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.

West on the American Founding (1): The State of Nature and the Evolution of Religion

At the next convention of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco (August 31-September 3), I will be on a panel on Thomas West's new book--The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom.  Many scholars of the American Founding have concluded that the founders' political thought was an amalgam of different, and even contradictory, traditions of thought, such as liberalism and republicanism.  Against this "amalgam" thesis, West argues--persuasively, I think--that the founders largely agreed on one coherent understanding of politics--the political theory of natural rights.  Their disagreements (as in the debates between the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians) were disagreements not about the end of government (securing natural rights) but about the best means for achieving this end.

Another recently published book--Randy Barnett's Our Republican Constitution--makes this same argument for the American founders as agreeing on the political theory of natural rights.  West recognizes this, but he claims that "Barnett's libertarian reading is silent on the founders' concern with the people's moral character" (46, n. 10).  For West, this "libertarian reading" of the founding is mistaken in ignoring how the founders' legally enforced morality and religion through the constitutions and laws of the states.  But then, West sometimes contradicts himself and accepts a libertarian interpretation of the founding as seeing the purpose of politics being limited to securing individual freedom, so that morality and religion are shaped in families and the voluntary associations of private society rather than through coercive public legislation.  I will elaborate this point in a future post.

In his explication of the founders' theory of natural rights, West agrees with Philip Hamburger (1993) in seeing that theory as based on five arguments.  First, natural rights are identified as part of the natural liberty that human beings have in state of nature in the absence of government.  This idea of the state of nature is fundamental.  West says: "The state of nature is the basis of the founders' understanding of politics" (409).  And in that state of nature, "self-ownership is the original natural right" (396).  Except for children, who are under the temporary natural authority of their parents, all individuals have equal liberty in that no one is under the rule of anyone else without their consent.  But these natural rights in the state of nature without government do not include the acquired rights that exist only as created by government.

Second, natural rights are constrained by natural law.  In the state of nature, human beings can use reason to discover natural law.  So, for example, they can reason that since all human beings seek to enjoy their natural liberty, they will resist and retaliate against those who infringe on their liberty; and therefore, human beings can conclude that the best way to preserve their life and liberty is to respect the equal liberty of others by not harming them.  They can thus see the wisdom in the Golden Rule--do unto others as you would have them do unto you--or the Silver Rule--don't do to others what you would not want them to do to you.  They will enforce these rules of natural law as customary norms for society.  But even if many, or even most, human beings can see the wisdom in this natural law, many will not understand it or observe it, and their aggressive attacks on others will make the natural rights insecure in the state of nature where there is no government.

Third, to overcome this insecurity of natural rights in the state of nature, human beings consent to establish governments to secure their natural rights through formal laws and institutions for making, enforcing, and adjudicating those laws.  In submitting to the protection of government, people must give up some of their natural liberty to government so that it can protect the remainder.

Fourth, although the civil law of government is not the same as the natural law in the state of nature, that civil law must approximate the natural law in securing natural rights.  So, for example, the civil laws of property will be highly variable.  But if those governmental laws of property do not adequately protect the natural rights of property, people have the natural right to overthrow the government, return to the state of nature without government, and establish a new government that they judge will better secure their natural rights.

Fifth, as long as the civil laws approximate the natural law, there is no necessary inconsistency between civil law and natural law.  So, for example, the United States Constitution is civil law and not natural law, but constitutional law can be judged by the standard of natural law as to how well it secures natural rights.

Affirming the reality of the state of nature is the first step in this line of reasoning, and it is not enough, according to West, to see the state of nature as purely "hypothetical" or "fictional," because it must be seen as really existing in human history, past and present (96-111).  Whenever human beings are without a government or common superior over them, they are in the state of nature.  In the prehistoric past, all of our human ancestors lived in foraging bands without government, and thus they were in the state of nature.  As I have argued in other posts (here, here, here), the Darwinian account of the evolutionary state of nature largely confirms the reality of this Lockean state of nature among hunter-gatherers.

The state of nature is not confined to the prehistoric past.  Since there is no one world government, the state of nature exists between governments.  And even within societies with governments, individuals can revert to a state of nature when they find themselves threatened by aggressors, and there is no chance to appeal to governmental protection.  Also, when people revolt against a government, they put themselves back into a state of nature.  So when the Americans declared themselves independent of Great Britain, they were momentarily in a state of nature, until they had consented to new governments.

If the political theory of natural rights is correct, natural rights are those rights that human beings have claimed in the state of nature.  I have argued that Darwinian studies of life in the evolutionary state of nature of foraging bands does show that foragers claim equal rights to life, liberty, and property.

But what about the claim to religious liberty as a natural right?  As West and Vincent Phillip Munoz (2015) have shown, it was common in the first American state constitutions to make this claim.  So, for example, the North Carolina Constitution of 1776 declared: "That all men have a natural and unalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience." 

But do we see foragers in an evolutionary state of nature making such a claim to religious freedom?

Hunter-gatherers do not typically show a religion of worshipping "Almighty God."  The monotheistic religions of worshipping a Creator God who enforces a moral law for human beings and intervenes in human affairs for their salvation did not appear in human history until the "Axial Age"--the six centuries before Christ--when Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity appeared for the first time.

The earliest form of religious belief is animism, which has been found among all hunter-gatherers, and which was probably the first form of religious experience for our earliest human ancestors.  In animism, there are no real gods, but 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).

The first professional religious practitioners 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).

After the move from foraging bands to agricultural settlements, and the transition to large-scale chiefdoms and states, "high gods" appear for the first time--gods who are more active and powerful than the spirits of animism.  First, polytheistic religions have many specialized high gods who are much like human beings but more powerful.  Then, in the Axial Age, the monotheistic religions teach that there is one Creator God who transcends the world He created, and who enforces a moral law for human beings.

Evolutionary psychologists have surveyed the evidence that these religions of High Gods or Big Gods arose by cultural evolution in large-scale cities and states to solve collective action problems by persuading people that the social norms of cooperation will be enforced by divine rewards and punishments--perhaps even eternal bliss in Heaven and eternal punishment in Hell.  I have written about this in a previous post.

