Keen On

Bell Curve author joins the intellectual mob (Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, Ross Douthat et al) and finds GodCharles Murray, the infamous co-author of the Bell Curve, has joined the crowd and is Taking Religion Seriously. But what if God doesn’t take him seriously—or worse, finds his work on cognitive elites sufficiently annoying to sentence him to give powerpoint presentations on IQ for eternity? Murray doesn’t seem too stressed by these Dantesque scenarios. Instead, he’s eager to keep up with his Quaker wife, Catherine Bly Cox, who has taken religion far more seriously than Murray himself. Even Murray’s discovery of God feels slightly detached and skeptical—as if the social scientist is laughing at himself for doing such an unverifiable and perhaps even low IQ thing. So if Murray can’t take his own faith seriously, why should God—or fellow skeptics of today’s mob fashion for religion—take him any more seriously? 1. The Intellectual Zeitgeist Has Shifted on Religion Twenty years ago, the New Atheists (Dawkin