Religion can’t seem to stay put—it’s always coming or going. For my entire adult life, I’ve been reading that it’s either about to disappear or on the cusp of revival. For many, religion is always “coming back” in the form of megachurches or Islamist radicals or Gen-Z Catholics. For others, religion is “on its way out,” with the creeping rise of the religiously unaffiliated and the steady evacuation of religious norms from American culture.

These narratives are more interesting as political documents than as social-scientific ones. Beneath their filigree of data, they help to shape larger stories about what America is and where it’s headed. And right now, there is an emergent story that we might call “the enchantment of the conservative intelligentsia.” As with all such stories, the truth is hard to pin down. We might begin by asking whether there is really anything new about it. After all, there have always been conservative intellectuals who hewed to religion. To name just one famous example, William F. Buckley Jr., one of the founders of modern American conservatism, was a devout Catholic.

It’s hard to ignore, though, the sense that something new has been happening in the past few years, crowned perhaps by the rise of the ostentatiously Catholic J. D. Vance. Conservative intellectuals, in recent years, have written a number of briskly selling books about the importance and centrality of religion. We’ve had books along these lines in recent years from Ross Douthat, Sohrab Ahmari, Eric Metaxas, and more. It’s hard to think of progressive analogues for this trend, even though there’s no necessary connection between religious belief and conservative politics. Nonetheless, this turn toward the sacred is happening much more amongst the conservative intelligentsia than its counterpart. Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson don’t share much, but they do share this.

And now, to this murderer’s row, we can add Taking Religion Seriously by Charles Murray. The book is part social science, part theology, and part memoir. Essentially, it chronicles Murray’s journey from agnosticism to a form of hesitant Christian faith. The book is most interesting as a marker of the times. Murray, after all, is one of the most influential and representative conservative thinkers of the past half-century.

Murray is a few decades older than the intellectuals just mentioned and was formed in a different era. His religion book is interestingly different from theirs, and the difference deserves close attention. For one thing, it’s humbler and more tentative. This is no memoir of faith or conversion, but of a slight opening to the possibility that Christianity might be true. This is a useful enterprise, and there’s much to admire about the book. It does not, however, do what its title promises. This is a serious book about Charles Murray and is therefore a serious book about America. But it is not a serious book about religion.

Charles Murray, born in Iowa in 1943, is a political scientist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is best known as the coauthor—with Richard J. Herrnstein—of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), which argued that intelligence was, at least partially, an inheritable trait, and that different races had demonstrably different levels of intelligence. The Bell Curve launched endless debates that need not detain us here, but it’s worth pointing out the small role that religion played in the book. One of its main arguments was that cognitive differences were increasingly important because the new economy was so oriented around cognitive skills (hence the rise of a “cognitive elite”). “Religion” appeared in this book as one of the things that used to matter in America, but increasingly did not.

So, if religion is always either coming or going, The Bell Curve assumed it was going. This has been true of Murray’s other books, too. In 2003, he published a book titled Human Accomplishment, which argued that Christianity played a major role in the great efflorescence of “accomplishment” in Europe and North America. Here, too, Christianity was in retreat: Murray sadly lamented that it could no longer play this role for the increasingly secular elite, who struggle to achieve great things because they struggle to find meaning in their lives. In 2012, his influential book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 made a similar claim with respect to the masses, arguing that white America was coming apart as the “cognitive elite” moved to the coasts and intermarried, leaving everyone else behind in decaying working-class cultures. “Religiosity,” like “industriousness” and “honesty,” was lamentably declining in the heartland.

There was always a bit of cognitive dissonance here. Murray presented himself as a small-town Iowa boy who had been raised with traditional values. And yet he also presented himself as an agnostic. This, perhaps, accounts for the peculiar power that his books have had. Many Christian authors, of course, lamented the decline of faith, linking it as Murray did with a general decline in morality and neighborliness. Murray, though, did so with charts and graphs rather than with scriptural exhortations. Like a conservative Robert Putnam, he put his finger on something that felt true to many readers, providing a secular account of a story that was often presented theologically.