Evolutionary psychologists, beginning with Darwin himself, have explained this evolution of religious beliefs and practices as a product of both natural evolution and cultural evolution.  By nature, human beings have the evolved propensity for "mind-reading"--for imagining that their are many intentional agents in the world who act purposefully according to their beliefs and desires.--because it is an evolutionary adaptation for successfully navigating through a world of intentional agents, both human and nonhuman.  This capacity for detecting intentional agents can easily become so hyperactive that human beings imagine the existence of invisible supernatural agents.  Thus, religion can be explained as an evolutionary manifestation of  a "hyperactive agency detection device" in the human brain, which I have written about in earlier posts (here).

That religious belief really is an evolutionary adaptation and not just an indirect by-product of some truly adaptive function of the brain is suggested by the evidence that religion promotes health and reproductive success.  Devout religious believers tend to have better physical and mental health and longer lives than those who lack such religious devotion.  Religiosity also increases fertility, and the most devout religious believers (like Orthodox Jews) tend to have the highest average number of offspring.  Atheists tend to have the lowest rates of fertility (Sanderson 2014, 344-50). 

This suggests that religion is rooted in evolved human nature, that the desire for religious understanding should be included on the list of 20 natural desires, and that atheists who advocate the abolition of religion are foolish.  This explains why evolutionary psychologists like Leda Cosmides disagree with the "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, as I indicated in a previous post.

But let's turn back to my earlier question: if there is a natural desire for religious belief in the evolutionary state of nature, did our foraging ancestors express that as a natural claim to religious freedom?  The animism and shamanism that have dominated the religious life of foragers seem to have arisen voluntarily through the competition of religious practitioners for customers, and there is no priestly or governmental bureaucracy for coercively enforcing belief.

The monotheistic religions that have arisen over the past few thousand years have often used coercive force to punish heretics and infidels.  But there have also been periods in which monotheistic believers have advocated religious liberty--such as New Testament Christianity during its first 300 years.  Christian advocates of religious toleration and liberty like Roger Williams have defended this as a revival of the New Testament teaching, which might also be seen as a revival of the religious liberty enjoyed by foragers in the state of nature.  The liberalism of religious liberty and toleration could then be understood as a return both to original New Testament Christianity and to the evolutionary state of nature.  (I have written about this here.)


REFERENCES

Barnett, Randy E. 2016. Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (New York: Broadside Books, 2016).

Eliade, Mircea. 2004. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. 2nd paperback edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hamburger, Philip A. 1993. "Natural Rights, Natural Law, and American Constitutions." Yale Law Journal 102: 907-60.

Munoz, Phillip Vincent. 2015. "Church and State in the Founding-Era State Constitutions." American Political Thought 4: 1-38.

Peoples, Hervey C., Pavel Duda, and Frank W. Marlowe. 2016. "Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion." Human Nature 27:261-82. doi10.1007/s12110-016-9260-0

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

Singh, Manvir. 2017. "The Cultural Evolution of Shamanism." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, forthcoming. doi.org/10.1017/50140525X17001893

West, Thomas G. 2017. The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and the Evolution of Religion and Morality in Bogota

 

                                           The Church on Monserrate Peak Overlooking Bogota

The Statue of Jesus Christ on Monserrate Overlooking Bogota

                                                               Universidad de los Andes

                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Recently I returned from Bogota, Colombia, where I participated in a conference at the Universidad de los Andes organized by the International Adam Smith Society (IASS).  The University of the Andes is located near the old colonial center of Bogota at the foot of Monserrate Mountain.  The University was founded in 1948 as the first private nonsectarian (that is, not affiliated with the Catholic Church) and politically neutral university, which was designed to emulate an American liberal arts university.  It is now regarded as the best university in Colombia and one of the best in all of Latin America.

Bogota is a huge city of almost 10 million people.  At an elevation of 8,400 feet, it is the largest city in the world above 8,000 feet elevation.  Overlooking the Bogota savannah, Monserrate peak rises to 10,300 feet.

IASS has posted online the program for the conference, which has links to the papers.

I was a commentator on Ivan Sternick's paper: "Society as a Moral Order: Adam Smith's Theory of Sociability as a Response to Mandeville and Rousseau."  I also presented my own paper: "The Three Waves of Adam Smith's Darwinian Liberal Moral Theory."  I have previously posted some portions of my comments on Sternick's paper, in which I suggested that Smith was an esoteric writer who agreed with Mandeville's satiric criticism of Christian ethics.

The responses to my paper were more favorable than I had expected.  There was almost no criticism of my argument that Smith's theory of the moral sentiments has been confirmed and deepened by Darwinian evolutionary moral psychology.  The commentator on my paper--Dirk Schuck--agreed with my argument, although he admitted that he knew little about the evolutionary science to which I was appealing.

I did detect, however, that some people were reluctant to accept my claim about Smith as an esoteric writer who hid his irreligious skepticism from his religious readers, but who momentarily dropped the cloak of esotericism when he praised David Hume as a "wise and virtuous man," which revealed his secret teaching that religious belief was not necessary for the morality of philosophers like Hume and Smith.

Smith does often appeal to God as the moral lawgiver and divine judge of the world, particularly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  But the Adam Smith scholars have long debated the question of whether Smith was sincere in his religious teaching or whether he taught this only to satisfy his religious readers, while he himself was a skeptic like his friend Hume.

Shinji Nohara surveyed this debate in his paper--"Adam Smith as a Moralist"--and then he took the side of those who claim that Smith was a sincere religious believer.  "For Smith," Nohara concluded, "the Deity provided human beings with the moral distinction between right and wrong," and thus "only the Deity could be the implicit foundation of morality" (22-23).

But people questioned Nohara as to why he relied so heavily on Smith's "atonement passage" for explaining "Smith's theodicy" (14-22).  The problem is that Smith removed this passage from the 6th and final edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was published in 1790, a few weeks before Smith's death.

This passage, which had appeared in the first five editions of TMS, was the only place in all of Smith's writing where he spoke of how man facing the judgment of God in the afterlife must appeal not to God's justice, because no man can be justified by his past conduct, but to God's mercy; and to win that mercy, man needs "the most powerful intercession," so that "the most dreadful atonement has been paid for our manifold transgressions and iniquities" (TMS, 92).  Without explicitly mentioning Jesus Christ, this sounds like a statement of the core doctrine of orthodox Christianity that the original sin of all mankind makes it impossible for men to earn salvation without the intercession of Jesus who was crucified to provide atonement for the sins of mankind.  Moreover, it was only here and in one other passage that Smith has used the word "revelation," which was the one word commonly understood to mean the communication of knowledge by divine or supernatural means (TMS, 92, 128).  But Smith eliminated both of these passages in the 6th edition of TMS.

