The History of Migration With Interbreeding: The Evolutionary Strategy That Made Us Human

I have argued for an "open borders" policy that would respect the natural human propensities to migration and interbreeding as shaped by the evolutionary history that has made us human.  In support of that argument, I now offer a brief genetic and cultural history of migration as a "melting pot of ideas, technology, and DNA" (Garcia-Bertrand and Herrera, 2018, p. 113; Goldin, 2024; Reich, 2018).

330,000-50,000 years ago.  Our earliest human ancestors emerged for the first time in Africa.  The oldest fossils with features shared with anatomically modern humans have been found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, dating to around 330,000-300,000 years ago.  Since other hominid fossils are scattered across most of Africa except for the Sahara Desert region, that suggests that the first human beings migrated long distances within Africa as they adapted to diverse ecological and climatic conditions.  As I have indicated previously, there is also evidence for extensive long-distance trade in Africa as early as 300,000 years ago.  So human evolution in Africa was shaped by both migration and trade.

Many Biblical believers--Jews, Christians, and Muslims--doubt this Darwinian account of the evolutionary origin of human beings because they believe it contradicts the Biblical teaching that God created Adam and Eve as the first human beings.  But the theistic evolutionists argue that there is no contradiction if one sees that God could have employed the natural evolutionary process to carry out His plan for the creation of human beings.

After all, even Darwin himself recognized that the religious appeal to God as the uncaused cause of nature cannot be refuted by reason.  All natural explanations of the world--including Darwinian science--must assume that ultimately the order of nature is the unexplained ground of all explanation. But there is no way by rational proof to deny the possibility that nature itself is the contingent product of nature's God.  Darwin recognized this in adopting the principle of dual causality, which originated in medieval Islamic and Christian theology.  He spoke of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which left open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.  Darwin thus allowed for theistic evolution, which has been adopted by a long line of Christian thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Alvin Plantinga. 

After the Genesis Flood, Noah and his family were the only human survivors left to populate the Earth.  Noah had three sons--Shem, Ham, and Japheth--"and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth" (Genesis 9:19).  The Bible then gives an elaborate genealogical history of how the nations arose from the migration of the descendants of Noah's sons over the earth.  For two thousand years, Christian writers have tried to trace the origins of all nations back to Noah's sons.  The dominant tendency was to attribute the paternity of Europeans to the children of Japheth, that of Asians to Shem, and that of the Africans to Ham.  Since the descendants of Ham were mysteriously cursed to serve their cousins as slaves (Genesis 9:27), this was interpreted as God's justifying the enslavement of Africans and condemning interracial marriage (Goldenberg, 2003).  Thus, this divinely ordained story of origins explained both the genealogical unity of all human beings through ancestry traced back to Noah and their genealogical diversity through ancestry traced back to one of Noah's sons.

130,000-95,000 years ago.  During this period, some anatomically modern humans began to migrate out of Africa into the Near East, where they could have met Neanderthals who were migrating out of Europe.  Genetic analysis indicates that Neanderthals had separated from the human lineage 770,000-550,000 years ago.  Neanderthal skeletons and DNA show that the Neanderthal lineage was evolving in Europe around 430,000 years ago.

80,000-35,000 years ago.  There was another wave of human migration out of Africa, and humans reached Europe, Asia, and Australasia.  During this time, humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans.  The best evidence for this comes from studies of "ancient DNA."  In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists discovered that it was possible to recover DNA from mummified human specimens and ancient bones.  In 1997, Svante Paabo and his colleagues reported that they had sequenced Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA.  In 2010, Paabo and his colleagues published a draft of the entire Neanderthal genome; and they suggested that there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans.  They also published a genetic analysis of another archaic human population--the Denisovans.  Later, it was shown that humans had interbred with Denisovans.

Since it was humans who had migrated out of Africa who interbred with Neanderthals, scientists have long assumed that while all present day non-African individuals carry some Neanderthal ancestry in their DNA, there would be no Neanderthal ancestry in African populations.  But in 2020, a new genetic study showed that African individuals do indeed show some Neanderthal ancestry (Chen et al., 2020).  This can be explained by ancient Europeans with Neanderthal genes migrating back to Africa.  So we now know that remnants of Neanderthal genomes are found in every human population.

Proportions of Neanderthal DNA in human populations today range as high as 2 percent.  Proportions of Denisovan DNA range as high as 5 percent--mostly in Asian and Australasian populations (Reich, 2018, 58-59).  This evolution by hybridization has benefitted human beings.  For example, modern humans in parts of Europe and East Asia have Neanderthal keratin protein genes that help them grow skin and hair suitable for the colder regions originally occupied by Neanderthals.  And many Tibetans today have a Denisovan gene active in red blood cells that help them breath the thin air of the Tibetan high altitudes (Reich, 2018, 65).

Thus, the scientific study of ancient DNA allows us to trace the entire history of human migration and interbreeding across time and space.  This research supports two general conclusions.  First, the evolution of human nature is about the mixture of populations, so that there is no such thing as a pure population or race.  Second, the people who live in a particular place today almost never descend exclusively from the people who lived in the same place in the distant past.  These two conclusions refute racism (by denying the "purity" of racial differences) and ethnic nationalism (by denying that national identity can be based on ancestral descent from a single founding population).

65,000-50,000 years ago.  The ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians arrived from Southeast Asia.  They remained foragers (living by hunting, gathering, and fishing), with little or no farming, until the British arrived in 1888.

20,000-13,00 years ago.  There is genetic evidence for at least four prehistoric migrations of Eurasians migrating to the Americas (Reich, 2018, 155-60).  By about 14,000 years ago, these human migrants had reached the southern tip of South America.  When sea levels were low enough for a land bridge to emerge in what is now the Bering Strait region, these people could walk across to Alaska.  In 1590, the Jesuit naturalist Jose de Acosta was the first person to speculate that human hunter-gatherers first crossed from Asia to an America without humans.  John Locke learned this from his reading of Acosta, which supported his conclusion that the American Indian hunter-gatherers were "still a Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe" (ST, 108).

13,000-9,000 years ago.  Agriculture developed for the first time in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East.  The first European farmers were genetic mixtures of local hunter-gatherers and Anatolian farmers. Farming was then spread by migrants throughout Eurasia over the next few thousand years.

6,000-4,000 years ago.  Early wheel technologies and writing systems emerged and were spread by migrants.

9,000-4,500 years ago.  During this period--the Early Bronze Age--the Yamnaya culture emerged in the center of the Great Steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas.  The Yamnaya population arose from a genetic mixture of Iranian farmers and local hunter-gatherers.  They were pastoralists whose economy was based on sheep and cattle herding.  They were innovative in their use of the newly domesticated horse and the hitching of animals to wagons and chariots with wheels.  They eventually spread over a vast expanse of the steppe--5,000 miles from Hungary in Europe to the Altai Mountains in central Asia and south into India where they conquered the Indus Valley Civilization.  They developed the first form of Indo-European Language, and their expansion created the family of Indo-European languages that stretches across Europe, India, and parts of East Asia.  By sometime after 4,500 years ago, the Yamnaya had migrated all the way to the British Isles.  90 percent of the people who built Stonehenge--people with no Yamnaya ancestry--were replaced by Yamnaya people (Reich, 2018, 99-121).

