He elaborates:

The stuff of life -- the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships -- occurs within just four institutions: family, community, vocation and faith. Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. The European model doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

Murray's latest pronouncement is really just another Leo Straussian ivory-towered academic bemoaning "the end of history" in a supposed bland society where war, disease and poverty have been banished. In Murray's nightmare world we have all become atheistic socialists enshrouded in a stifling European safety-net.  

There you have it folks; progress as the agent of apostasy!

Two of Murray complaints particularly caught my attention:

Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. The nations of Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. They are countries where jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And with only a few exceptions, they are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

As well as:

For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: The 20th century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human life that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And 20th-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way adolescents react when they think they have discovered that Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date. It was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas was no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, then the Nicomachean Ethics had nothing to teach us.

If we look past Murray's obscurantisly entertaining academic summersaults -- his real goal is to attack universal health care and upward mobility based upon merit by equating them with the death of religion. (One might think he would be embarrassed to engage in argument by false equivalence, but then again, he is the author of The Bell Curve.)

If Murray were really in search of the roots of apostasy, he might want to look to religious hierarchies instead.

Perhaps Church attendance in Europe, especially in the Catholic populated countries has declined not because of universal health care, but more likely because of the Humanae Vitae -- Pope Paul VI's 1968 reaffirmation of the Church's prohibition of all forms of artificial contraception; and moves by the hierarchy away from the progressive spirit of Vatican II towards reactionary forms of orthodoxy.

"I stand in awe of Europe's past," Murray declares. "Which makes Europe's present all the more dispiriting." But the Eurpean past for which Murray pines was marked by high rates of illiteracy; and faith was not strengthened by reason, but viewed it as its sworn enemy. Between the lines of Murray's piece is a profound insult:  that the masses require ignorance to be faithful and that they should leave the details of belief to the elite!

It should be no surprise that Murray has such faith in powerful elites who also bemoan state-sponsored safety nets; they are his benefactors. As liberal writer Eric Altermann pointed out:

Back when Murray was still in Iowa, he became friends with a well-connected Reagan Administration official named Michael Horowitz. Horowitz secured an invitation for Murray to speak at a lunch sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, convincing William Hammett that he had discovered a star. Meanwhile, Murray sent a copy of an article he wrote for the Olin Foundation-funded neoconservative journal The Public Interest, co-founded and edited by Irving Kristol. Kristol called Michael Joyce, whom he had helped hire to run the Olin Foundation, and explained that Murray wanted to turn his article into a book but needed money to do so, as no commercial publisher would pay a living wage for a wonky right-wing study of welfare policy by a nobody from Iowa. A series of quick phone calls resulted in a $125,000 grant from three conservative foundations.

Alterman continued:

Fortunately for Murray, Michael Joyce, who had been so instrumental in supporting him at the Olin Foundation, had now taken over the Bradley Foundation. Murray's $100,000 grant was moved from the Manhattan Institute to the American Enterprise Institute, after a brief -- and failed -- attempt to place him in the more centrist and establishment-oriented, Brookings Institute. Murray was, once again, extremely fortunate in his choice of sponsors. By the time he completed his second book, he had received more than $750,000 since the Bradley foundation had begun its support, with more than $500,000 coming during the four years he worked on The Bell Curve.

The real problem, I submit, is that European Christianity - and to a lesser extent, its American cousin -- suffers from being seen by everyday folks as out-of-touch and accelerating its rush towards the most reactionary public spectacles it can manage: such as the Pope's recent outreach to Holocaust deniers and his absurd pronouncement to African Catholics that condom usage exacerbates the AIDs crisis on their continent.  Is it any wonder that so many people see the faith as out of touch with basic ethics and riddled with hypocrisy?

Murray's claims that the welfare state leads to atheism is simply old fashioned balderdash. It is suffering and oppression that causes apostasy. And apostasy is facilitated when religious leaders become overt agents of oppression rather than the firm advocates for ordinary people struggling to make ends meet.