Many of Smith's Christian readers quoted the "atonement passage" as evidence that Smith was a devout Christian who accepted the New Testament teaching about how the sacrifice of Christ on the cross had redeemed mankind from original sin.  So when some of these Christian readers noticed that Smith had dropped this passage from the 6th edition, they were disturbed.  For example, William Magee, the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, published a book of Discourses on the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement and Sacrifice, in which he quoted from Smith's atonement passage as showing that a distinguished philosopher had endorsed the Christian doctrine of Atonement; but then he expressed his surprise that Smith had spoken of Hume the infidel as "a perfectly wise and virtuous man," in the 1776 letter on Hume's life and death.

After someone pointed out to Magee that Smith had withdrawn this atonement passage from the last edition of TMS, Magee added a footnote to his book attributing Smith's withdrawal to "the infection of David Hume's society . . . one proof more . . . of the danger, even to the most enlightened, from a familiar contact with infidelity," and then Magee again quoted Smith's offensive praise of Hume in his obituary letter.  D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie have told this story in an Appendix to their Oxford/Liberty Fund edition of TMS (383-401).

These two actions of Smith that his Christian readers found offensive--his praise of Hume as wise and virtuous and his withdrawal of the atonement passage--are the two moments when Smith revealed his secret teaching--that while religious belief is necessary to reinforce the morality of the religious man, it is not necessary for the morality of irreligious skeptical philosophers like Hume and Smith.

Although I call this Smith's "secret teaching," there are a few passages in TMS where Smith comes close to stating this openly.  Consider, for example, this passage:

"When the general rules which determine the merit and demerit of actions, come thus to be regarded as the laws of an All-powerful Being, who watches over our conduct, and who, in a life to come, will reward the observance, and punish the breach of them; they necessarily acquire a new sacredness from this consideration.  That our regard to the will of the Deity ought to be the supreme rule of our conduct, can be doubted of by nobody who believes his existence. . . ."

"It is in this manner that religion enforces the natural sense of duty; and hence it is, that mankind are generally disposed to place great confidence in the probity of those who seem deeply impressed with religious sentiments.  Such persons, they imagine, act under an additional tie, besides those which regulate the conduct of other men.  The regard to the propriety of action, as well as to reputation, the regard to the applause of his own breast, as well as to that of others, are motives which they suppose have the same influence over the religious man, as over the man of the world.  But the former lies under another restraint, and never acts deliberately but as in the presence of that Great Superior who is finally to recompense him according to his deeds.  A greater trust is reposed, upon this account, in the regularity and exactness of his conduct.  And wherever the natural principles of religion are not corrupted by the factious and party zeal of some worthless cabal; wherever the first duty which it requires, is to fulfil all the obligations of morality, wherever men are not taught to regard frivolous observances, as more immediate duties of religion, than acts of justice and beneficence; and to imagine, that by sacrifices, and ceremonies, and van supplications, they can bargain with the Deity for fraud, and perfidy, and violence, the world undoubtedly judges right in this respect, and justly places a double confidence in the rectitude of the religious man's behaviour" (TMS, 170).

Notice how the "religious man" who believes in the existence of God is set apart from "other men" or "the man of the world."  While some men are motivated to be moral purely by "the natural sense of duty," the religious men are motivated by this but also by "an additional tie"--their belief that moral laws are the sacred laws of the "Great Superior."  But this works only as long as the religious men follow the "natural principles of religion," which are concerned with the obligations of morality, rather than "frivolous observances," "sacrifices," or "ceremonies," that have nothing to do with morality.  And notice the implication that "the man of the world" can be naturally motivated to be moral even though he is not a religious believer.  Notice also that the "natural principles of religion" enforce the same "natural sense of duty"--the same natural morality--that is recognized by the irreligious "man of the world."

We should also see here two more important features of Smith's account of religion and morality.  First, this natural religious morality does not depend on any supernatural revelation.  Second, the enforcement of this natural religious morality does not depend on any political enforcement of a religious establishment that would deny religious liberty and toleration.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "revelation" denotes "the communication of knowledge by divine or supernatural means."  As I have already indicated, the two passages in TMS that used the word "revelation" were withdrawn by Smith in the 6th edition.  Thus, Smith is silent about the reason/revelation debate between those who seek truth by purely natural reason and those who seek truth from supernatural revelation, but Smith is clearly on the side of reason rather than revelation.  That is why he withdrew the passage on atonement, because the doctrine on atonement depends on faith in the revelation of the supernatural miracle of Christ's Resurrection.  In the original passage on atonement, Smith had said that "the doctrines of revelation coincide, in every respect, with those original anticipations of nature" (TMS, 92).  But that cannot be true, because the doctrine of Atonement depends on faith in the revelation of a supernatural truth.

The publication in 1779 of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, three years after his death, turned the secret debate over reason and revelation into a public debate, which indicated the success of the Liberal Enlightenment in making esoteric writing unnecessary.   Previously, I have written about how this allowed Darwin and Leo Strauss to openly debate reason and revelation here, here, here, here, and here.

Smith refused to consider the possibility that religious faith could be based on the supernatural truth of revelation.  Instead, like Hume in his Natural History of Religion, Smith explained religious belief as a natural psychological propensity for anthropomorphic projection of human mental experience, so that human beings imagine that there are invisible spirits with minds like their own.  And since human beings have moral sentiments and passions, they imagine that these divine beings have the same moral sentiments and passions.  In this way, religion sanctions morality as sacred law, and thus provides religious support for a natural sense of moral duty (TMS, 163-64).  (I have written previously about this Humean and Darwinian explanation of religious belief as rooted in evolved human nature here and here.)

Smith's refusal to take seriously any claim of faith in the supernatural truth of revelation explains why in his account of the religious supports for morality, he is silent about the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity (love).  As Thomas Aquinas explained it, the natural virtues (such as justice, temperance, courage, and prudence) are directed to man's natural happiness, and they can be known by his natural principles.  But the supernatural or theological virtues (as identified by Paul in the New Testament) are directed to man's supernatural happiness--his eternal salvation and knowledge of God--and this surpasses human nature, because it requires divine revelation: these theological virtues "are not made known to us, save by Divine revelation, contained in Holy Scripture" (Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 62, a. 1).

