This week I’m revisiting Steven Pinker’s 2011 book THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURES, in part to catch up posting here notes on substantial books I’ve but not yet posted about, and in part to revisit one of the central books that has formed my worldview. I go on and on about the spectrum of human nature and the endpoints of conservativism and progressivism. At the extremes, cave-man tribalism, vs. a sort of science-fictional utopianism. The history of the human race has been a struggle to break away from the mentality of ancient humanity and find better goals and meanings for life than stultifying tradition and inter-tribal animus.
This struggle is progressing. For every giant step backwards of an administration like Trump’s, a century from now we’ll be five steps forward. (Or extinct, perhaps. I don’t rule that out, I’m just extrapolating from the past.)
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So. On the one hand…
OnlySky, Adam Lee, 1 Dec 2025: American religion continues its long fadeout, subtitled “Another milestone in the secularization of humanity.”
Religion is in decline all around the world. The empirical evidence proves this to be true. Even if preachers and proselytizers are loud and inescapable, even if they wield a disproportionate share of political influence, their numbers continue to shrink.
The numbers of atheists, agnostics and generally nonreligious people have been growing for years. As a share of the U.S. population, they now outnumber every single religious denomination. As of 2021, for the first time ever, less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, mosque or other organized house of worship.
Even among those who still identify as religious, the intensity of their belief is declining. Increasingly fewer people say that religion is an important part of their lives.
There’s a new poll on this topic, and it comes with a whopper of a title: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World.
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As Gallup notes, poorer countries tend to score higher on religiosity, whereas nearly all countries grow less religious as they become wealthier, more democratic, and more stable.
This line of evidence supports what we might call the “opiate of the masses” theory: the purpose of religion is to be a psychological bulwark in a chaotic world. It’s a way for people to cope with dangers that are out of their control. By teaching—in spite of all available evidence—that the universe is ruled by a just and benevolent power, and promising the faithful a blissful afterlife where they’ll be recompensed for every pain and injustice they suffer now, it offers a source of hope when hope is hard to find elsewhere.
However, the more people work together to make this world a better place, the more religion starts to seem unnecessary. When war, disease and hunger recede as everyday threats; when liberal democracy gives people a greater sense of control over their own destinies, rather than people feeling like they’re helpless before the whims of fate; when people become more educated, more prosperous, and more able to look towards the future with optimism—then they have less need of the mental and emotional crutches of belief.
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And on the other hand…
As Pinker and others note repeatedly, part of the way the world becomes more prosperous and peaceful is that interconnectedness leads to empathy, to understand that other people around the world are, to a large degree, just like you. So naturally Christians, who claim the values of Jesus but who act more like tribalists who demonize the ‘other’ — as Trump seems to do every day — are skeptical about empathy.
Axios, Russell Contreras, 30 Nov 2025: Empathy is the new Christian battleground
I don’t subscribe to this site so I can only quote the first couple lines:
As the U.S. grows more diverse, a quiet civil war is unfolding within American Christianity over who deserves empathy.
Why it matters: Conservatives ranging from evangelical pastors to Elon Musk have started framing empathy not as a virtue but as a vulnerability on immigration, racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights.
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And then there’s Elon Musk, some months ago, as in this article: The Guardian, 8 Apr 2025: Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy, subtitled “Trump’s actions are irreconcilable with Christian compassion. But an unholy alliance seeks to cast empathy as a parasitic plague”
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This is where Trump and MAGA are now.
LA Times, Gustavo Arellano, 2 Dec 2025: Trump’s message to ‘nice’ Americans: You’re all illegal now
On Thanksgiving evening, as Americans offered grace for their blessings and feasted with loved ones, President Trump’s contribution to the country’s dinner table was the digital equivalent of a flaming turd pie.
On social media, he published a screed that drew from his tried-and-true playbook — personal insults against political enemies, slanders against immigrants, oscillating between calling his opponents “nice” and “STUPID.”
This time, though, Trump went lower and nastier than he has ever gone before — no, really.
Freely switching between “refugee,” “foreign national,” “migrant” and “illegal,” he declared immigration “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America” and insisted that “only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.”
That’s an idea the farthest fringes of the American right have preached going back to the days of slavery, when some wanted freed Black people sent back to Africa, lest they poison democracy. In recent years, it’s been proposed by so-called Heritage Americans who insist the United States rightfully — and only — belongs to folks whose ancestors were roughing it on the frontier back in the days when passenger pigeons blotted out the sun.
But don’t sit too comfy if you can trace your family back to William Bradford. Trump also wrote that he wants a “major reduction” in “disruptive populations” — “anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country … or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
He seems to be equated Western Civilization with American white supremacy.
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And finally, keying off recent news, there is tribal loyalty so strong it stands in defiance of law, expertise, and competence.
- The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 1 Dec 2025: Pete Hegseth Needs to Go—Now, subtitled “A man with such contempt for the military should not run the Pentagon.”
- Slate, Fred Kaplan, 2 Dec 2025: If Trump Doesn’t Fire Pete Hegseth Now, It’s Going to Send a Message Heard Round the World
- The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, 1 Dec 2025: Pete Hegseth, Moral Failure, and the Erosion of Military Legitimacy, subtitled “Congress needs to find out if any laws were broken and who is responsible.”
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On the one hand, in a truly educated population, religious belief might eventually become as embarrassing as adults admitting they still believe in Santa Claus. On the other hand, education is a constant, Sisyphean task, without which it’s easy for a new generation to grow up uneducated, especially if confined to a religious bubble, and subject to all the biases and illusions of human nature that give rise to religious belief in the first place.
