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If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be–what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into–you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now.

—Barack Obama, 2016 graduation speech at Howard University

Christianity is based on a narrative of decline that goes something like this: The world began as a perfect place where people walked and talked with God and lived in harmony with the natural world. But human beings sinned and were cast of paradise, where they became wickeder and wickeder until God had to destroy all but eight of them. Those eight started a new society that also became wicked, and God had to periodically destroy cities and send Assyrians and Babylonians to punish His chosen people. Then he sent his only son into the world, and we killed him. Since then, we have been getting wickeder and wickeder and, sometime in the near future, everything will be destroyed again and Jesus will come back and be king.

This narrative has been so baked into the Christian world view that we hardly even notice it anymore. But it conditions the way we think about almost everything. It makes us see human desires as fundamentally evil, natural disasters as divine punishments, and “the world” as a collection of people who have been inspired by Satan to tempt us away from God’s path. To resist the world, we have to (among other things) develop a relationship with God, obey lots of stuff, and stop being gay.

The narrative of decline—which many contemporary Latter-day Saints have adopted enthusiastically—works against what some people call the “Enlightenment narrative,” which arose in the 18th century to tell a different story. According to the Enlightenment narrative (or so people say), human beings are capable of reason but not particularly good at it, and we have the capacity to use applied reason and science to solve our many problems. We can improve health, government, social institutions, and human flourishing—if we set our minds to it. But we have to do it ourselves; it is not God’s job.

In his newest book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker is here to tell you that the Enlightenment worked. It didn’t work perfectly, and we have not created Eden. But it has worked pretty well. The world has gotten a lot better. The political and economic ideas that came out of the Enlightenment—including liberal democracy and regulated free markets—have swept across the world and made people wealthier and more free. And Enlightenment scientific principles have wiped out diseases like smallpox and polio that used to kill or disable millions of people every year.

As one who, like Pinker, is a liberal but not a leftist, I find myself agreeing with almost everything in this over-arching argument. Sure I have specific quibbles with all kinds of stuff. Pinker is not content to show that most things are a little bit better. He wants to be more comprehensive than that and show that everything is a lot better. And in the process, he often stretches his argument beyond what can be reasonably proved.

But even adjusting for some hyperbole, the data he presents is overwhelmingly persuasive—not just that life has gotten better in the world since the 18th century, but that it has improved dramatically in just the last 30 years. During this time, extreme poverty has fallen from 50% of the world to 10%, the number of people killed in wars has fallen by 200%, criminal violence has decreased dramatically, cars are safer, more countries are democratic, and income inequality has decreased in all but the most developed nations. It seems to me that there is no reasonable way to refute the proposition that the world today is more amenable to human flourishing than it has ever been.

It is as a religious believer that I find Pinker’s arguments uncomfortable. To be clear: Pinker is an atheist (though not a “new atheist” like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris). He sees the Enlightenment as an inherently secular movement, and he sees counter-Enlightenment religious narratives as a dangerous rejection of the principles upon which most of the world’s progress is based.

And I agree, sort of. But not entirely. I have never bought in to the standard narrative of decline. But I have also known many, many religious people who have spent their lives addressing problems like poverty, injustice, and environmental degradation. And they have done so largely by using the tools of the Enlightenment: they have set up schools in poor countries and impoverished areas of our own country. They have worked hard to bring vaccinations and modern medicine to people who could not otherwise afford it. And they have convinced many people to do the same. There are some religious narratives that are fully compatible with Enlightenment values.

If Enlightenment Now has anything to say to religious believers it is that our narratives matter—and that there are real ethical problems with narratives that see history as an inherent decline and “the world” as the opposite of God. When we adopt these narratives, we tend to do the wrong things and call it being moral. We try to solve things that aren’t really problems, and we try to solve real problems by obeying authority instead of examining facts. Or we give up solving problems altogether because we think that the world is supposed to get worse.

And it seems to me that religious believers and Enlightenment humanists can find enough common ground to fill many lifetimes by starting with the assumption that we all have the ability, and the responsibility, to do everything we can to make the world better.