Margins
Taking Religion Seriously
2025
First Published
4.47
Average Rating
152
Number of Pages

"Millions are like me when it comes to 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 toward the idea of God in general and Christianity specifically. He argues that religion is something that 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 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.”"

Avg Rating
4.47
Number of Ratings
298
5 STARS
60%
4 STARS
31%
3 STARS
7%
2 STARS
1%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Charles Murray
Charles Murray
Author · 15 books
Charles Alan Murray is an American libertarian conservative political scientist, author, and columnist. His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (1984), which discussed the American welfare system, was widely read and discussed, and influenced subsequent government policy. He became well-known for his controversial book The Bell Curve (1994), written with Richard Herrnstein, in which he argues that intelligence is a better predictor than parental socio-economic status or education level of many individual outcomes including income, job performance, pregnancy out of wedlock, and crime, and that social welfare programs and education efforts to improve social outcomes for the disadvantaged are largely wasted.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved