"Disclosure Day": The Religious Longings Behind Spielberg's Belief in ETI Visitations

 

                                                  

                                               The Final Official Trailer for Disclosure Day

                          Steven Spielberg's Extended Interview with CBS Sunday Morning

                                                       Steven Spielberg's AP Interview

                                  The Trailer for The Age of Disclosure (2025) Documentary

                                  Three Declassified Videos of UFOs Released by the Pentagon

Stephen Spielberg's new movie, Disclosure Day, has had its first weekend in the theatres.  Spielberg directed and produced the movie.  He also wrote the story that was turned into a screenplay by David Koepp.  The music is by John Williams.

This is the fourth of Spielberg's science fiction movies on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) visiting the Earth.  It was preceded by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET, the Extraterrestrial (1982), and The War of the Worlds (2005).  So this theme has stretched across Spielberg's entire movie-making career.

Disclosure Day has two sides to it--action and contemplation.  The New York Times reviewer--Manohla Dargis--describes the action side as "a feature-length chase involving some likable, enigmatically connected people who are racing toward a shared destiny while evading powerful forces."  But she also sees the contemplative side of the movie--"sober interludes that touch on belief, reason, trauma, self-governance, the common good, and higher powers."

This shows the cinematic genius of Spielberg in combining thrilling action that appeals to a popular audience and contemplative moments that appeal to those who like pondering the big questions of human life in the universe.  Dargis conveyed the popular excitement in the movie when she reports that she scribbled in her notebook I am having so much fun.  But she also saw in the movie that Spielberg "has something to say about the world and our place in it."

These two sides are presented in the final trailer, which moves between fast-paced action scenes from the movie and clips of Spielberg speaking about how the disclosure of ETI visitations to the Earth could deepen our understanding of the cosmic meaning of life in the universe.

Here I'll begin by saying something about the active and contemplative sides of this movie.  Then I'll raise four questions suggested by the movie.

ACTION

Spoiler alert: I'm recounting the plot here.

The movie begins in the middle of the chase that will stretch throughout the movie.  Cybersecurity specialist Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O'Connor) has been chased down by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the head of the Wardex corporation, who is leading his Wardex agents in trying to capture Daniel.  Daniel escapes and goes into hiding at a convent with his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson).  

Later, we learn that Daniel has stolen a piece of extraterrestrial technology and extensive files of photos and videos of human-alien contact collected by the Pentagon dating back to 1947.  The Wardex Corporation is a secret arm of the U.S. government charged with holding these files and making sure they are never revealed to the public, because it is believed that if they were ever made public, this would create a mass panic reaction around the world that would undermine all social order.

From the beginning of the movie, we hear news reports in the background of military and political movements around the world that are leading to a nuclear World War III provoked by North Korea.  We see mobs of people at gas stations and grocery stores stocking up supplies in preparation for a global nuclear holocaust.

In Kansas City, television meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is preparing for work when a cardinal flies into her home, briefly observes her, and then flies away.  This stirs up her latent psychic abilities for intuitively understanding the thoughts and experiences of others and for speaking in languages she has never learned.  During a live weather broadcast, she begins speaking in an unknown language.  Footage of the broadcast goes viral.  People at Wardex identify the language as extraterrestrial, and so Wardex agents quickly go to Kansas City to chase down Margaret.  After she is hospitalized by people who fear she has had some kind of mental breakdown, Margaret is almost captured by Wardex agents, but she intuitively understands that the agents are out to kill her, and she escapes and goes into hiding.

Daniel reveals the stolen files to Jane.  He explains that Wardex has been experimenting on captive aliens to understand their mental and biological powers, and they have also been reverse engineering their technology so that humans can use it.  

And indeed, Noah Scanlon has learned how to use an alien device to give himself telepathic powers.  He uses this to get into the mind of Jane (Daniel's girlfriend) to discover that they are hiding in a motel.  Jane escapes with another alien device.  But Daniel is captured.

Margaret has visions of Daniel and follows him to the secret site where the Wardex agents are holding him.  Margaret and Daniel escape when Margaret uses her empathetically telepathic powers to persuade the agents to stand back and let them leave.  But one of the agents has not been controlled by Margaret.  He chases down Margaret and Daniel and rams his car into theirs, so that their car is lodged into the side of a passing train.  Daniel pulls Margaret out of the car just in time for them to climb onto the train and make their getaway.

Margaret and Daniel are rescued by a team of Wardex employees who have decided to become whistleblowers under the leadership of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who has been working with Daniel.  Hugo has brought Margaret and Daniel into a secret warehouse.  There's a reconstruction of Margaret's childhood home in the warehouse.  Hugo tells her that to understand what has been happening to her, she will have to go into the house and recover her suppressed memories of how the ETIs contacted her as a child.  Inside the house, Margaret remembers that she and Daniel were abducted by ETIs as children and subjected to experiments that gave them their supernormal powers.  She also learns that the unusual animals that have appeared to them throughout their lives are ETIs who assumed animal form so that they could observe them without scaring them.

Margaret also remembers that as a child she and Daniel entered a Gingerbread House, as if they were Hansel and Gretel of the Grimms' fairy tale.  My wife and I were confused by this scene when we saw it because it didn't seem to fit into the story.  But now I think it evokes a lot of themes in Spielberg's movies.  Children are open to the magic of fairy tales in a way that adults are not.  And for that reason, they are more open to empathetic contact with ETIs than are adults.  Remember that in Spielberg's ET, it's the children who befriend ET, and they save ET from the adults from the government officers who want to capture and exploit ET.  Moreover, the story of Hansel and Gretel, like many of the Grimm fairy tales, is indeed a very grim story of how children are vulnerable to being betrayed by adults--parents who abandon them in a forest to starve and witches who want to eat them--and therefore children must be clever and resilient in helping one another to escape the harm from adults.  

