Part of Charles Murray’s journey to Taking Religion Seriously came through writing Human Accomplishment:
Any book that attempts to explain the explosion of innovation, wealth, and creative artistry in Europe from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries must reckon with the role played by the Christian faith. He argued in the book that such creativity flows most freely when “the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that individuals can act efficaciously to fulfill that purpose.”
Christianity provided this sense of purpose for Europe, and its decline had noticeable effects as well. Murray notes that as the Christian faith faded as a motivator of elite action, technical achievement may have continued, but true art did not. Art that attempts to represent transcendent truth, access the beauty of reality, or point to goodness was elevating. Murray thinks that the replacement of this older ideal of art with one that casts artists as visionaries or rebels has led to art’s degradation as “artists tend to make their work about their personal preferences, and those preferences tend to be banal, or wrongheaded, or both.” He offers this as another clue: anyone who agrees with him that art is not what it once was might consider the connection between art and faith. But at the very least, he suggests that it is interesting that the loss of transcendent purpose in human life is reflected in numerous dark ways in art.
Yet, Murray is keenly aware of how astonishing the leap from any of his clues to considering Christian teachings must seem, and he dedicates considerable attention to explaining this. His own engagement with these questions began after reading C.S. Lewis and considering the apologist’s presentation of natural law alongside Murray’s own deep involvement with evolutionary psychology.
Fully convinced that evolutionary psychology offers “one of social science’s most important tools for understanding human behavior,” Murray nonetheless observed a problem: Even if evolved norms can explain the universality of certain moral rules, what do we make of the instances when our natural instincts conflict with what we know to be right? While psychology can at least model an answer (at least when family or friends are involved), Murray argues that the field seems to have little explanation for “agape: unconditional love, focused on giving rather than receiving, not based on merit or acquaintance with the recipient.” Given the extraordinary focus Christianity places on this sacrificial sense of love, Murray believed he had to decide, finally, what he made of the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
By Christian, the author means Roman Catholic.
It is interesting that at the height of the Roman Empire a significant number of gentiles attended Jewish synagogues. They did this for the moral guidance provided by Judaism. The pagan religions provided no moral guidance. Philosophy did, but its audience was limited to a few members of the Ruling Class, but not enough to matter.
As Christianity dies out, we are stranded in a neopagan world without meaning, or morality, or mercy.