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.
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