At the time, perhaps, this was a necessary thing to do. After all, the American right still had a flotilla of policy wonks, many of whom had nothing to do with religion. The American right, though, is changing, and the younger staffers, rising through the ranks, do not much resemble Murray. In November, Tucker Carlson’s controversial interview with Nick Fuentes was positively drenched in theology (and antisemitism). Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, ignited a civil war on the right—and in his own foundation—by defending the interview. Conservative critics of the anti-Israel views represented by Carlson and Fuentes do exist, of course, but they do not adopt the perspective of liberal antiracism. Dinesh D’Souza, one of the highest-profile critics of Carlson on the right, interprets Israel’s wars through the lens of biblical prophecy.

This is the new playing field, and it’s not one that makes much room for Murray’s style of reasoning. Whether intentionally or not, Taking Religion Seriously represents Murray’s intervention into this God-drenched moment.

There’s actually a lot to like about this book—certainly more than I expected. It is essentially an account of Murray’s years-long investigation into the problem of religion, and of Christianity in particular. This is a highly cerebral reflection: he doesn’t encounter Christ in the unhoused or in his heart, but in a pile of books. There’s nothing wrong with that: if Christianity is true, it will be just as present in books as anywhere else. Murray has read widely, and there’s something disarming about the frankness with which he approaches truly difficult questions. Does God exist? What are the arguments for and against? What does modern science actually have to say about this? If God doesn’t exist, is everything truly permitted? And what about Christianity—is there actually any evidence for it? What’s the state of the debate on this? Have the gospels actually been disproven, by historians or archaeologists? Or does there remain a glimmer of hope—or even more than a glimmer—that the stories might be true?

I used to think that, as I got older, I would be having those conversations all the time. What, after all, could be more important? Surely, as my peers and I shed the inhibitions of youth and confronted our mortality, these eternal questions would loom ever larger. Imagine my disappointment! But you probably don’t have to imagine—unless your social life is richer and more stimulating than mine. It’s refreshing, then, to read an account of a smart and articulate man who asked himself these questions and tried to work out the answers.

The book asks two basic questions, one in each section of the book. First: Is there a God? Murray determines, based on evidence from the natural sciences, that a divine presence is the most parsimonious explanation for natural phenomena. The Big Bang, he observes, looks an awful lot like the creation story in Genesis. He describes how perfectly calibrated the force of gravity must be to keep the universe from exploding or collapsing in on itself. He also displays a surprisingly keen interest in paranormal phenomena and near-death experiences, which he treats as scientific facts.

Murray is aware that he is out of his depth here. His only real point is that the God hypothesis is not transparently absurd and there are even some good reasons to believe it. His arguments are intriguing, but it seems doubtful that they would be convincing to the unconverted. The Big Bang, for instance, does not really look all that similar to the story of Genesis, which, to put it mildly, departs in many other ways from the scientific consensus.

The second half of the book asks about the truth of Christianity specifically. It begins by reprising Murray’s old argument that Christianity was responsible for a great deal of human “accomplishment.” This may be philosophically irrelevant, but Murray includes it because it was part of his own evolution toward religion. Human Accomplishment was published in 2003, and two years later, he had dinner with Pete Wehner, a Republican speechwriter and Evangelical Protestant. Wehner recommended that Murray read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and the effect of this book on Murray was, he reports, enormous.

He begins where Lewis did: with an account of the moral law. The argument is that human beings inherently have a conscience, or sense of right and wrong, and that evolutionary biology cannot account for this. We are much more altruistic than evolutionary logic would require. And if this sense of right and wrong is not an evolutionary inheritance, it must have come from somewhere else. The name we have for that “somewhere else” is God.

