“A generation ago, the New Atheists were all the rage. Sam Harris in "The End of Faith" (2004) and Christopher Hitchens in various essays drew a direct link between religious belief and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Richard Dawkins's international bestseller "The God Delusion" (2006) baldly asserted that religion was responsible for most if not all of the world's man-made evil. (The book was based on his documentary of the same year, "The Root of All Evil?") Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell" (2006) purported to explain religion in terms of evolutionary biology. Hitchens's "God Is Not Great" (2007) made the same claim, its unsubtle subtitle, "How Religion Poisons Everything."
The New Atheists have since all but disappeared. Hitchens died of esophageal cancer in 2011. The other disbelieving intellectuals continued to write and publish but seemed to make less news by their pronouncements.
I put the turning point in the spring of 2009, when A.N. Wilson said he'd returned to Christianity. The British journalist and biographer had by this time been a thorn in the side of Anglophone Christianity for two decades. In 1990 he'd published a biography of C.S. Lewis that all but laughed at Lewis's faith. "Against Religion" appeared the following year. Subsequent books included "Jesus: A Life" (1992) and "Paul: The Mind of the Apostle" (1997). So imperious was Mr. Wilson's tone and so arrogant was his attitude toward Christianity, the joke circulated that his next book would be titled "God: An Autobiography." Yet here he was, writing in the left-wing magazine New Statesman, declaring himself a reconverted Christian.
Atheism's fall from that momentary spike in popularity was in some sense inexorable: After the news that there is no God, no afterlife and no authority beyond the here and now, what else is there to say?
Meanwhile, a succession of well-known authors and intellectuals, formerly cold to religion, have either returned to Christianity, as Wilson did, or embraced it anew. In 2016 the British classicist and historian Tom Holland, then writing a book about how the West became irrevocably Christian in its habits and outlook -- the book, published in 2019, would be titled "Dominion" -- announced he'd been wrong about Christianity.
That religion, he said, is the reason "most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value."
Mr. Holland has since said he attends Christian worship.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, having rejected the Islam of her youth and proclaimed her disbelief in God -- she published "Infidel" in 2006 -- was for a time thought to be the next New Atheist. She announced her conversion to Christianity in 2023. Soon after, her husband, the British historian Niall Ferguson, said he'd done the same.
Kindred cultural phenomena have continued apace. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and intellectual, speaks as if he is on the verge of Christian belief; confer his latest book, "We Who Wrestle With God." In 2024 Mr. Dawkins himself, while in no way confessing religious belief, deplored the increasing influence of Islam in British life and said he counted himself a "cultural Christian." Paul Kingsnorth, the British journalist, novelist and sometime radical environmentalist, has recently converted to Orthodox Christianity.
It's hard to know what any of this signifies, other than that atheism is too boring to hold the attention of literate people for more than a few years at a time. I am reinforced in this view by the publication of Charles Murray's "Taking Religion Seriously." With this short book Mr. Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, joins the roster of formerly agnostic or atheistic intellectuals.
He is the author of two of the most prescient books on American politics and society published in the past half-century, "Losing Ground" (1984) and "Coming Apart" (2012). The first showed that America's welfare state did little to alleviate poverty and much to perpetuate it.
The second documented the paradoxical state of affairs in which America's poor live by the countercultural values taught to them by elites, while elites abide by traditional conceptions of work and marriage.
Mr. Murray, 82, is also the author of "The Bell Curve" (1994), co-authored with Richard Herrnstein, and of "Human Accomplishment" (2003). The first of these, which described and lamented the rise of a "cognitive elite" in American life, provoked a massive and largely misinformed controversy owing to one chapter on race and IQ (written by Herrnstein, who died before publication). Both books are impressive works of scholarship that combine cold analytic reasoning with an ardent concern for human flourishing.
But neither, it's fair to say, would lead anybody to mistake Mr. Murray for a religious believer. He has tended to accept the premises of evolutionary psychology in ways that religious people typically do not. His book "Human Diversity" (2020), though rightly criticizing the liberal habit of blaming racism and sexism for every form of inequality, assigns greater importance to genetic traits than a devoutly religious person normally would.
His latest book's rather desiccated title led me to believe it would mount some dry defense of religion in general. I was wrong. The book is a highly personal and readable account of a profound change in the author's outlook: one that grew gradually over the course of decades but has lately blossomed into a kind of faltering, guileless Christian belief.
Whatever else may be said about Mr. Murray, he can't be accused of dishonesty or cowardice. He has a penchant for saying what many other writers and scholars know but either can't say or can't say clearly and without a thousand qualifications. He has often been typecast in liberal organs as an ideologue, but that is exactly wrong: Reading Mr. Murray's work -- this is most plainly true in "Losing Ground" and "Coming Apart" -- you often sense that the writer would rather draw different conclusions but, in view of the evidence, can't.
"Taking Religion Seriously" is, in that sense, typical of its author. Mr. Murray wasn't searching for religious belief. His wife, whom Mr. Murray plainly reveres, is a Quaker who doesn't care all that much about the factual questions that bother him in this book. Chief among them: Did Jesus of Nazareth conquer death, or didn't he?
Mr. Murray's conversion, if that's what it is, began in the early 2000s, when he read a few theoretical accounts of the universe's origins, among them Martin Rees's "Just Six Numbers" (1999). So wildly improbable were the conditions necessary for the so-called big bang, it seems to Mr. Murray, that the whole business, whenever it happened, sounded very much like what Christians call creation. "I can't believe I'm thinking this," he recalls reflecting, "but it's the only plausible explanation" -- "it" meaning the divine origin of everything.
Other books troubled his conscience. A Christian friend, asked by Mr. Murray how he had come to faith, named C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity" (1952). Lewis's argument that Jesus couldn't have been a "great moral teacher" if he wasn't the Son of God, as he claimed to be, grabbed Mr. Murray's attention. The usual response -- that the Gospels don't record what Jesus said and did, and that belief in his divinity was a much later invention -- led Mr. Murray to read an array of books on the four Gospels' origins. (In a series of vignettes, "Taking Religion Seriously" lists all the books the author read in his journey from agnosticism to belief.)
One of those books on the Gospels' formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham's "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus' life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels -- books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims -- and wasn't so impressed.
These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus' divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple's actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?
And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? "If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist," Mr. Murray wonders, "why wouldn't someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?" The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke's account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus' disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened?
Reading Charles Murray on the historicity of the Gospels was not, suffice to say, high on my list of expectations for 2025. Yet it is so.
In the end, Mr. Murray approaches the whole question less as a person of faith than as a social scientist, weighing likelihoods and limiting his conclusions. On the matter of the apostles' strange certainty that Jesus had been raised, Mr. Murray is only sure, he writes, that "something transformative happened to the apostles and Jesus' other followers soon after the crucifixion and that something enabled the apostles to convince many people quite quickly" (his emphasis). He writes of his "newfound belief that an afterlife is a realistic possibility" -- not phrasing an ordinary believer would use -- and observes that "I may not have the gift of faith."
Maybe not, but it's pretty clear something happened to him.
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Mr. Swaim writes the "Unruly Republic" column for the Journal.” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: Faith Makes a Comeback. Swaim, Barton. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Oct 2025: C7.
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