The Yamnaya were a stratified male-dominated society in which a few elite males ruled.  The ancient DNA data show that.  The Y chromosomes of the Yamnaya were mostly of only a few types, which shows that a few males succeeded in spreading their genes.  Moreover, these few Y-chromosome types of the Yamnaya are predominant today in Europe and India, which shows that the Yamnaya expansion allowed the most powerful Yamnaya male descendants to be more successful in mating than men from the local groups (Reich, 2018, 237-41).

This reminds us that because of the biological differences between the sexes, a single male can have far more children than a single female, and consequently powerful men can potentially have a far greater imprint on the human genome than powerful women.

As we will see, this ancient history of an Indo-European culture was transformed--beginning in the 19th century--into the myth of the "Aryan race" that has supported the ideologies of Nazism, Hindutva (Hinduism), and the Alt-Right Nietzscheanism of Trumpists like "Bronze Age Pervert."

117 AD.  The Roman Empire reaches its greatest extent under Trajan.

500.  Silk Roads link the Mediterranean region and China.

700s-1000s.  Viking ships cross the Atlantic.

1206-1368.  The Mongols formed the largest contiguous empire in history.  Genghis Khan (1162-1227) was the founder and the first khan of the Mongol Empire.  Genetic evidence indicates that 8 percent of the males living in East Eurasia today share a characteristic Y-chromosome sequence that was probably Genghis Khan's Y chromosome, which shows his millions of direct male-line descendants across the territory occupied by the Mongols (Zerjal et al., 2003).

1320-1350.  New Zealand was discovered and settled by Polynesians, who developed the distinctive Maori ethnic cultural group, which is today the second largest ethnic group in New Zealand, behind the European New Zealanders.

1492.  Columbus landed in the Bahamas, although he thought it was India.  He encountered the Taino people--the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands. Thus began the first global network of immigration, interbreeding, and trade encompassing most of the Earth.

1519.  Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec capital--Tenochtitlan--present-day Mexico City.  Within four years of the 1519 campaign, Martin Cortes, "el Mestizo," was born: his father was Hernan Cortes, his mother was Cortes's Aztec mistress.  Thus began the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization.  Today, in Mexico (with a population of 127 million), 70% of the people are mestizos, 14% Amerindians, and 15% whites.  As I have argued previously, this refutes the idea of "American genocide": there are more people in the Americas today with Indigenous American genes than there were when Columbus landed in 1492.

1526.  This was the year of the first transatlantic slave voyage from West Africa to Brazil.  Thus began one of the most massive, forced migrations in human history.  By the 1780s, over 75,000 African slaves were arriving every year in the Americas.

1693.  John Locke wrote an essay "For a General Naturalization" that was probably written in support of the General Naturalization Bill of 1693.  "Naturalization is the shortest and easiest way of increasing your people," Locke declared at the beginning of the essay. Increasing population is important, he explained, because "people are the strength of any country or government," and it's "the number of people that make the riches of any country."  What we see here is what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.   We see that today because the people in the less free countries want to migrate to the freer countries (as measured by the Human Freedom Index).

1718.  Great Britain's Transportation Act formalized the forced migration of convicts.  From 1718 to 1775, as many as 50,000 convicts were sent to the British colonies in America.  After the British lost the Revolutionary War in 1783, they decided to look elsewhere for penal colonies.  In 1788, they established their penal colony at Botany Bay (Sydney) in Australia.

1776.  Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained two grievances against King George III concerning immigration.  On the one hand, the King was accused of obstructing the passage of laws that would encourage the free migration of foreigners to America and then facilitate their naturalization.  On the other hand, the King was denounced for promoting the forced migration of African slaves through the slave trade, which was said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself."  The passage condemning the slave trade was excised from the final draft, however, because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.

I have written about Jefferson's disturbing behavior in adopting his slave Sally Hemmings as his concubine, who bore at least six of his children.  That the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, who affirmed natural human equality and who denounced slavery as a violation of human nature, could not only own black slaves but also exploit them for his sexual gratification forces us to think about the human nature of slavery, its corrupting effect on slaveowners, and the evolution of racial mixing.  Moreover, interracial sexual mating undermines the claims of the racist that the races can and should remain "pure" in their separation. 

1850.  The U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to make it easier for Southern slaveowners to recapture slaves who had run away to the Northern free states.  The law made it a federal crime for anyone to help fugitive slaves avoid capture.  This denied the freedom of internal migration within the nation--the freedom to vote with one's feet by running away from enslavement in the American South.  Many Americans resisted this law as an unjust law that violated natural human rights.  A black abolitionist like Frederick Douglass, who had himself run away from his slave master, were especially eloquent in defending the natural human right to run away--to migrate--to some place where one could be free.  

Some years later, Douglass defended a general "right of migration" for all human beings.  And he argued for the greatness of America as a "composite nation" open to all races, creeds, and religions and to all foreigners who would come to America searching for freedom.   He compared the "repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners" to the "prejudice of race and color" that had supported chattel slavery:  both express the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia that favors us against them.  Even if all other nations manifest this natural tribalism in limiting migratory rights and other human rights to themselves, America is unique in being the nation dedicated to human rights for all--"the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds."  And therefore, America must recognize the right of locomotion or migration as a right for all of humanity, so that America must have open borders.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

REFERENCES

Garcia-Bertrand, Ralph, and Rene J. Herrera. 2018. Ancestral DNA, Human Origins, and Migrations. Elsevier.

Goldenberg, David M. 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Goldin, Ian. 2024. The Shortest History of Migration.  New York: The Experiment.

Reich, David. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York: Pantheon Books.

Zerjal, T., et al. 2003. "The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols."  American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 717-21.

Trump's Supreme Court Appointees Uphold the Same-Sex Marriage Decision

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right protected by the 14th Amendment.  I have written a series of posts over the years arguing that this decision can be defended as grounded in Thomistic natural law and Darwinian natural right.  So I was pleased to learn that today the Supreme Court has refused to reconsider this decision, even though many people have assumed that the same conservative majority on the Court that overturned Roe v. Wade would also want to overturn Obergefell.

Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk, had filed the petition asking the Court to reconsider Obergefell.  Davis became famous in 2015 for defying a court order to obey the Court's decision and issue same-sex marriage licenses.  She argued that she could not issue licenses to same-sex couples without violating her religious belief that homosexuality and same-sex marriage violate the divine law of the Bible, and therefore to force her to issue those licenses would violate her freedom of speech and her religious freedom.  She spent five nights in jail after she was found in contempt of court for refusing to follow a court order to issue licenses to same-sex couples.  Years later, a Kentucky gay couple sued her for refusing them a marriage license.  They won at trial in 2023, and Davis was ordered to pay the couple $360,000 in damages and lawyers' fees.