This sort of thought experiment stops well short of Christianity. The kind of God who grounds our moral sense could take any form, really, and the intensely personal and concrete God that Christianity proposes does not seem like a particularly obvious candidate. Nonetheless, Murray believes that once he accepted a belief in some kind of deity, it led “inexorably to my next task: to decide what I make of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Murray doesn’t try to prove that Christ was the son of God, exactly. He’s more concerned to prove that he might be, and that the idea is not prima facie impossible. He does this in two ways. First, he endeavors to show that the gospels were written a few decades earlier than most scholars assume. This chapter admirably summarizes the long debate about the dating of the texts, with Murray siding with the minority of scholars who think that they were written just a few years after the death of Christ. This, it should be said, is a curious way to prove the truth of Christianity. As Murray concedes, the texts aren’t obviously more reliable if written earlier. The Quran would probably pass this test more readily than the gospels.

In any case, he moves on to a second and more important analysis of the “historicity” of the gospels: Did these things actually happen? Murray argues that it’s possible they might have. For one thing, the gospels are full of all kinds of accurate details about life in Palestine in Jesus’ era. The setting is accurate, and it feels implausible that the authors would inject elements of pure fantasy into otherwise realistic accounts. And it seems clear that a group of people were truly convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead and were convinced of it not long after it supposedly happened. The Occam’s-razor conclusion, therefore, is that it did happen.

There is not an iota of “faith” in this book, and Murray doggedly compiles evidence in support of his thesis. The deepest rabbit hole in this book concerns the Shroud of Turin. Eight of this book’s 150 pages are devoted to it. While the scientific consensus is that the shroud dates from about 1100, Murray sides with the more fringe theories that declare it an indubitably ancient relic that once wrapped a corpse that did not decompose.

And here the book ends. Not with a conversion, but with, in Murray’s word, a reassessment. “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.” Beyond that, Murray is unprepared to go. “I may not have the gift of faith,” he sadly concludes. I found this humble ending refreshing in its way. It would have been easy enough—and would have earned many plaudits on the lecture circuit—for Murray to conclude with a description of his conversion. He does not. Instead, he ends with a moving reflection on the simple faith of his childhood, and with the regret that this faith still feels so distant from the octogenarian author.

There is a lot to quibble with in Taking Religion Seriously—how could there not be in a book by a nonexpert that purports to answer the great question of the universe in 150 generously spaced pages? But I’d prefer to focus on one particular question: In what way is this book of sweet reason a recognizable product of Charles Murray, the conservative intellectual? And if the two are connected, what does that mean about the apparent resurgence of religion among the conservative intelligentsia?

The book is not ostentatiously conservative or political at all. It was published, though, by the conservative press Encounter Books, which also publishes books like The New Face of Woke Education and When Harry Became Sally. This suggests that there is something else going on besides the desire to defend religion (there exist, after all, plenty of Christian presses). Scratch the surface, and the book is recognizably a Charles Murray production, with many of the same concerns and anxieties as his previous books. The intellectual style is certainly similar. As in his earlier books, he has an affection for revisionist or discredited theories: the frisson of the forbidden truth. Hence the long digressions on the paranormal experiences, the Shroud of Turin, and fringe scholarship on the gospels—hardly the most obvious starting places if one is trying to convince educated agnostics to take religion seriously.

The book can also be read as an extended riff on the ideas of religion Murray discussed more briefly in his previous books. Taking Religion Seriously rehearses some ideas about genetics and inheritance from The Bell Curve—and in fact, on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast, Murray mused about the existence of a “bell curve of spiritual-perceptual abilities.” In a bizarre passage, he suggests that the apostles repeated implausible stories about Jesus’ miracles because Jesus was “an exceptional human being who exercised human qualities at an extremely high level.” Jesus, perhaps, was like a 6’9” man: “Extremely tall but fairly unique.” Imagine that Jesus was “the equivalent of 6’9” in wisdom, fortitude, empathy, sympathy, and charisma.” This high-IQ Jesus could “easily be mistaken for the Son of God.”