Since Smith has no interest in the possibility of supernatural happiness, he is only concerned about how religious belief might support those natural virtues that promote natural human happiness in our earthly life.  For Smith, religious belief seems to be both supportive and subversive of our moral sentiments.  The religious belief that God shares our natural moral sentiments can strengthen our morality.  But religious fanaticism can promote violence and intolerance taht corrupt our morality.  What we need, then, Smith argues in The Wealth of Nations, is "that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established" (793).  This could be achieved if government dealt equally and impartially with all religious sects, and everyone was free to choose his own religion.  There might be a free marketplace of religions, with hundreds or thousands of different religious sects competing for believers; and if no sect was allowed to use violent coercion against any others, the competition for believers could induce "philosophical good temper and moderation," such as one could see in Pennsylvania, where the Quakers had established religious liberty, and the law does not favor one sect over others.  Thus did Smith embrace John Locke's policy of religious toleration, but unlike Locke, Smith did not deny toleration for atheists.

As I toured Bogota and read about the history of Colombia, I wondered about whether the evolution of religion in Bogota might illustrate Smith's natural history of religious morality.  My wife and I travelled to Zipaquira, a city about 30 miles outside of Bogota, to see the Salt Cathedral, an underground cathedral carved out of salt in an old salt mine.  I later learned that one of the oldest archaeological sites in Latin America--El Abra--is located on the eastern edge of Zipaquira.  This is a rock shelter and cave system for hunter-gatherers that is dated at around 12,400 years BP (Gomez Mejia 2012).  They lived by hunting mammals such as deer, fishing, and gathering plants.  There is also evidence within this occupation zone that beginning about 5,000 to 3,000 years BP, the people here began cultivating and domesticating plants.

There is some evidence of religiosity in their funeral burials, which include artifacts associated with offerings.  As I have indicated in some previous posts, the evolutionary history of religious belief and morality beginning with hunter-gatherers is complicated.  The anthropological evidence--as surveyed by John Lubbock and others--suggested to Darwin that our earliest human ancestors in foraging societies had no belief in any omnipotent, moral God who was "a Creator and Ruler of the universe."  In that sense, they had no moralistic religion.  But they did show the nascent religiosity of animism--the belief that all of nature is animated by unseen spiritual agencies--although these unseen spirits did not actively intervene in the lives of foragers to enforce morality.  At the earliest stage of religiosity, Darwin observed, "anything which manifests power or movement is thought to be endowed with some form of life, and with mental faculties analogous to our own" (Darwin 2004, 116-117).  This anthropomorphic animism as the original source of religiosity was also suggested by Smith: "Those unknown intelligences which they imagine but see not, must necessarily be formed with some sort of resemblance to those intelligences of which they have experience" (TMS, 164).

Recent surveys of the studies of hunter-gatherer societies have shown that some form of animism is universal.  Belief in an afterlife and shamanism are almost universal--in about 80% of these foraging bands (Peoples, Duda, and Marlowe 2016; Sanderson 2018).  Of course, the hunter-gatherers that have been studied by anthropologists over the past 200 years are not necessarily direct analogues or direct descendants of our Pleistocene ancestors, but they do at least provide a window onto those earliest human ancestors (Marlowe 2005).  Belief in an afterlife is the belief in the survival of the individual personality after death (Bering 2006).  Shamanism is the belief that a shaman has access to an unseen world of spirits, that he can enter into a trance state in a ritual to practice divination and healing, and thus mediate between the earthly and spirit worlds (Eliade 1964; Singh 2018).

Notice that this animistic and shamanistic religiosity of our original hunter-gatherer ancestors does not provide any religious enforcement of morality, because the beings in the unseen spirit world are not omnipotent and moral deities actively concerned with monitoring human life.  Only very recently in human evolutionary history, Darwin observed, have human beings come to believe in an all-seeing and moral God, and this has contributed to the advance of morality.  This cultural evolution was driven by group warfare in which groups that were cohesive because of their shared religious belief in moralistic Gods would tend to prevail over groups that lacked such religious beliefs.  And now this belief in morality as rooted in reverence or fear of God is "most important, although not necessary."  Now it is possible for people to live by their own moral judgment.  "Man prompted by his conscience, will through long habit acquire such perfect self-command, that his desires and passions will at last yield instantly and without a struggle to his social sympathies and instincts, including his feeling for the judgment of his fellows" (Darwin 2004, 138-40, 682; Darwin 1959, 94-95).

In this way, according to Darwin, the evolutionary history of morality and religion has passed through three stages.  First, in the earliest and longest stage, human hunter-gatherers organized their lives in small bands through social instincts such as kinship and reciprocity, without any need for a religiously grounded morality.  Then, as human beings formed large, civilized societies, they formulated through cultural evolution religious traditions of believing in an omnipotent and providential God who enforced a moral law for human beings.  Now, it is possible for many human beings to live by the inner monitor of their conscience (or what Smith identified as the "impartial spectator") without the necessity for believing in a God who rewards the good and punishes the bad.  Over the past 40 years, the growing research in the evolutionary psychology of morality and religion has largely confirmed Darwin's account (Norenzayan 2013, 2014; Norenzayan et al. 2016).

One can see these three stages in the history of morality and religion in the history of Bogota and Colombia.  When my wife and I toured the Gold Museum (Museo del Oro) in Bogota, we saw beautiful displays of pre-Columbian gold artifacts from all regions of Colombia.   Many of these artifacts were from the Muisca, the indigenous people of the Bogota savannah before the Spanish conquest.  The Muisca replaced the El Albra Culture sometime between 1,000 years BC and 500 AD.  The Muiscas moved moved from being hunter-gatherers to becoming sedentary farmers.  When the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, the Muisca were organized as a tribal confederation with each tribe ruled by a chief.  The tribes united in the face of a common enemy under the command of one ruler.  They fought against the Spanish, but they were completely defeated by 1540.

The moral and political order of Muisca civilization was grounded in their religion.  There is a good animated video about the religious creation story of the Muisca.

They worshipped a variety of deities at sacred sites and in temples, with priests performing sacrifices.  Their gods included a Supreme Being who had created light and Earth, and gods and goddesses of the Moon and the Sun..  Their rituals included consuming psychotropic plants such as coca.

All of this was swept away after the Spanish conquest when the Spanish established the Catholic Church as the state church for their Latin American colonies.  After the struggle for independence from Spanish colonial rule, Simon Bolivar captured New Granada in 1819; and he was elected the first president of the Republic of Gran Columbia.  The Catholic Church was still the state church, but there was a continuing debate over whether the Church should remain the established church.  