The Supreme Court has declined to consider Davis's petition without comment, and so we don't know how the Justices reached this decision or how they voted on this.  But we do know that the Court's accepting a petition like this requires that at least four of the nine judges must vote for it.  We also know that of the four dissenters in Obergefell--John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito--three are still on the Court (Roberts, Thomas, and Alito).  So, if we assume that those three voted to reconsider Obergefell, that means that they failed to persuade any of the other Justices to vote with them.  

We have to infer, therefore, that none of the three Justices appointed by Trump--Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett--wished to consider overturning Obergefell.  That's particularly remarkable in the case of Gorsuch because he replaced Scalia--after Scalia's death--but apparently Gorsuch does not agree with Scalia's dissent in Obergefell.  Gorsuch embraces the originalist and textualist jurisprudence that Scalia championed.  But it would seem that unlike Scalia, Gorsuch believes that a constitutional right to same-sex marriage can be grounded somehow in the original meaning of the Constitution--particularly, the 14th Amendment.

The crucial point here is that the right to same-sex marriage is not specifically enumerated in the Constitution--in contrast to those rights enumerated in the first eight amendments.  So if there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it would have to be an unenumerated right that is somehow implied in the original meaning of the Constitution.  I have argued that the Ninth Amendment clearly allows for such unenumerated natural rights: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."  "Retained by the people" suggests rights that belong to the people by nature that the government must secure--as affirmed by the Declaration of Independence.

We have to wonder whether Gorsuch and perhaps others on the Court agree with this.  

Is Speaking in Tongues a Miraculous Gift of the Holy Spirit? Could It Be a Sign of God's Endorsement of Trump?

 

Paula White, the Head of Trump's White House Faith Office and Longtime "Spiritual Adviser" to Trump, Speaks in Tongues, Mixed with Some English Words, Praying that Angels from Africa Will Be Dispatched to Overturn the Presidential Election of 2020.

Over 80 percent of the American Evangelical Christian voters have voted for Trump.  Without them, Trump would not have been elected.  White has said that Christians who do not support Trump will be punished by God.  If the Holy Spirit has miraculously filled her with the gift of speaking in tongues, that could be a sign of God's endorsement of Trump.  Previously, I have written about those Evangelical Christians who insist that Trump is God's Chosen One.  Trump has brought some of them into the White House to pray for him and to lay their hands on his head--a gesture that symbolizes the passing on of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 8:14-19, 9:17, 19:6).

But what does it mean to "speak in tongues"?  And is there any evidence that it's a miraculous power given by the Holy Spirit?

SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY FOR SPEAKING IN TONGUES

There are five places in the New Testament with references to speaking in tongues.  First, in Mark 16:17, after Jesus has been resurrected, he speaks to his apostles: he tells them to preach the gospel and promises that there will be miraculous signs that accompany those who believe, and one of those signs is "speaking in new tongues."  He uses the Greek noun glossa for "tongue or language" and the Greek verb laleo for "speak."  So, the English term "glossolalia" has been coined to refer to "speaking in tongues."  Since this passage in Mark (16:9-20) is missing in the earliest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, some biblical scholars infer that it was not written by Mark but added by some other author.

In Acts 1-2, Jesus tells his apostles to remain in Jerusalem, so that after his ascension into Heaven, they will be baptized with the Holy Spirit and receive the powers of the Holy Spirit.  Then, on the day of Pentecost, a wind from Heaven filled the house where the apostles were sitting.  "They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them" (2:3-4).  In Jerusalem, there were "God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven."  15 different countries are listed, ranging from the Parthian Empire in the northeast, to Arabia in the southeast, to Cyrene in North Africa, and to Rome in the west.  As these people gathered to hear the apostles preaching, they were amazed that each of them heard the apostles speaking in "our own language, wherein we were born" (2:8).  Some mocked them by saying "they have had too much wine."  But, of course, even drunk men cannot speak in a language they don't know.  So here was a miraculous power of the Holy Spirit--people speaking in languages that were unknown to them.

In Acts 10:46, Peter is preaching to the household of Cornelius in Caesarea, and people are amazed to hear them speaking in tongues because they are the first Gentiles to receive this gift of the Holy Spirit.

In Acts 19:6, Paul meets with some disciples in Ephesus.  "When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied."  This is what Paula White was doing when she placed her hands on Trump's head.

In First Corinthians 12-14, Paul comments on speaking in tongues as one of the many gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Although he would like all the Corinthians to speak in tongues, he prefers that there should always be someone with the gift of interpretation who can translate the unknown tongue into comprehensible speech.  Anyone who speaks in an unknown tongue speaks to God, but if there is no interpretation, he does not speak to other people, who will not be edified if they can't understand the message.

Generally, it seems that speaking in tongues is speaking a human language unknown to the speaker.  But sometimes it seems that the language can be a divine or angelic language that is unintelligible to human beings.  Paul says: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal" (1 Cor. 13:1).  So those languages can be either "of men" or "of angels."

Paul also includes among the gifts of the Spirit "the ability to distinguish between spirits" (1 Cor. 12:10).  This seems to refer to distinguishing Holy-Spirit-inspired speaking in tongues from Devil-inspired speaking in tongues.  Because Christians are taught "do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1).

These are the New Testament passages cited by Pentecostal or Charismatic Christians as scriptural authority for their speaking in tongues.  But most Christians claim that while most or all of the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues, were really exercised by the early first-century Christians, that "age of miracles" has passed, and so Christians should no longer expect such miracles.  The most obvious weakness in this claim by "cessationist" Christians is that the New Testament never says explicitly that these gifts of the Holy Spirit would cease after the first generation of Christians.

PROOF FOR A MIRACLE?

Moreover, Charismatic Christians today point to the fact that when they speak in tongues, they speak in languages that they have never learned, which they say is proof of a miraculous power of the Holy Spirit.  For example, Charles Fox Parham initiated the modern Pentecostal movement in October 1900, when he opened Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, and there he and his students felt the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which was expressed through speaking in foreign languages that they had never learned.  Parham reported that one woman began speaking in Chinese and was unable to speak in English for three days.  Parham himself had a similar experience: "Right then there came a slight twist in my throat, a glory fell over me, and I began to worship God in the Swedish tongue, which later changed to other languages and continued so until the morning."  He insisted that this was "indisputable proof" of the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit (Hyatt 2002, 135-39).  That's why Paul said speaking in tongues was "for the unbeliever" because even unbelievers could not doubt that this was proof of a miracle (1 Cor. 14:22).

But is that true?  

