Yes! The three books form a trilogy. The Happiness Hypothesis presents and analyzes what I consider to be the 10 greatest psychological ideas of all time, which have been discovered by several of the world’s civilizations and are rooted in ancient wisdom. The Righteous Mind develops three of these ideas in detail—the divided self, the faults of others, and divinity with or without God—and uses them to explain why people are so easily divided by politics and religion, and so willing to believe terrible things about their fellow citizens. The Coddling of the American Mind analyzes what will happen if parents, teachers and universities continue to teach children to believe three great untruths, or terrible ideas: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.” “Always trust your feelings.” And, “Life is a battle between good people and evil people.” As my co-author, Greg Lukianoff, and I wrote in The Atlantic, “Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control.”

Discussions between people out in a void, just two people who differ, tend to go badly. Just look at the comments section below any YouTube video. It is far better to have an overarching moral canopy or element of shared identity, ideally a moral identity. Noting that “we are all Americans” or “we are all Christians” is a very good way to start any difficult discussion. And of course, few traditions have moral resources as rich as Christianity, even just the Sermon on the Mount, for preparing people’s minds and hearts for difficult discussions. I think religious congregations are the best places in America for hosting such discussions, and doing the work of reweaving our social and civic life. Jewish congregations are bitterly divided, particularly over Israel and foreign policy questions. I have spoken at my synagogue, Central Synagogue, on these matters. I have also done events with Tim Keller and with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and I recently gave a talk at Biola University [a conservative Christian university in Southern California]. I find that speaking about politics and polarization in a religious community is invariably uplifting. People seem truly interested in healing divisions, rather than in sharpening them or in showing off.

I was raised Jewish, had a bar mitzvah, and decided, about two years after that, that I was an atheist. In my 20s I was one of those hostile atheists. Had the “New Atheism” books come out then, I would have become a New Atheist. But as I studied morality and its origins and cultural evolution, my thinking changed. I came to believe that human beings evolved to be religious. There is, to paraphrase Pascal, a “God-shaped hole” in each human heart. If that’s true, then regardless of how it came about, it matters how that hole gets filled. If you fill it with a community that values service and decency and responsibility and caring for your family and caring for others, then things will go well for those people and for the community and for the country.