Charles Murray: I Thought Religion Was Irrelevant to Me. I Was Wrong.

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This is the 30 minute TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Charles Murray. The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on October 25, 2025.

🔴 Watch the extended version of this episode: https://ept.ms/4o7SH8c

Political scientist Charles Murray has written many well-known books over the course of his lifetime.

Many of his works—including “Losing Ground,” “The Bell Curve,” and “Coming Apart”—have deeply influenced the intellectual discourse and zeitgeist of our times and provoked heated debate about the roots of major social problems in America.

His latest book covers a topic that he has never covered deeply before: religion.

Murray writes in the foreword of his book “Taking Religion Seriously,” “Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant. We grew up in secular households or drifted away from the faiths in which we were raised and never looked back. For them, I think I have a story worth telling.”

In our conversation, he recounts how he slowly came to question his assumption that there was nothing in religion for him.

He began to grapple with questions such as: How did life come to be? Why is there something rather than nothing? What happens to purely secular societies? What happens to art that no longer acknowledges beauty, truth, and the good?

He said: “I finished the book by comparing myself to a kid whose nose is pressed against the glass watching a party that’s going on inside that he can’t join. I have had the good fortune to meet a number of people who have had a very full, rich spiritual experience. ... I look at the kind of people they are, and I say to myself: I want more of that.”

CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:00 Charles Murray’s Background and Introduction to the Topic
0:01:24 Questioning Secularism and Religion’s Irrelevance Among Intellectuals
0:04:00 Personal Journey: Murray’s Family and Spiritual Perception
0:07:30 Philosophical Questions and the Anthropic Principle
0:09:34 Secularism’s Impact on Society and Cultural Shifts
0:13:32 The Value of Religion and Personal Approaches to Faith
0:16:15 Rethinking Materialism: Consciousness and Near-Death Experiences
0:19:41 Shifting Relationship Between Science and Religion