William Samarin was a prominent linguist who taught at the University of Toronto.  In the 1960s, he spent more than five years studying glossolalia.  He wrote a book--Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism, in which he concluded that speaking in tongues was not a miracle or a supernatural phenomenon--in fact, it was not a language at all but rather "strings of syllables, made up of sounds taken from among all those that the speaker knows, put together more or less haphazardly but which nevertheless emerge as word-like and sentence-like units because of realistic, language-like rhythm and melody" (1972, 227).

Samarin did three kinds of research.  He collected a large sample of glossolalia by having many people consent to having their glossolalic prayers tape-recorded.  He attended meetings of Pentecostalist groups around the world--including Italy, Holland, Jamaica, Canada, and the United States.  The clearest recordings were then phonetically transcribed and analyzed.

He also interviewed in person many of the people that he met.  And he had 84 individuals fill out a questionnaire mailed to them with 71 questions.  For example, one of the questions was whether they thought their glossas were real human languages but unknown to them, and most of them said yes, although they were often uncertain as to what languages they might be compared to.

Here is one sample of a phonetic transcription of a man's speaking in tongues who thought he was speaking a language unknown to him:

kolama siando, laboka tohoriamasi, lamo siando, laboka tahandoria, lamo siando kolamsi, labo siando, lakatandori, lamo siambaba katando, lama fia, lama fiandoriako, labokan doriasando, lamo siandoriako, labo sia, lamo siando, labakan doria, lama fia, lama fiandolokolamababasi, labo siando, lama fiatandroria, lamokayamasi, labo siando (1972, 253).

That is not English, not French, not German, not Chinese, not any human language.  It is not a language at all.  As Samarin said, it is "a meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead" (1972, 2).  

English was the native language for the man who uttered this.  And what he said is composed of English syllables put together haphazardly.  Samarin found that this was true for every case:  the speaker draws sounds from whatever language (or languages) he knows.

Samarin also studied transcripts of what people said when they were interpreting the unintelligible tongues by translating them into English.  Samarin found that many times the style of the English interpretations imitated the style of the King James Translation of the Bible.  For example: "Heed ye the word of the Lord.  Yea, hear ye my voice as I speak to you this day.  Hear ye not in words, nor in voice, but hear ye in the hidden recess of your heart. . . . Yea, hear my voice today and yield to me as I speak to you in the tender voice of the Lord, your God" (1972, 169-70).

Samarin did not find a single case of someone speaking in tongues in a human language of which they had no previous knowledge.

Charismatic Christians who speak in tongues are using the uniquely human capacity of the mind for creating symbolic meaning, which is a produce of human evolution.  The symbolic meaning of speaking in tongues is not the meaning of ordinary human discourse.  It's the meaning of religious language that says, "This experience is special.  This is sacred.  This shows that God is in me right now."  That religious language is not sacred in itself.  But it does express the feeling of the sacred in the speaker.  That feeling of the supernatural is itself natural because it arises naturally as the power of the human mind for experiencing ecstasy.

So the next time Trump babbles something incomprehensible, we should consider whether he is speaking in tongues.  But if so, we can be sure that it's no miracle.

REFERENCES

Hyatt, Eddie.  2002.  2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity: A 21st Century Look at Church History from a Pentecostal/Charismatic Perspective. Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House.

Samarin, William J.  1972.  Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism.  New York: Macmillan.

The Evolution of Religion from Shamanism Supports Religious Liberty

 

Pope Gregory I (the Great), Pope from 590 to 604.  He is Writing in his Study.  The Holy Spirit as a Pentecostal Dove Whispers in His Ear.  Below, Scribes Copy His Work.  A Tenth-Century Ivory, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

THE FIRST RELIGION

Animism was the first religion, and shamans were its first practitioners.  The religious experience of animistic shamanism is the natural seed in the human mind from which all subsequent religions have evolved.

Animism has been found among all hunter-gatherers.  In animism, there are various kinds of invisible spirits with limited powers that permeate all of nature--plants, animals, and even physical phenomena such as thunderstorms.  These spirits influence human life.  But they do not enforce any moral law for human beings (Peoples, Duda, and Marlowe 2016; Sanderson 2014, 339-53).

In the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin agreed with Edward Tylor in seeing animism--the belief in spiritual beings--as the first religious experience.  As I have indicated in a previous post, C. S. Lewis agreed with Darwin in identifying animism as the first form of religion.  Showing the influence of Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, Lewis sketched the evolutionary development of religion through four stages in the Introduction to The Problem of Pain (16-25).  The first stage is what Otto called the experience of the Numinous--the feeling of dread and awe in the experience of the uncanny.  Otto coined the word "numinous" from the Latin word numen for "divinity."  According to Lewis, this arose first among prehistoric human beings.  "Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period, began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits" (17).  This dreadful and awful feeling of ghostly invisible spirits was "the seed of religious experience" (God in the Dock, 189).

The first professional practitioners of animism were shamans, who have been found in almost all foraging bands, and who continue to appear in some form in almost every society.  Shamans are believed to have the power to transform themselves through ecstatic trances to communicate with invisible spirits to solve problems--most commonly through healing and divination.  Successful shamans provide the service to their customers of interacting with the invisible forces that control unpredictable important outcomes--such as recovering from illness, success in hunting, communicating with the dead, and protecting people from evil spirits and malevolent magic (Eliade 2004; Singh 2017, 2025a).

Because of its behavioral diversity across societies, shamanism is hard to define.  But Manvir Singh offers a good definition of a shaman: "A shaman is a specialist who, through non-ordinary states, engages with unseen realities and provides services like healing and divination" (2025a, 30).  

"Non-ordinary" refers to the altered states of consciousness such as trance or ecstasy that look very different from waking functioning.  They can be drug-induced.  They can be the mental dissociation that comes after many hours of frenzied dancing and singing.

"Engaging with an unseen reality" means interacting with invisible agents that work through invisible means.  Shamans might extract demons from people's bodies or fight with witches.  They might be possessed by dead ancestors.  Or they might go on soul journeys to meet with the gods.

A "service" is some act performed for someone else's benefit.  "Aside from healing and divination, popular shamanic services include changing the weather, improving harvests, boosting business success, and raining down afflictions on one's enemies" (Singh 2025a, 31).

A shaman cannot coerce people into believing in his supernatural engagement with unseen spirits.  But he can put on elaborate performances (wearing strange costumes, shouting, ranting, speaking in incomprehensible language, drumming, dancing) that persuade people of his special abilities, because he must compete with other shamans to provide the most appealing services for his customers.

CHRISTIAN SHAMANISM AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Similarly, when Jesus and the early Christians claimed to be filled with the unseen Holy Spirit that gave them supernatural powers for healing, prophecy, and even ascending into Heaven, they did not coercively compel people to believe these claims, but rather they relied on the persuasiveness of their shamanic performances to convince people of their special abilities.  So, for example, when Christians spoke in strange tongues--in a foreign language that they had never learned or in an incomprehensible angelic language--this was a persuasive sign that they had been filled with the Holy Spirit and endowed with the same supernatural powers possessed by Jesus (John 14:12; Acts 2-3, 9:3-9, 10:46, 19:6; Romans 15:19; 1 Corinthians 12-13; 2 Corinthians 12:1-4).

