This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mower, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

Charles Murray is a man of ideas, and those ideas are sometimes controversial. He is the W.H. Brady

scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a graduate of Harvard University with a

PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a widely quoted

author whose latest book is coming apart, The State of White America 1960 through

2010. Charles Murray, welcome to thinking in public.

Thanks very much.

I'm pleased to be talking with you.

I have been following many of the concerns of your book for a long time, and your book in one sense

does not come along making arguments that have ever been made before,

but you are certainly making them on a scale and with a pointed attention to statistical research that I don't believe has ever existed before, but your book also

tells a narrative.

And I just like for you to encapsulate that narrative.

Just summarize the story you tell us in coming apart.

The thesis is very simple. It says that there has

been a divergence in American classes that is different and kind from anything we've

ever had before. I mean we've always had people who were rich

people and poor people. We've always had people who lived in somewhat different

parts of town and the rest of it but but what's happened in the last 50 years is that what But what I call the new lower class has ceased to participate in America's civic culture and it's a large group of people.

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