Why the return to religion matters

Murray’s breakthrough came when he realized that belief in God need not depend on simplistic anthropomorphic imagery. He began to “de-anthropomorphize” God, as he puts it, discarding the childish picture of a bearded man in the sky and replacing it with a vision closer to classical theism—a being beyond being, the ground of all that exists. Thinkers from Aquinas to Spinoza had entertained versions of this idea, but for Murray, it was not an academic exercise; it was a way to make intellectual peace with mystery. He writes that our difficulty in conceiving of God mirrors a dog’s inability to grasp its owner’s mind: there is a qualitative, not just quantitative, gap. For him, this insight reframed faith as the recognition of limits—not a renunciation of reason but its completion. This shift, however, was not purely abstract. As with many who find faith later in life, Murray’s reflections were influenced by age, mortality, and loss. In the face of death, even the most rigorous rationalist confronts the insufficiency of material explanations. In that sense, his book is both public argument and private meditation, written for those who share his suspicion that the secular story no longer satisfies the hunger for meaning. The timing of Murray’s conversion is not incidental. Across the Western world, a quiet religious reawakening is taking place—not necessarily a return to organized religion, but to a sense that the purely secular world is inadequate. After decades of assuming that science and technology could answer all questions, many have come to suspect that the biggest questions are not empirical at all: What is good? What is beautiful? Why should we care for the vulnerable? Such questions resist quantification. They depend on the conviction that human life has inherent dignity—a belief that rests, however unspoken, on a metaphysical foundation. Even atheists often live by borrowed light, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has put it, drawing moral warmth from a divine fire they no longer claim to believe in. Murray’s book thus becomes more than an autobiography; it is part of a larger conversation about the role of religion in sustaining civilization. He does not preach or claim certainty. Instead, he writes as a man persuaded that the modern world has overestimated reason’s powers. Secular humanism, for all its virtues, cannot explain why anything—truth, beauty, or goodness—should matter in a universe of blind forces. The search for transcendence, Murray insists, is not escapism but realism. He calls his new conviction “a hypothesis worth living as if it were true.” Faith, in other words, becomes not dogma but orientation: a way of seeing the world as a gift rather than an accident. What makes Murray’s turn compelling is its intellectual candour. There is no evangelism in his tone, no easy romanticism. He concedes that belief does not settle every question, nor does it erase doubt. But he also suggests that doubt itself can be a form of reverence. In the end, he arrives not at theological certainty but at a posture of openness—a recognition that reason and faith are not adversaries but companions, each incomplete without the other. If Murray’s earlier work traced the unravelling of the American community, Taking Religion Seriously may be read as his answer to that unravelling. A society without a shared sense of transcendence, he argues, inevitably dissolves into individualism and relativism. Religion, imperfect as it is, is less about saving souls than saving culture itself. In that sense, his late-life conversion carries both civic and personal significance. Just as earlier generations once rediscovered the classical virtues during times of crisis, Murray’s turn to religion reflects a wider yearning for order amidst fragmentation. We live, he suggests, in a moral and metaphysical vacuum—one that cannot be filled by economics, politics, or technology alone. Taking Religion Seriously is not just a private act of belief, but a public act of restoration: an attempt to recover a language of meaning that modernity has forgotten how to speak.