Judging the truth of these personal experiences of the Holy Spirit was left up to each individual believer and each church.  Paul advised the churches that they should enforce good order and intelligibility in their worship services.  Those speaking in tongues should use intelligible words, or they should provide interpretation of their words.  And everything should be done in "a fitting and orderly way" (1 Corinthians 14).  

Moreover, Paul warned the churches against false prophets and false apostles who are moved by a different spirit from the Holy Spirit of God--these people should be ostracized and expelled from the church, but the churches could not inflict any violent punishment on these people (1 Corinthians 5:1-5, 12; 2 Corinthians 11:1-15).

As I have noted in previous posts, Locke (in The Letter Concerning Toleration) saw this as evidence that the New Testament churches were "free and voluntary societies"--in contrast to the "absolute theocracy" of the Jewish commonwealth in the Old Testament.  The New Testament Christians recognized religious toleration as "the chief characteristic mark of the true church," because "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every church is orthodox to itself."

This must be so because the Holy Spirit does not speak clearly enough to overcome religious pluralism.  In the Third Letter for Toleration, Locke argued that we cannot count on political rulers to enforce the true religion by coercion because no one can know what the true religion is.  The Christian believer can have faith that his version of the Christian religion is the true religion, "but faith it is still, and not knowledge" (1870, 94-95). 

Against this, the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church is that God has clearly identified the Catholic Church as the only true religion because the divine authority of the Church has been transmitted by the Holy Spirit passing through the apostolic succession of the popes (the bishops of Rome) beginning with Peter, the first Pope (as supposedly taught by Jesus in Matthew 16:18-19).  The picture of Pope Gregory the Great at the head of this blog post conveys this idea:  the Pentecostal Dove of the Holy Spirit whispers in Gregory's ear, Gregory writes out the divine message, and the scribes make copies of his work.  The Pope is the shaman of the Christian church--a religious specialist who, through the supernatural inspiration of the Holy Spirit, engages with divine realities and provides services such as teaching people what God demands of them, which Catholics call the Magisterium--the teaching function of the Papacy.  

According to the tradition of Catholic Integralism, this divine authority of the Pope justifies him in asking political rulers to coercively enforce submission to the Catholic Church and to punish heretics, apostates, and blasphemers who challenge the Church's supremacy.  Locke's argument for toleration and religious liberty was an attack on Protestant Integralism--the claim that a Protestant church like the Church of England could use the coercive power of government to enforce obedience to that church.

Notice that the shamanism of the Catholic Church differs from traditional shamanism in that traditional shamans attract clients through persuasion but not through coercion, because shamans must compete with one another in the free market of shamanism.  The more persuasive shamanic performers win a bigger share of the market, while the less persuasive ones lose customers.

Contrary to the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church, the New Testament does not say that Peter and his successors as bishops of Rome would have exclusive access to the Holy Spirit.  On the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, all of the apostles "were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them."  There were in Jerusalem Jews "from every nation under heaven," and they were utterly amazed when they heard their own native language being spoken.  Peter explained to the crowd that this was the fulfillment of what the prophet Joel had said about how "in the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.  Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.  Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days" (Acts 2).  Elsewhere in the books of Acts (10:46, 19:6) and First Corinthians (12-14), it is made clear that all the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" (charismata in Greek)--including speaking in tongues, the interpretation of tongues, healing, prophecy, and other miraculous powers--are given to all Christians.  

Amazingly, this suggests that all Christian believers can become shamans.  But if so, that means that each individual must judge the truth of revelation through his personal religious experience.  That's what Locke meant in saying that "everyone is orthodox to himself."  And that supports toleration and religious liberty as everyone is free to pursue his own religious happiness in his own way, as guided by the Holy Spirit, and free to join whatever church he finds to be supportive of his faith.

TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF PENTECOSTAL/CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY

But even if the Christian church of the first century was a charismatic church in which all Christians were filled with the miracle-working gifts of the Holy Spirit, many Christians in later centuries believed that this Pentecostal church had come to an end because God was no longer filling every believer with the Holy Spirit.  

There are at least three reasons for doubting that.  First, the New Testament never says that the Pentecostal church as filled with the Holy Spirit was only a temporary condition, and that within a century, the gifts of the Holy Spirit would no longer be available for all Christians.

Second, there is plenty of evidence that charismatic Christianity persisted throughout the past two thousand years of Christianity (Hyatt 2002).  Certainly, in the first three centuries of Christianity, the Fathers of the Church testified to the ecstatic visions that occurred throughout the Christian community.  For example, Cyprian (A.D. 195-258), the Bishop of Carthage, described some of these visions: "For beside the visions of the night, even in the daytime, the innocent age of boys [innocent children] is among us filled with the Holy Spirit, seeing in an ecstasy with their eyes, and hearing and speaking those things whereby the Lord condescends to warn and instruct us" (Hyatt 2002, 21).  It is true that with the institutionalization of the church in the fourth century, as the church became the established church of the Roman Empire, there was a decline in charismatic experience in the Christian community as the clergy claimed that the gifts of the Holy Spirit belonged only to them and not to the laity.  The freedom of the Holy Spirit moving among all Christians was replaced by ceremonial ritual and ecclesiastical order in which the clergy monopolized the spiritual gifts.

But beginning in the late second century, with the Montanists (the Christian followers of Montanus), there is a long history of charismatic renewal movements in which the qualification for ministry was possession of a spiritual gift from the Holy Spirit rather than appointment to an ecclesiastical office.  The Montanists delivered prophecies in a frenzied state of ecstasy.  Several church councils condemned them as pagan heretics who were demon possessed (Hyatt 2002, 26-30).  There were many more ecstatic mystical movements like this--such as the Cathars (from the 12th to the 14th centuries) who were finally eradicated by the Medieval Inquisition (Hyatt 2002, 63-66).

The third reason for doubting that the Pentecostal church ended in the first century is that there has been a stunning revival of Pentecostalism from the early 1900s into the present.  Pentecostal revivals broke out at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, in 1900, in Zion City, Illinois, in 1901, and at a church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906.  These revivals quickly spread across America and to Europe, India, Africa, and South America (Hyatt 2002, 135-159).  Since the 1990s and into the 21st century, Pentecostalism has become the fastest growing religious movement in the world.

The defining feature of Pentecostal doctrine is the teaching that all true Christians can be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the most prominent gifts of the Holy Spirit include healing, praying, prophesying, and preaching through speaking in tongues.  Here we see, once again, Christians becoming shamans who, through extraordinary states of ecstasy, engage with divine entities and provide services like healing and divination.