Colombian politics has been dominated by two political parties--the Conservatives and the Liberals--and while the Conservatives have been in alliance with the Roman Catholic Church, the Liberals have wanted a separation of church and state.  In 1848, Ezequiel Rojas, a leading liberal thinker, wrote an influential newspaper article supporting the candidacy of Jose Hilario Lopez as president, which is generally seen as the beginning of the Liberal Party in politics.  In his article, Rojas declared:

". . . the Liberal Party wants a government organized to benefit the governed.  It wants a republic, a truly representative system, an independent congress, an executive branch with powers limited by law and responsible for an independent judiciary, good laws, and an unmistakably national and American executive power with impartial justice for all, which by its actions takes into account nothing but the public benefit.  It wants all this so the obedient will not be slaves to those who govern; so there can be true liberty; so we can liberate ourselves from theocratic government; so those of Granada can truly ensure ownership of themselves and their properties" (Rodriquez and Ramirez 2022, 148).

This began a long liberal period dominated by the Liberal Party in government--from 1848 to 1880--during which the liberal effort to "liberate ourselves from theocratic government" led to assaults on the power of the Catholic Church and to constitutional guarantees for religious liberty in the Constitution of 1863.

But then when the Conservatives gained office in 1880 with the presidency of Rafael Nunez, they overturned many of the liberal reforms, including a restoration of the Catholic Church's supremacy.  In 1888, the Conservative Party government signed a concordat with the Vatican that began by declaring:

"The Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion is the religion of Colombia; the public powers recognize it as an essential element of social order, and they are obliged to protect it and make it respected."

A hundred years later, this was reversed by the Colombian Constitution of 1991, which disestablished the Roman Catholic Church and declared (in Article 19) that "freedom of religion is guaranteed."

In travelling around Bogota today, one can see evidence for a deep Christian, and particularly Catholic Christian, culture.  The Catholic Cathedral and the giant statue of Jesus standing on the peaks of Monserrate overlook the entire city.  In the Cathedral on Monserrate, there is statue of Jesus behind the altar that has been associated with many miracles.  People come from far away to make a pilgrimage to there, where masses are conducted every day.  On Sundays, the Cathedral is full.  Around the city, my wife and I went into some of the beautiful old churches, and there were always some people there praying or attending mass.

Surveys indicate that 90% of Colombians identify themselves as Christians, 70% identify as Catholic.  But less than 30% of the Catholics regularly attend mass.  It seems, therefore, that while Christian religious practice is greater in Colombia, and in most of Latin America, than is the case in North America and Europe, even there the tendency to secularization has been strong.

I am reminded of Smith's letter to Alexander Wedderburn (August 14, 1776), in which he reports on Hume's decline towards death.  Smith said that Hume told him that he was trying to come up with some excuse to give to Charon to delay his being carried into Hades on Charon's boat: "At last I thought I might say, Good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of people; have a little patience only till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches shut up, and the Clergy sent about their business; but Charon would replay, O you loitering rogue; that wont happen these two hundred years; do you fancy I will give you a lease for so long a time?  Get into the boat this instant."

Was this Hume's joking way of suggesting that he foresaw the churches being shut up in maybe 200 years--towards the end of the 20th century?  Can't we see a lot of evidence that that decline in fervent religious belief and practice has been occurring in many parts of the world?

And if so, can we also see that the moral order of society has endured without much support from religion?  Can we see that Smith was right that for some people, perhaps even for many people, the impartial spectator of conscience, as part of our evolved human nature, can take the place of God as moral monitor?  

Can we be good without God?

Or should we take seriously the complaints of the Catholic Integralists and the Christian Nationalists that in fact secularizing liberal societies are showing moral decline and social disorder, and that the only way to restore moral order is to establish theocratic states that will enforce Christian morality?

REFERENCES

Bering, Jesse. 2006.  "The Folk Psychology of Souls."  Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (5): 453-498.

Darwin, Charles. 1958.  The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Ed. Nora Barlow. New York: Norton.

Darwin, Charles.  2004. The Descent of Man. New York: Penguin.

Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gomez Mejia, Juliana. 2012. "Analysis of Bone Markers of Stress in Populations of the Middle and Late Holocene of the Savannah of Bogota, Colombia." Colombian Journal of Anthropology 48: 143-68.

Marlow, Frank W. 2005. "Hunter-gatherers and Human Evolution." Evolutionary Anthropology 14: 54-67.

Norenzayan, Ara. 2013. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Norenzayan, Ara. 2014. "Does Religion Make People Moral?" Behaviour 151: 365-84.

Norenzayan, Ara, A. F. Shaariff, W. M. Gervais, A. K. Willard, R. A. McNamara, E. Slingerland, and Joseph Henrich. 2016. "The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39: 1-65.

Peoples, Hervey, Pavel Duda, and Frank W. Marlowe. 2016. "Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion." Human Nature 27: 261-82.

Rodriguez, Sebastian, and Gilberto Ramirez. 2022. "Liberalism in Colombia." Econ Journal Watch 19 (1): 142-65.

Sanderson, Stephen K. 2018. Religious Evolution and the Axial Age: From Shamans to Priests to Prophets. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Singh, Manvir. 2018. "The Cultural Evolution of Shamanism." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41: 1-61.

The Fall of Orban's "Illiberal Democracy." Fukuyama Was Right.

 

        Viktor Orban with J. D. Vance and Rod Dreher in Washington, D.C., November 2025

     

                                                                        Peter Magyar

"It's nice to have a strong man running your country."  That's what Donald Trump once said about Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary.  One indication of his political strength is that he has been Prime Minister since 2010, which makes him the longest serving Prime Minister in Europe.

But that could be ended by the parliamentary elections coming up on April 12, because polling shows that Peter Magyar is leading Orban in the race to become the next Prime Minister.  Magyar is a former Orban loyalist in Orban's Fidesz party who now leads the opposition party Tisza.

If Orban loses, that would signal the collapse of the international right-wing movement for populist nationalism because Orban's illiberal regime in Hungary has been the model for that movement.  That explains why Trump and Vance have endorsed Orban for reelection, and why Vance has been visiting Hungary to support Orban.  There are reports that Vance will appear with Orban at a campaign rally in Budapest a few days before the election.  Trump and Vance are desperately worried that Orban's defeat would be a crushing blow to the international MAGA movement.

