” writes Murray. “It was a love so all-enveloping, she later told me, that she had trouble distinguishing where she stopped and Anna began. Her epiphany was that she loved Anna ‘far more than evolution required.’”
Catherine, raised Methodist, paid a visit to the Friends Meeting of Washington (D.C.), a Quaker “church,” but as anyone who knows anything about the Quakers will tell you,
It was completely unlike any religious service she had ever attended. People were seated on benches forming a square. Occasionally someone rose and offered a brief reflection or read a short quotation or prayer. That was it. No Apostle’s Creed. Also no pastor, no choir, no hymns, no sermon, no benediction.
Murray, raised Presbyterian, joined her once. His response to this very spare religious rite? As per his journal entry: “Not sure what I think. Could be very nice. Could be grating.”
Years passed, including a move to the suburbs to escape the high prices of life in D.C., yet without any great move of the spirit, at least for Charles. Catherine, however, found another Quaker Meeting House, 22 miles from their new home in Burkittsville. As Murray and coauthor Dick Hernstein put the finishing touches on their new book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, he decided he no longer had any excuse to ignore “this important part of my wife and children’s life, godless though I still was.”
Murray had forsaken his Christian upbringing back in his college days, a tale as old as time. And as much as his wife’s spiritual journal intrigued him, he still didn’t quite “get it.” “I suffer from a perceptual deficit in spirituality,” Murray admits. If he was to experience some kind of religious awakening, he was going to have to find his own way to it, as he did to compensate for just “okay” math skills: “I need concrete examples. … I cannot enter into a journey involving religious faith by the path that people who are more receptive to spiritual experiences can use. But I can deploy alternative strategies.”
And so he did. The first nudge in the direction of faith was the strange fact of “the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena. … It was almost as if someone had planned it that way.” The “brute facts” of the Big Bang, the at-one-time revolutionary idea that life, the universe, and everything had a beginning and was not, as previously thought, always a “thing,” was another shove in the direction of faith. “The Big Bang gave me good reason for thinking that the creation of the universe was a Mystery with a capital M. But that was still just preparing the ground for my road-to-Damascus revelation.”
But wait, there’s more weird science. Just Six Numbers, by Martin Reese, Britain’s “astronomer royal,” posits that if just six numbers had not fallen exactly into place, we would have been spared two world wars and The Godfather III—and literally everything else. This is what is known as the “fine-tuning” argument: roulette on an incalculably large scale, with consequences far exceeding a suite at the Bellagio. And if you’re the type who likes to get deep into the weeds, check this out:
As the universe cooled, antiquarks all annihilated with quarks, eventually giving quanta of radiation. But one out of every billion quarks survived because it couldn’t find a partner to annihilate with. This is consistent with the empirical observation that radiation quanta in the universe outnumber protons by a billion to one. So all the atoms in the universe could result from a tiny bias at the ninth decimal place in favor of matter over anti-matter. Theory provides no explanation why such a serendipitous asymmetry might exist.
In the immortal words of Spaceballs’ Dark Helmet: Everybody got that?
For good measure, just to make sure he’s allowed every purely materialistic explanation a hearing, Murray gives the multiverse theory a go, the idea that “so many universes exist that it is not surprising that one of them, ours, permitted life to exist.” But … he’s not convinced. (I daresay very few people are.)
And so Murray picked up a pocket New Testament he found at the checkout line at Walmart, read John 3:16, and blammo—he’s—
Not quite. Murray was, let’s say, enchanted by the paranormal: “telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokineses, known collectively as psi phenomena.” Before you blanch, his investigation proved another nail in the coffin of his formerly reductionist view of “mind,” no small thing. Take what you can get. Also please note: His was not “wholesale acceptance” of all this stuff, but “a subset of near-death experiences amounts to persuasive evidence that is incompatible with a strict materialistic theory of consciousness.” And “if I am not just a brain in a body, what am I? I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”
So where does real “religion” come in? you may be asking. Calm down. I’m getting there. Or at least he is. While working on a book called Human Accomplishment, Murray began examining the idea of individualism, and its roots. While something akin to the notion could be found in ancient Greece, “Aristotelian happiness [was not] something that everyone could enjoy. Only a small minority had the character and intelligence to strive for it.”
Christianity, however, “put the individual at center stage as no other philosophy or religion had ever done before.” As he gathered more string on this topic, he realized, with the help of Rodney Stark’s For the Glory of God, that the individualism fostered by Christianity also wrought a flowering of the highest of arts and deepest of sciences as Christians put to use their intellect and creative gifts for, you guessed it, the glory of God and the pursuit of Truth, Beauty, and the Good.
As I reached this point in Murray’s retelling of his intellectual journey, I began to get the distinct impression that all he needed was one more big push in the direction of the compatibility of religious faith and intellectual seriousness—and he was in. And I had an inkling (hint hint) who the pusher was going to be. “Mere Christianity probably led more people to Christianity than any other book of the twentieth century. How? For me C.S. Lewis was the perfect example of a ‘smart person who still believed that stuff.’”
Yet Murray wasn’t all that impressed by Lewis’s famous “trilemma” thesis about the claims of Christ: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher,” insisted Lewis.