This book also repeats the idea, discussed in both Coming Apart and Human Achievement, that religion has a great deal of social utility. Murray spends a full chapter rehearsing the argument that, for centuries, Christianity gave Western elites a moral code that translated into great scientific and cultural achievements. At the end of the book, he describes the beneficial impacts on his own life from his newfound respect for religion. “Doesn’t the evanescence of moral principles in the present age,” he asks, “suggest a special need to seek moral bedrock?”

Much more than Murray lets on, then, the book is continuous with his past work. The journey it traverses is not really a journey at all. Murray ends up almost exactly where he started and his life does not change in any external way. He was attending meetings of the Religious Society of Friends before the journey began, and that is where he ends. He announces that he doesn’t have faith. He even lists a feeling of “interconnectedness” as one of the great virtues of religion, before admitting that his study of religion has not given him, personally, that feeling.

If all of this is true, in what sense is Murray, as his title promises, taking religion seriously? We’re often enjoined to do that, by secular and religious people alike, but it’s seldom clear what it means. Murray doesn’t define it explicitly, but two things at least are clear. First, by “religion,” Murray means “Christianity”: there is no real consideration of other religious traditions. And secondly, to take Christianity seriously is to recognize that many of the claims of religion are not transparently false, and some of them at least seem to be true, according to social and natural scientific methods.

I would like to propose that this is not taking Christianity seriously at all—that a definition like this is inappropriate to understanding Christianity, past and present. The Christian command is not to rationally accept some of its truth claims, but to follow Jesus. This is presented, by Christ himself and by the tradition, as a serious challenge. Jesus asks a great deal of us, both in creedal beliefs and personal transformation. He asks for everything. To take Christianity seriously would be to recognize this challenge: to recognize that, for the Christian, God came to earth, underwent torment and crucifixion out of a deep and unfathomable love for his fallen children, and asked us to drop everything and follow him.

This would not necessarily mean accepting the challenge, of course. My point is that, from a purely dispassionate perspective, that’s what the tradition demands, and it is what many religious believers understand their faith to demand (though none of course can fully answer the call). C. S. Lewis, so admired by Murray, understood this very well. Plenty of nonbelieving philosophers and scholars and novelists have understood it, too. Friedrich Nietzsche, to take one example, took religion extraordinarily seriously. He understood the challenge offered by Christianity, and rejected it.

The problem isn’t that Murray’s book is conservative. If Christianity is true, it is true for conservatives and progressives alike, and my own experience attests that many conservative Christians do take Christianity seriously, in the deepest sense. The problem is that Murray has not allowed himself to be challenged by the faith, much less changed by it. From inside the tradition, Christianity means measuring ourselves next to Christ, and finding ourselves wanting. This is not what Murray does: he takes his preferred beliefs and methods, and then he asks if God is compatible with them.

And this is where I think Murray’s book, for all its merits, is pernicious, and where it is representative of much recent writing on the faith. What Murray does, in this book, is show how one can take one’s preexisting beliefs, and one’s preexisting life, and baptize them. At the end of Murray’s journey, he finds only himself. I don’t mean to discount the authenticity of Murray’s journey or his reflections. The problem is that he presents these as a model for others, and moreover as a model for what a mature and reasonable grappling with the faith might look like.

To return to where we started: Taking Religion Seriously is most interesting, whether Murray intended it or not, as a political intervention. It can be read as a sort of olive branch from the old guard of conservatism to the ascendant one. Murray seems to be saying to his fire-breathing and podcasting successors that he, too, understands the appeal and power of religion, and that his old-fashioned libertarian brand of conservatism is not incompatible with it. What’s striking, then, is just how tentative his embrace of religion actually is. In any case, his olive branch is not likely to be accepted. For good or for ill, this book does not speak the language of serious Christians.