The defining feature of Pentecostal churches is that they follow the example of the first Christian churches as voluntary associations that attract members through their persuasive performances of ecstatic possession by the Holy Spirit rather than through the coercive authority of a clerical hierarchy.

CATHOLIC PENTECOSTALISM

The most dramatic manifestation of the popular appeal of Pentecostalism over the past fifty years is the opening of the Catholic Church to Pentecostal revivalism.  This began at the Vatican II Council (1962-1965).  In calling the Council, Pope John XXIII asked Catholics to pray that the Holy Spirit would bring a "new Pentecost" to the Church.  The Belgian Cardinal, Leon Joseph Suenens, one of the most influential people at the Council, led the way in asking for discussions of how "the Charismatic gifts working today" could unite Catholics and non-Catholics in a Charismatic Renewal Movement.

Then, in 1967, a group of Catholic professors and graduate students at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh gathered to study the Book of Acts and pray for a Catholic Pentecost.  They felt the moving of the Holy Spirit through them, and they began shouting praises to God and weeping and speaking in tongues.  This soon spread to Notre Dame University.  And in 1970, a Catholic Charismatic conference attracted over 30,000 Catholic Charismatics.  This has become an ecumenical movement in which Catholics meet in religious services with Charismatic Protestants and Messianic Jews and share in the ecstatic experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit (Hyatt 2002, 174-77).

Since then, all of the popes have endorsed the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement.  In 1992, Pope John Paul II called this "a particular gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church." He said that the Holy Spirit is "the principal agent of the Church's mission in sustaining and guiding her efforts to bring the graces of Pentecost to all people."  He insisted that "there can be no conflict between fidelity to the Spirit and fidelity to the Church and her Magisterium."

And yet, many traditionalist Catholics--like those at Catholic Family News--argue that fidelity to the pre-Vatican II Church and its Magisterium would teach us that Catholics claiming to share with Protestants a personal experience of the Holy Spirit is heretical because since the Catholic Church is the only true religion, non-Catholics cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit.  The traditionalist Catholics can quote from Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors (1864), which says that it is an error to believe that "good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ."  Moreover, Pope Pius IX joined other popes such as Leo XIII in teaching that divine law requires the state to enforce Catholicism as the only true religion.  So when the Second Vatican Council issued the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" (Dignitatis Humanae) in 1965, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration, this was a heretical denial of the papal teaching prior to 1965.

The most radical of the traditionalist Catholics--the Sedevacantists--go so far as to say that all the popes who have endorsed the heresies of the Second Vatican Council--that is, all the popes since the death of Pius XII in 1958--are not valid popes (Dimond and Dimond 2007).  The Most Holy Family Monastery is one example of a Sedevacantist organization.  The term Sedevacantism comes from the Latin sede vacante--"the chair being vacant."  The Sedevacantists believe that the chair of the pope has been vacant since 1958.

This brings us back to the problem of the Holy Spirit.  As I have argued in previous posts, Catholics must believe that the Holy Spirit selects the pope.  But while the Sedevacantist Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit surely did select popes like Pius IX and Leo XIII, they deny that the popes after 1958 were chosen by the Holy Spirit.  If the Holy Spirit has spoken, its message has not been clear enough to bring all Christians to agreement.  After all, even the 133 cardinals who met in Rome last May to select the new pope were not guided by the Holy Spirit to a unanimous choice.  The choice of Cardinal Robert Prevost was by a two-thirds vote.  And many of the Catholic commentators on this choice, including the traditionalist Catholics, explained this as a prudent political choice of a moderate who was somewhere between the progressives (or liberals) and the traditionalists (or conservatives), which prevented a possible schism in the Church.  The Holy Spirit had nothing to do with it--unless we want to say that the Holy Spirit is good at playing the game of church politics.

THE EVOLUTION OF SHAMANIC RELIGION BY SUBJECTIVE SELECTION IN THE MARKETPLACE OF RELIGION

The belief that there are unseen spiritual agents--like the Holy Spirit--and that some human beings can engage those spiritual agents to exercise extraordinary powers like healing and divination is a human universal.  It has arisen in some form in every human culture throughout history (Singh 2018, 2025a).  

Why?

One answer is that many people believe this because it is true.  They have discovered that there really are spiritual agents who can help human beings solve many of their problems.

Another answer is that regardless of whether it is objectively true, this belief is beneficial.  Human beings have discovered that this belief helps them satisfy some of their natural desires--such as the desires for healing and control over the uncertainties of life.

Since our knowledge of reality is very limited, we cannot deny the reality of supernatural invisible spirits because there might be supernatural dimensions of reality that we have not yet observed.  We can know, however, that so far no one has conclusively demonstrated the reality of such supernatural spirits.  For example, from 1964 to 2015, the skeptic and magician James Randi offered as much as $1 million dollars for anyone who could present proof of paranormal or supernatural powers.  When the challenge was terminated in 2015, no one had ever won.

But even if we can't be sure that the religious belief in the supernatural is true, perhaps it has become a universal belief for most human beings because it somehow benefits them, and therefore it's an adaptive trait that has been favored by cultural evolution.  But many times people can believe that their religious beliefs benefit them even when there are no objective benefits.  For example, people can evaluate religious magical practices to be effective for healing illness or divining the future, even when they have had no causal effect (Hong 2022; Hong and Henrich 2021).

A better explanation of a human cultural universal like religion, Manvir Singh has argued, is to say that a cultural practice like religion evolves through subjective selection and subjective appeal rather than objective benefits (Singh 2020, 2025b).  "Subjective selection" is the production and selective retention of cultural variants that are evaluated by individuals as useful for satisfying their desires or goals.  Individuals will adopt the religious belief in supernatural agents if that belief appears to them to be effective in satisfying goals like healing illness and divining the future.  The subjective appearance is more important than the objective reality.

This explains the healing power of shamanic ceremonies and the therapeutic effects of medical ritual even when the patients don't believe in the causal efficacy of the treatments.  Singh has seen this in many cases of shamanic healing: "You can go to a shaman as a skeptic.  You can come away a skeptic, too.  Nevertheless, if the healing encounter is gripping--if it engulfs you in sound and touch and imagery, and implicitly signals that you are being healed--we should expect it to still be soothing." "Shamanism is about creating a captivating, consuming reality--a conflagration of light, touch, costumes, music, and theater that, in the case of healing, persuades a client they are being treated" (Singh 2025a, 104).

This suggests that you can be healed when your body feels itself being healed.  Some remarkable studies of the placebo effect in healing have confirmed this.  We all know about the studies showing that sick people can become better when they are given a placebo (a sugar pill), but they have been deceived into thinking that the pill contains medication.  The more interesting studies, however, are when researchers get the placebo effect without deceiving the patients.  Ted Kaptchuk and his colleagues conducted an experiment with people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome.  Half of them were given no medical treatment.  The other half were given placebo pills, and they were told that these were "placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes."  Amazingly, the group who knowingly took the placebo pills showed significantly greater improvement than the no-treatment group (Kaptchuk et al. 2010).