But Magyar's victory would be just the final nail in the coffin for Orban's regime, which has been in decline for years now.  There are at least three signs of that decline.  Orban's policies for strengthening Hungary's families have failed to raise the female fertility rate.  Orban's promotion of a "Christian Hungary" has failed to revive Hungarian Christianity.  And, finally, huge numbers of Hungarians have been voting with their feet against Orban's regime by emigrating to Western European countries that offer them a better life than what they can have in Hungary.  The fact that these emigrants are going to those European nations that rank high on the Human Freedom Index confirms the argument of Francis Fukuyama that most human beings today regard the liberal social order that secures human freedom as the best regime.

THE ILLIBERAL STATE

As a young student and lawyer, Orban was originally a liberal anti-communist.  In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Alliance of Young Democrats (with the acronym FIDESZ), which challenged the Hungarian Young Communist League.  In 1989, Fidesz became a political party that supported the overthrow of the communist regime in 1990.

In 1989, Orban studied at Oxford University on a research fellowship funded by George Soros, the Hungarian-born philanthropist whom Orban now denounces as the conspiratorial funder of liberal causes in Eastern Europe.

In 1990, he left Oxford early so that he could return to Hungary to run in the first post-communist parliamentary elections.  He was elected a Member of Parliament, and he became a leader in Fidesz.

In 1994, after Fidesz lost the parliamentary elections badly, Orban decided that if he was to have any chance of becoming Prime Minister, he would have to move Fidesz away from its center-liberal position and towards the sort of right-wing populism that had propelled Silvio Berlusconi to become prime minister of Italy (Higgins 2025; Szelenyi 2022).  He was willing to change his political principles if he thought that would help him win votes and gain political power.  And, indeed, he became prime minister in 1998.  But he lost the general election in 2002.

In 2010, Orban returned as prime minister, and this time, he wanted to make sure that he would remain in power for many years.  He began silencing or taking over media outlets that he considered hostile to Fidesz.  He had the government fund an elaborate propaganda apparatus serving Fidesz.  He wrote a new constitution that would make it difficult for his opponents to win control of the parliament.  He removed the civil service protection for many government employees, and replaced them with his loyalists. He also took control of the courts so that he could appoint judges loyal to him.  

All of this supported what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2002, 2010) have called "competitive authoritarianism."  Somewhere between a fully authoritarian regime and a fully democratic regime, a competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

Under competitive authoritarianism, opposition forces can compete seriously for power.  And, occasionally, the opposition can win an election, and the incumbents lose.  But this regime is still not fully democratic, because the ruling party uses its power over the government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.

These three regime types are distinguished by the kind of countervailance--power checking power--that they allow.  A fully authoritarian regime allows little or no countervailance.  A fully democratic regime allows strong countervailance.  A competitive authoritarian regime allows weak countervailance.

In a speech in 2014 that attracted attention around the world, Orban explained that "the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state."  He said that this would break away from the principles of liberal democracy that had dominated the global regime (including Hungary) from 1990 to 2010.  Beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008, he argued, it had become clear that the Western liberal social, economic, and political order based on the principle of individual freedom had failed.  This created an opening for newly emerging global powers based on illiberal nationalism--nations like Singapore, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.

Previously, Orban observed, the liberal states in Western Europe had been organized around the liberal principle of individual freedom: "With regard to the relationship between two people, the starting point of the liberal organization of society is based on the idea that we have the right to do anything that does not infringe on the freedom of the other party."  Here Orban paraphrased the definition of freedom adopted by John Locke--freedom as not being constrained or coerced by others, so long as one does not infringe on the same freedom for others (see Locke, Second Treatise, para. 57).

Notably, Orban did not completely reject this liberal principle of freedom.  But he did insist that this would not be the central organizing principle of the illiberal state.

What is happening in Hungary today can accordingly be interpreted by stating that the prevailing political leadership has today attempted to ensure that people's personal work and interests, which must be acknowledged, are closely linked to the life of the community and the nation, and that this relationship is preserved and reinforced.  In other words, the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed.  And so in this sense, the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.  It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.

So Orban's illiberal state would secure some individual freedom, but there must also be a "national approach," because "the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community."  Here you see why the conservative communitarian critics of liberal individualism--like Patrick Deneen, Roger Scruton, and Rod Dreher--have all made their pilgrimages to Budapest to honor Orban and receive his praises for their promotion of Orbanism in the United States and the UK (Szelenyi 2022).  Dreher moved to Budapest in 2022 so that he could be a part of Orban's propaganda operation--particularly, the Danube Institute, a state-backed think tank for disseminating Orban's ideology (Worth 2026).

I should say, however, that the Danube Institute does show some commitment to the liberal principle of open debate and freedom of thought.  Their mission statement includes this passage:

Our primary audience is the universe of centre-right intellectuals, political leaders, and public-spirited citizens. But we will also engage our counterparts on the democratic center-left in vigorous and principled public debate on as many occasions as possible and appropriate. We hope to draw upon the best minds of our day across national boundaries in international forums.

A recent example of their commitment to the liberal principle of intellectual freedom and debate is their event debating the question "Is Liberalism a Threat to Religious Liberty?"  One of the invited participants was Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, who is best known for his philosophic and legal arguments for gay rights.  His response to the proposed question was to suggest that this was a weird question, because since religious liberty originated as a principle of Lockean liberalism, to suggest that liberalism could threaten religious liberty was nonsensical.

If you peruse the website of the Danube Institute, you can see their concern for thinking through all of the themes of Orban's illiberal state, two of the most prominent being Christianity and family life.

DECLINING CHRISTIANITY

In 2018, Orban declared that Hungary must be a "Christian democracy," and "a Christian democracy cannot be liberal" (Orban 2018).  A Christian democracy cannot be liberal because "it gives priority to Christian culture" over all other cultures, and therefore it denies the liberal principle of multiculturalism.

But Orban was vague about what exactly he meant by "Christian culture."  Most confusing was his claim that in affirming the importance of Christian culture, he was not affirming any Christian doctrines of faith.

Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith--in this case Christian religious articles of faith.  Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation.  Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected.  Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them.  These include human dignity, the family, and the nation--because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations.  Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities.  This--and not the protection of religious articles of faith--is the duty of Christian democracy.

Orban's statement is incoherent.  On the one hand, he says that a Christian democracy must be illiberal.  On the other hand, he says that a Christian democracy must not enforce any religious articles of faith and must secure the freedom of all "faith communities," which sounds like the liberal principle of religious liberty and toleration.  