He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.
And yet, “Did Jesus really claim to be the Son of God or are those passages later inventions by the authors of the Gospels,” asked Murray. He still needed to fend off Enlightenment and New Atheist challenges to the historical reliability of the Bible. Coming to the rescue were Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Larry Hurtado’s One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, and Michael Bird’s The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus, among other theological first responders.
Murray then spends more than a few pages detailing exactly how he worked through some of the brain teasers presented by the Scriptures to a modern skeptic: the dating and authorship of the NT documents, apparent contradictions, the miracles, and especially the miracle—the Resurrection. “As N.T. Wright documents in excruciating detail, the resurrection was not a repackaged version of anything that had come before. Jesus’s apostles had nothing in Jewish tradition that could have inspired them. For that matter, neither was there any pagan tradition that they might have drawn upon.”
Enter the Shroud of Turin. Yes, you read correctly. Murray began to investigate the strange and beguiling history of what many claim is Jesus’s perfectly preserved burial shroud—which happens to have emblazoned on it a startling image of His (or a) crucified corpse.
The shroud is so very strange that its creation by a medieval forger would be nearly as incredible as the resurrection. If the redating of the shroud to the first century is confirmed by an independent method or is otherwise reinforced, it will be difficult for me to deny that the shroud wrapped the body of the crucified Jesus. But it is impossible to reconcile the characteristics of the shroud with exposure to a decomposing corpse. I think I would have to accept the shroud as evidence of a physical resurrection, with all that implies.
Now before the professional atheists spit gall, Murray is by no means on the road to fundamentalism. “Nothing in this chapter means that I think the Gospels we have today are pristine versions of the original accounts. I accept that many specifics of the revisionists’ evidence for augmentation and redaction are correct.” And he is happy to dismiss the two birth narratives—one in Matthew and one in Luke—as mere “folklore.” At first glance, at least, one can see why. The two tales contradict each other in almost every particular. Both trace Jesus’s lineage through his adoptive father, Joseph—which makes Jesus’s Davidic heritage suspect (although some say Luke’s genealogy is really Mary’s obscured by patriarchal convention). Moreover, Matthew has the gruesome tale of the massacre of the innocents, a wholesale slaughter of babies that could have been avoided had God simply readjusted the stellar GPS for the Magi, while Luke has the more Hallmark Christmasy version. When the Pauline writer of the pastorals, which were penned around the time of the gospels in question (at least according to mainline scholars), warns against “foolish controversies and genealogies,” one can’t help but think this is just what he had in mind.
So does that make the birth narratives of no value? Not if Matthew’s real point is that Jesus is the new Moses, a giver of a better law, and Luke’s that he is the second Adam, which Paul had already insisted in 1 Corinthians. In Jesus, we are all now reconciled to the Father, just as we were alienated from him by virtue of the Fall of the first Adam. This signals a fresh start for all humanity. A new world has dawned. Do you believe this? is the point.
But this raises the issue of the historical-critical approach to Scripture, a no-go zone for many confessional and conservative Christians. It is but one exegetical tool, but one often used to bludgeon rather than refine the Good News. Nevertheless, as Pope Benedict XVI opined when asked whether it was a “pseudo-science whose operative principle is not Christian,” he replied:
I wouldn’t subscribe to so harsh a judgment. The application of the historical method to the Bible as a historical text was a path that had to be taken. If we believe Christ is real history, and not myth, then the testimony concerning him has to be historically accessible as well. In this sense, the historical method has also given us many gifts.
But I digress. Murray’s heterogeneous take on the Bible does not mean he’s become the subject of a Maxine Nightingale song. “I am persuaded that the Gospels contain a great deal of material from eyewitnesses who were reporting real events, who might reasonably be expected to have repeated them accurately.”
So does that means he’s now … ? “The short answer is that taking religion seriously has done far more in retrospect than I realized while it was happening. I have periodically discovered that I was thinking differently about God and life than I had thought some years earlier.” He then delivers a roll call of the various subjects about which he has had a change of mind, including “an intentional universe,” the interconnectedness of things, the moral law (“Our impulses to ‘do the right thing’ are God’s way of revealing himself to us”), and the forgiveness of sins (“God’s grace has become real to me”).
Oh, and Jesus. “I lost the option of believing that claims of Jesus’s divine nature were a later invention of the church. I now accept that Jesus of Nazareth represented himself as having a unique relationship with God—and suspect that he had such a relationship in fact.”
And that’s it. He kinda sorta believes, but never identifies explicitly, at least in the pages of this book, as a Christian. “I have yet to experience the joys of faith.” But take heart: “I’m not done trying to join the party.”
Taking Religion Seriously, if nothing else, provides a neat catalog of the best apologetics works for anyone exploring the Christian faith today. And while not in the same rank as Mere Christianity, because starting from very different premises, it is nevertheless a fascinating look at one educated man’s pursuit of truth wherever it leads, or at least to the extent that it makes some kind of moral, intuitive, and scientifically respectable sense.
Murray’s at the door of the Great Cathedral, one could say, but has yet to step over the threshold to take his pew place before the altar. And that’s OK. After all, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Do we believe this?