Singh concludes from this that "in the case of the placebo effect, experience trumps belief" (2025a, 104).  We can be deeply affected by a made-up reality that we know intellectually is fictional.  This is most clearly manifested in our experience of fictional drama.  We read novels, watch movies, and attend theatrical performances.  We know that these stories are not literally true.  But we can be moved to tears by the suffering of a character or to joyful excitement when a character is successful.

Does something similar happen in our response to religious stories?  Even if we know or suspect that these stories are not literally true, they might have a powerful subjective appeal to our natural cognitive propensity to imagine spiritual agents at work in an unseen reality.  Previously, I have written about how religious belief might be naturally appealing to the evolved human mind.

We can then explain the cultural evolution of religion as a psychological marketplace in which religious ideas and practices compete for customers, and those religious traditions that are more subjectively appealing to the human mind win more customers than those that are less appealing, and ultimately the standard of subjective appeal is set by the individual decisions of human beings.

So, for example, we have seen that while the Catholic Church for centuries tried to suppress the freedom of individuals to spontaneously experience the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the popular subjective appeal of the Pentecostal/Charismatic tradition was so persistent that the Church had to open up to that tradition after the Second Vatican Council.

But some Pentecostals would argue that the gifts of the Holy Spirit have not only subjective appeal but objective reality, and their objective reality is proven by the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues.  If people possessed by the Holy Spirit can speak in foreign languages that they have never learned, doesn't that testify to the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit?  I'll take up that question in my next blog post.

REFERENCES

Dimond, Michael, and Peter Dimond. 2007. The Truth About What Really Happened to the Catholic Church After Vatican II.  Fillmore, NY: Most Holy Family Monastery.

Eliade, Mircea. 2004. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hong, Z. 2022. "Ghosts, Divination, and Magic Among the Nuosu: An Ethnographic Examination from Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspectives." Human Nature 33:349-379.

Hong, Z., and J. Henrich. 2024. "Instrumentality, Empiricism, and Rationality in Nuosu Divination." Religion, Brain, and Behavior.

Hyatt, Eddie. 2002. 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity: A 21st Century Look at Church History from a Pentecostal/Charismatic Perspective. Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House.

Kaptchuk, Ted, et al. 2010. "Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome." PLoS ONE 5 (12) e15591.

Lewis, C. S. 1940. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan Publishing.

Lewis, C.S. 1970. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Locke, John. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, John. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Peoples, H. C., P. Duda, and F. W. Marlowe. 2016. "Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion." Human Nature 27: 261-282.

Sanderson, Stephen K. 2014. Human Nature and the Evolution of Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Singh, Manvir. 2018. "The Cultural Evolution of Shamanism." Behavioral and Brain Sciences e66.

Singh, Manvir. 2020. "Subjective Selection and the Evolution of Complex Culture." Evolutionary Anthropology 31: 266-280.

Singh, Manvir. 2025a. Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Sing, Manvir. 2025b. "Subjective Selection, Super-Attractors, and the Origins of the Cultural Manifold." Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Forthcoming.

More Waa-Barking at the "No Kings!" Protests

 No Kings! Protest Overflows Grant Park in Chicago

                                              No Kings! March Fills Downtown Chicago

Yesterday, I was at the "No Kings!" protest in Chicago.  This was one of over 2,500 protests across the United States.  It was probably the single biggest mass protest in American history, with estimates of over 8 million people turning out.  The second biggest protest was the previous "No Kings!" protests in June.

There are reports that the march after the rally in Chicago stretched out over 22 city blocks.  I can attest to that.  And while it's hard to estimate crowd sizes in such circumstances, I would say the crowd had to be over 300,000.  My point of reference for that estimate is my experience in going to Dallas Cowboys football games at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.  Counting standing-room-only tickets, that stadium can hold over 100,000 people.  I have been to games with counts close to that.  Comparing those crowds exiting the stadium with what I saw yesterday suggests to me that the crowds yesterday must have been at least three or four times larger.

So what were all of these people in Chicago and around the country doing?  As I have previously said about the protests in June, when I attended the one in Grand Rapids, the "No Kings!" protests are the waa-barks of America's chimpanzee politics of resistance to Trump.  Subordinate chimpanzees utter pant-grunts to signal their fear and submission before a dominant chimp.  But subordinates can also utter waa-barks to signal their defiance of a dominant chimp.  If enough subordinates scream their waa-barks, and if the dominant chimp does not have a sufficiently strong coalition of supporters, he can be overthrown.  

If you look at the C-SPAN videos of Trump's cabinet meetings, you see Trump ordering his cabinet members to pant-grunt to him.  It often takes over an hour to go around the table with every cabinet member praising Trump as the greatest, most intelligent, most lovable leader in the history of the world.  Or if you look at the video of Trump in Ohio when he endorsed Vance for U.S. Senator, you'll hear him brag about how Vance was once a fervent critic of Trump, but now, Trump says, "he's kissing my ass."  "Kissing my ass" is Trump's fancy term for pant-grunting.

At Trump's birthday on June 14th, we saw a military parade for Trump that was a display of pant-grunting.  But we also saw that the number of spectators at the parade was small, and many of them were looking at their phones to see images of the massive crowds at the "No Kings!" protests on that same day.  The waa-barks were louder than the pant-grunts.  Yesterday, the waa-barks were even louder.  Waa-barks are one of the weapons of nonviolent resistance to oppressive dominance.

Last week, MAGA politicians warned that the "No King's" protestors were "domestic terrorists" and "Marxists" who "hated America," and that their protests would contribute to the violent insurrection of "Antifa."

I saw no evidence in Chicago for any of this.  I did see a small tent for the "Revolutionary Communists of America."  But I didn't see many people stopping off at the tent.  And I didn't see any evidence that the "No Kings!" protestors were supporting communism.  The protests pledged their loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and the American tradition of individual liberty and rights, which they saw as threatened by Trump.  I can't imagine how communists could do that.  For example, the crowd repeatedly chanted: "This Is What Democracy Looks Like."

Upholding the Constitution against Trump's unconstitutional dictatorship was the overriding theme of the protests as expressed in their signs, their chants, and in the speeches.

The next most prominent them was protecting immigrants--even illegal immigrants--from ICE.  The argument was that hard-working immigrants with families who paid their taxes and contributed to American society should be recognized as Americans with the individual rights of Americans--such as the Fourth Amendment right to due process of law.

An equally prominent theme was "We Love Chicago" and "Hands off Chicago."  Some of the most deeply emotional displays was the determination to defend Chicago and its multiethnic neighborhoods against ICE raids.  A lot of the talk was about neighbors organizing to protect their neighborhoods from ICE by people identifying ICE officers and warning their neighbors by blowing whistles in the streets and helping people escape capture by the ICE masked kidnappers.