Christian democracy would be truly illiberal if it meant some form of Christian integralism or theocracy (like medieval Catholicism or 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony).  But clearly Orban does not want that.  If he doesn't want the state to enforce any religious doctrines, that sounds like liberal democracy.  Indeed, Rod Dreher has said that authentic Christianity "can't exist if liberal democracy goes away" (Worth 2026, 36).  And as Koppelman pointed out, when the Danube Institute defends religious liberty, they're defending a fundamental principle of Lockean liberalism.

Moreover, if Christianity supports "the preservation of nations," as Orban says, does that mean the preservation of nations with diverse religious traditions?  Europe has some predominantly Muslim countries--such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey--and in some cases, these Islamic traditions go back to the Middle Ages.  So it would seem that Orban's nationalism would have to allow for Islamic nationalism.  But then Orban's Christian democracy has been interpreted by many of his supporters as a defense of Christian Europe against Islam.

Another problem here is that by insisting that the state must not enforce any religious doctrines, Orban implies that religious freedom should include freedom of thought for atheists.  The fundamental religious doctrine of monotheism is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth" (the Apostle's Creed), and if Orban does not think the state can enforce belief in that doctrine, then he must think that atheists are free from persecution.

So in saying that Christian democracy supports Christian culture but not Christian doctrines, Orban implicitly endorses the kind of atheistic religiosity promoted by conservatives like Roger Scruton, who want to enjoy the religious feelings that sacralize a national culture but without the religious belief in the real existence of God outside the human mind.  (The vacuousness of ritualized Christian culture without Christian belief was manifest three years ago in the coronation of King Charles III as the Christian King of Great Britain.)

But in the long run, believing in the importance of Christian culture without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines fails to slow the decline of that Christian culture.  We can see that in Orban's Hungary.

According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the majority of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  In the census of 2022, 42.5% identified themselves as Christians, 1.3% as non-Christian religious believers, 16.1% as not religious, and 40.1% refused to answer.  Since it's unlikely that religious believers would refuse to answer the question, those who did refuse are probably not religious.  That means, then, that 56.2% of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  And since most of the houses of worship in Hungary reportedly have few people attending, we can assume that most of those who identify themselves as religious are not devout believers.

If creating a Christian democracy in Hungary means that at least a majority of Hungarians are serious Christians, then Orban has failed to achieve that.

But that doesn't mean that Christianity cannot rebound in Hungary.  The number of Catholics and Reformed Protestants has dropped by about one half in 20 years.  But Hungary's fastest growing Christian church is the Hungarian Faith Church, which is a charismatic Pentecostal form of Christianity.  With its headquarters in Budapest, it has over 150,000 members, of which over 70,000 are in Hungary.  In a nation of 9.8 million people, those are impressive numbers when you consider that this church was founded as recently as 1979 by seven Hungarians.  Notably, Orban's son Gaspar Orban converted in 2014 to the Faith Church, and he has even become a minister in the church who claims to have received revelations from God and witnessed miraculous healings.

As I have argued, Christianity originated as a charismatic or Pentecostal form of religion rooted in animistic shamanism.  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.

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.

                              A Fresco of the Pentecostal Dove, Symbolizing the Holy Spirit

As long as we have liberal social orders with religious liberty, we will have free markets in religion that will allow the more charismatic Pentecostal religions to gain a growing share of the market because they appeal to the natural human desire for religious transcendence in making contact with the spiritual world through shamanic practices.  Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, with over 600 million adherents worldwide.  So while Christianity in general might be in decline today in Hungary and elsewhere, we can expect a continuing revival of charismatic Christianity.

DECLINING FAMILIES

One reason why Christian culture is so important for Orban is that he sees it as supporting the traditional family with lots of children.  And that's important because families having and rearing many children resolves what Orban has said (in a 2017 speech) is "the greatest existential question for European civilization"--Will the drastic decline in Europe's population continue until there are hardly any Europeans left?

In that 2017 speech, Orban lamented that the population of Hungary had declined from 10,709,000 in 1980 to 9,799,000 in 2017, so that in less than 40 years, Hungary had lost almost a million people, which was more than all the casualties that Hungary sustained in World War II.

Orban announced that "Making Families Strong Again" would be the motto for the Hungarian government's family policies directed to raising the birth rate.  He explained:

It is important to highlight that the restoration of natural reproduction is a national cause; and it is not just one national cause among many, but the national cause.  And it is also a European cause: not just one European cause among many, but the European cause.  The goal of the Government of Hungary is to raise our birth rate to 2.1 per cent by 2030, which would be a replacement rate for our society.  At present, this figure stands at 1.5 per cent.

The technical term for the birth rate is the "total fertility rate" (TFR), which is a measure of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for the ages 15-49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year.  So this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year, and if she survived throughout all her childbearing years. 

If there were no mortality until the end of a woman's childbearing years, the replacement level of TFR would be around 2.0.  The replacement fertility rate is close to this for most industrialized countries.  For the global average, the TFR at replacement is about 2.33.  Here "replacement" means maintaining the present level of population into the future.

The drop in fertility rates that has occurred in most of the wealthier nations over the past hundred years has been called "the demographic transition" by demographers.  In the most developed societies today, the rich and powerful tend to have low fertility rates, and it's the lower class people who have higher fertility rates.  So as societies become wealthier, the total fertility rate for the whole society tends to drop, and over the past 70 years, it has dropped below replacement levels.

I have argued that one can explain this in Darwinian terms through the "embodied capital theory of human life history."  In the developed societies, the economic and social success of children depends ever more on their acquired technical skills and educational training, so that as adults they can compete for jobs that require special talents and knowledge. Consequently, rearing successful children in such societies requires that parents make increasingly costlier investments in the education of their children.  And as the cost of children has thus increased, the quantity of children demanded by parents has decreased, because parents now express their natural desire for parenting successful children by investing more resources in fewer children, thereby choosing quality over quantity in their children.

Moreover, for human beings to be able to invest so much in their children, they must first invest time and energy in their own education and career development and in the search for suitable mates.  Consequently, successful people in modern developed societies must often delay their marriage and having children, and thus the average ages for getting married and having the first child have risen.  When women do this, they sometimes reach the end of their reproductive years, and so produce fewer children than they would have desired.  It's likely that one reason for the total fertility rate falling below replacement levels is that couples who desire two or three children delay marriage and reproduction for so long that the women reach the end of their physiological fertility sooner than they had expected.  Then couples must rely on fertility treatments or adoption to satisfy their parental desires.