One speaker argued that this was similar to Chicago's history of protecting fugitive slaves and refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a crime to help fugitive slaves running away from their slave masters.  I found this particularly interesting because it suggested that the immigration laws being enforced by ICE were unjust laws--like the Fugitive Slave Law--and therefore there was a moral obligation to disobey those laws and the ICE officers enforcing them.

There were no National Guardsmen to be seen--suggesting that the federal court order against the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago was being obey.  Nor were there any ICE officers visible.

There were a lot of Chicago Police officers, but they were mostly stationed around the edges of the crowd.  They were clearly there to intervene if necessary to keep the peace.  But they never engaged the crowd in any way, because there were no disturbances that needed to be quelled.   The remarkable peacefulness of the protestors was crucial for showing that the claim that they were "domestic terrorists" was ridiculous.

But although peaceful, they yelled their waa-barks for all the world to hear.

                     Trump Has Posted This Video as His Answer to the No Kings Protests

Trump's Martial Law in a New Civil War?

                                                            The Portland "War Zone"

In previous posts, I have argued that Trump's biggest mistake was following the recommendations of Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society in his judicial appointments because judges who are constitutional originalists and textualists will not support Trump's claim that "as President, I can do whatever I want to do"--that is, become a dictator unconstrained by law.

The most recent case illustrating this point came just a few days ago--State of Oregon and the City of Portland v. Donald Trump et al.  On Saturday, U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut issued a temporary restraining order halting Trump's deployment of National Guardsmen to Portland, Oregon, as an unconstitutional act.  She declared: "this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law."  To show that the American Founders feared the sort of military tyranny that Trump is now launching, she quoted from James Madison at the Constitutional Convention: "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.  The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."

Remarkably, Judge Immergut was appointed to her position by Trump in 2019.  But now Trump says "to have a judge like that, that judge ought to be ashamed of himself" (strangely referring to her as a man).

As in so many previous cases, Trump is being frustrated by judges he appointed because their jurisprudential originalism and textualism deny his claims to dictatorial power.  If Trump were smart, he would scorn conservative jurisprudence and argue for a "living constitution" that allows the president to rule as a king above the law.

Judge Immergut's case involves Trump's order on September 27, 2025, directing Pete Hegseth to provide troops to protect "War ravaged Portland" from "Antifa, and other domestic terrorists" and authorizing "Full Force, if necessary."  Hegseth authorized the deployment and federalization of 200 of Oregon National Guard service members to be sent to Portland, even though Oregon's Governor, Tina Kotek, objected.

Under the Militia Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the power "to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections, and repel Invasions" (Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 15).  In the Militia Act of 1792, the Congress first delegated this Congressional authority to the President to call forth the militia in extraordinary circumstances.  The modern version of that law is the Militia Act of 1903, which today is codified as 10 U.S.C, sec. 12406, which says that the President may federalize National Guard service members if:

(1) the United States, or any of the Commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation;

(2) there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States; or

(3) the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.

In this case the Defendants (Trump et al.) argued that Trump's military mobilization for Portland was authorized under the second two conditions: there was "rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States" in Portland, and the President was "unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States" in Portland.

Judge Immergut employs a strict textualist standard to rebut the appeal to "rebellion."  She asks how would the Congress have understood the term "rebellion" in 1903 when it passed the Militia Act of 1903?  Drawing from a previous case, where the court surveyed four dictionaries from the late 1800s and early 1900s, she states this definition:

First, a rebellion must not only be violent but also be armed.  Second, a rebellion must be organized.  Third, a rebellion must be open and avowed.  Fourth, a rebellion must be against the government as a whole--often with an aim of overthrowing the government--rather than in opposition to a single law or issue.

By that definition, Judge Immergut concludes, the protests in Portland were not a "rebellion."

She also concludes that the history of the protests in Portland from June to September do not show that the President was "unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States."  She surveys the record of the protests in Portland to show that while the disruption outside the Portland ICE facility peaked in June of 2025, federal and local law enforcement quelled the disorder.  And, more importantly, as of September 27, 2025, when Trump issued his order, there had been months without any serious level of violent or disruptive protests in Portland.

Trump said that Portland was "War ravaged," and there was "lawless mayhem" and "Chaos, Death, and Destruction."  But Judge Immergut observed: "The President's determination was simply untethered to the facts."

Federal judges have said that in such cases, the courts must show "a great level of deference" to the President's judgment.  But still, the courts must "review the President's determination to ensure that it reflects a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment."

In this case, any reasonable assessment of the history of the protests in Portland over the three months before Trump's order on September 27 do not support his claim that "War ravaged Portland" required federal military intervention.

TRUMP'S CIVIL WAR?

It is easy to predict, however, that Trump will soon employ a new legal maneuver to justify his imposition of martial law on cities and states that he sees as under the control of Democrats and thus constituting "the Enemy Within"--in other words, his political opponents.

He will invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.  Here's the crucial clause:

 An Act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.

In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, a new section was added to allow the President to use the militia (the National Guard) and the regular military forces against the will of state governments in the case of "rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States."

We can foresee that Trump will declare that states like Illinois, Oregon, and California are in rebellion against the government of the United States, and therefore he will launch a full military invasion of those states.

We will then see whether the courts can stop him.

But the ultimate question is whether the U.S. military will obey his orders.  When they are ordered to kill Americans protesting Trump's dictatorship, will they obey?

Previously, I have written about how in the last two months of his first term, after he had lost the election, Trump did not have the guns or the guts for becoming a military dictator.  He did not have the guns because military leaders such as General Mark Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) made it clear that they would not allow the military to support a presidential dictatorship.  And he did not have the guts because he lacked the courage to assert his dictatorial will in violation of the Constitution. 

But now it might be different because Trump is surrounded with sycophantic loyalists eager to obey his every whim.

We can hope that the U.S. military will resist.  A few days ago, when Hegseth and Trump gave their political speeches (for over two hours) to all of the top U.S. military leaders from around the world gathered in Quantico, Virginia, there was no applause from the audience, and Trump was clearly disturbed by that silence.  That's a good sign of resistance.

Another good sign is that when ICE has tried to prosecute protesters for harassing them, grand juries are refusing to indict.  This has already happened in Washington, D.C., Illinois, and California.  It is also possible that even if indicted and taken to trial, people resisting ICE can expect that juries will refuse to convict them.  Jury nullification has a long history in America as a way for citizens to impede unjust laws and governmental misconduct.  For example, this was one way that citizens resisted the enforcement of the fugitive slave laws before the Civil War and thus protected runaway slaves from being captured.

Trump and his people could evade this constraint of jury nullification by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which would allow them to arrest and imprison anyone--to "disappear" them--without having to give any legal justification.  This would be the ultimate suspension of all individual rights.  Stephen Miller has proposed this.  That would be a police state.