Orban has been trying to reverse this tendency to lower fertility through governmental policies that promote marriage and large families.  Hungary has a large per-child tax deduction that gets progressively larger with the second and third child.  Mothers of two or more children are exempt from paying income taxes for the rest of their lives.  Women with three or more children can have all of their student loan debt cancelled.  Families with home mortgages can have a large portion of that debt paid by the government in proportion to the number of their children.  The government has built or renovated infant day care centers around the country, and day care costs are heavily subsidized by the government.  The government has also built "family-friendly" infrastructure in the cities, such as beautiful playgrounds and parks, where parents can take their children to play.

But as of now, it appears that all of these pro-family policies have failed to raise the fertility rate.  In 2011, when Orban first became prime minister, Hungary had Europe's lowest TFR at 1.23.  By 2021, it had risen to 1.61.  But in 2025, it was back down to 1.27--essentially, the same all-time low as in 2011.

It is possible that policies designed to incentivize having more children may have had the opposite effect.  For example, providing tax exemptions for mothers of two children might provide a work incentive for those mothers.  European women are career-minded, and giving them tax exemptions could be reinforcing the idea that they should be earning more money, which directs the mother to invest more time and energy in her career rather than in her children.

When it comes to housing, Hungary's policy of subsidizing mortgages could be increasing the demand for housing but not the supply, which creates bidding wars that make homes less affordable.

Now let's consider how Hungary compares with the United States with respect to population growth and the fertility rate.  Unlike Hungary, the population of the U.S. has been growing steadily for over a hundred years.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the U.S. has grown every year since 1900, except for one year during the Spanish flu epidemic, growing at an average of 0.85% per year since 2000.  As of today, the population of the U.S. is 342,415,867, which makes it the third largest national population in the world, behind only India and China.

This is surprising since the TFR for the U.S. is only 1.79, which is substantially higher than Hungary's 1.23, but it's still below the replacement level of 2.1.  What explains the growing population despite the below-replacement TFR is immigration.  Consider these calculations for the U.S. from the U.S. Census Bureau:

One birth every 9 seconds

One death every 10 seconds

One international migrant (net) every 97 seconds

Net gain of one person every 45 seconds

This shows that the mistake make by Orban's Hungary has been in limiting immigration into Hungary.  If Hungary had allowed more freedom of movement of immigrants into Hungary, comparable to that allowed by the U.S., Hungary could have had an increasing population.

Now, of course, if Trump's policies for closing the U.S. borders and deporting immigrants continues, this could reverse the century-long trend towards increasing population and bring about the sort of depopulation crisis that has afflicted Hungary.

This supports my argument for open borders and freedom of movement.

DECLINING FREEDOM LEADS TO DECLINING POPULATION

I have pointed to two causes of Hungary's declining population--low fertility rates and low rates of immigration into Hungary.  But there's a third cause: the emigration of Hungarians out of Hungary.

According to Hungary's Central Statistical Office, a total of 367,515 Hungarians have officially left the country during the 15 years that Orban's Fidesz government has been in power.  This is actually an underestimation because foreign statistics often record nearly twice as many new arrivals from Hungary as Hungarian authorities do departures.  Another reason for this being an underestimation is that many Hungarians living abroad retain a Hungarian address.  Adjusting for these factors, there could be as many as 640,000 Hungarian emigrants who have left the country.  Notably, most of these emigrants are aged 25-49 years old--the prime age for people who could contribute to the economic and social life of Hungary.

What's most interesting about these emigrants is that prefer to emigrate to countries that rank high on the Human Freedom Index.  This should not be surprising if one recognizes, as I have argued, that countries ranking high in freedom tend to provide the best conditions for people to live good lives because they have wider opportunities for freely pursuing their happiness.

Here are the five most popular destinations for Hungarian emigrants, with their Human Freedom Index ranking in parentheses: Austria (22), Germany (17), UK (19), Netherlands (9), and Switzerland (1).

By comparison, Hungary ranks 67th out of 165 countries.  Previously, Hungary ranked much higher at 26th in 2009 the year before Orban's Fidesz came to power.  Hungary's rankings have dropped steadily during Orban's time as prime minister.

So Hungarians are voting with their feet against Orban's illiberalism and for freedom secured in a liberal social order.  Declining freedom thus leads to declining population.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AT THE END OF HISTORY?

This failure of Orban's illiberal Christian democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's famous argument in 1989 for "the end of history," in which human beings show their natural desire for the freedom--both economic and personal freedom--that comes from liberal democracy.

Actually, the appeal of the liberal principle of individual freedom is so powerful that even Orban cannot reject it completely.  As we've seen, Orban accepts the importance of securing that Lockean liberal conception of freedom in any good regime, although this cannot be the central organizing principle of his "illiberal state."  Consequently, Orban's "illiberal state" is not absolutely illiberal.  Someone like Rod Dreher (2023) can even defend Orban as the "guardian of liberal freedoms"!

We can see this in Hungary's rankings in the Human Freedom Index.  Under the rule of Orban's Fidesz party from 2010 to the present, Hungary's freedom ranking has fallen from 26th to 67th out of 165 countries.  But notice that a 67th ranking puts Hungary well above the world average.  Most countries rank lower.  Here are some examples of the lower ranking countries:  Mexico (91), Indonesia (92), India (110), Kuwait (113), China (149), Russia (152), and Iran (164).

If you look at how Hungary ranks in the various categories of personal freedom and economic freedom, where 10 is the highest possible score, you will see that Hungary ranks low in "rule of law" (4.9), "expression and information" (5.4), and "size of government" (6.1).  But Hungary ranks high in "freedom of movement" (9.9), "security and safety" (9.6), and "freedom in relationships" (8.8).

Thus, Orban's illiberal democracy is really very liberal, but not liberal enough for those Hungarians who have voted with their feet against Orban by leaving the country, and for those who will vote against him in the coming election.

REFERENCES

Dreher, Rod. 2023. "Orban: Guardian of Liberal Freedoms." The Critic, November.

Higgins, Andrew. 2025. "Viktor Orban's 'Propaganda State' Is Starting to Show Cracks." New York Times, October 12.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Orban, Viktor. 2014. "Speech at the 25th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 26. Tusnadfurdo (Baile Tusnad), Romania.

Orban, Viktor. 2017. "Speech at the 2nd Budapest Demographic Forum."  May 25.

Orban, Viktor. 2018. "Speech at the 29th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 28.