We also know from Spielberg's The Fabelmans that he suffered from his parents' divorce and his mother's betrayal of his father by having an affair with his father's best friend.  We also know from that movie that Spielberg became a "fable-man" through making movies as a way of working through some of his childhood problems.  He waited until his parents died to make The Fabelmans.

But let's get back to the ending of Disclosure Day.  Margaret and Daniel, along with the whistleblowers, break into Margaret's television studio in Kansas City to make a public broadcast of "Disclosure Day"--dumping all the photographic and video files that Daniel has stolen into a broadcast that can be sent out to news broadcast outlets around the world.  Noah Scanlon and his agents try to blow up the power grid for the television studio.  But Jane arrives and gives her special extraterrestrial device to Margaret, who uses it to restore the power.  Noah feels defeated, and he decides to stand back and watch.

The television transmission spreads around the world's broadcasting systems.  We see people in all countries stunned by the images of extraterrestrial contact with humans and the work of governments in covering this up.  We also see news that as an effect of this broadcast, political and military leaders are pulling back from nuclear war.

The whistleblowers roll into the television studio a cage that has one of the extraterrestrials, who is freed from the cage.  He is a humanoid figure--a large head on a thin bodily frame with two arms and two feet and walking bipedally.  He whispers something to Daniel, who passes it on to Margaret.  Margaret prepares to broadcast the message to the world by saying, "Listen."

CONTEMPLATION

That's the end of the movie--leaving us wondering what the message from the extraterrestrial could be.  But I'm sure many audience members were like me in picking up the hints in the movie that the extraterrestrials have been empathetically watching humanity become ever more divided by conflict and now moving towards nuclear war.  Presumably, the message from the extraterrestrials to the world would be the message that Spielberg himself has intimated--that the discovery that the universe is filled with extraterrestrial intelligent life that feels empathy for all of humanity should move us to extend that circle of empathy to make peace rather than war on the Earth.

Spielberg suggests this message in what he has said about this movie in the final trailer and in various broadcast interviews over the past few weeks.  In the trailer, he says:

I am much more inclined now than when I made Close Encounters to believe that we are not the only intelligent civilization in the universe.  How will this change us?  I think for the better.  It will remind us of the capacity for empathy and that there is something bigger out there than just ourselves.  I used to say to myself wouldn't it be wonderful if all of this turned out to be true?  Wouldn't it be wonderful for people to know all of this is true?

In his recent interviews, Spielberg has said that his sense of wonder about the universe--about what there is "out there"--began in his childhood.  He tells the story of sleeping in his bed in his New Jersey home when he was somewhere around 6-7 years old.  His father woke him up and told him he had to go somewhere in the middle of the night.  He was confused by this.  His father took him to a park where people had spread out blankets so that they could lay down and look up at the Perseus meteor shower.  Spielberg remembers this wonderful sky show of falling stars.

He also remembers his father's collection of science fiction magazines of the 1950s like Analog, which started his interest in science fiction.

Then, after his parents moved to Arizona, he had a telescope in his back yard where he could study the stars and the planets in the night sky.

Spielberg has said that what convinced him that eyewitness sightings of UFOs were conclusive evidence for ETI visitations of the Earth were the series of articles in The New York Times beginning in 2017 about how the Defense Department was hiding the evidence from the public, which led to testimony by military officers to Congress in 2023 about a secret government program to cover up this evidence (Cooper, Blumenthal, and Kean 2017).

Spielberg is silent, however, about the fact that in response to a congressional mandate, the Pentagon issued a 63-page report in 2024 that investigated all of the government programs for studying UFOs from 1945 to the present and concluded that these UFO sightings provided no clear evidence for ETI visitations of the Earth (Barnes 2024).  Now, of course, Spielberg might say that this report is part of the government's continuing cover-up of the truth.  But to substantiate that charge, he would have to show that there really is conclusive evidence for ETI visitations.

EVIDENCE?

Do you see a triangle here?  If you do, your brain is filling in the gaps in information to "see" a triangle where none exists.  This is the famous "Kanizsa illusion," named after the Italian artist and psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa.  This could explain some of the triangular-shaped UFO sightings that Spielberg takes as evidence for ETI visitations.  (Here my thinking has been influenced by Michael Shermer's new book Think [2026: 198-226].)

Leslie Kean was one of the co-authors of the 2017 New York Times article that so impressed Spielberg.  She is a journalist who has been one of the leading advocates for UFO sightings as evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence visiting the Earth.  In 2010, she surveyed this evidence in her best-selling book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.  Remarkably, she began the book by admitting that roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained:

Examples of phenomena sometimes mistaken for UFOs are weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planet Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!  Yes, the vast majority of reports can usually be explained by one of the above, but of course it's only the ones that can't that we're interested in (12).

So she has to point to the few cases that cannot be explained in one of these ways as demonstrative evidence for UFOs of extraterrestrial origin.

She begins her survey of the evidence "on very solid ground" with "one of the most vivid and well-documented UFO cases ever"--a two-year wave of UFO sightings in Belgium that began on November 29, 1989.  Over two-thousand cases were reported.  Belgian Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer described the first night of the wave: "Hundreds of people saw a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately a hundred and twenty feet and powerful beaming spotlights, moving very slowly without making any significant noise but, in several cases, accelerating to very high speeds" (17).

As Shermer suggests, there might have been three sources of light in the sky (such as small planes) that appeared triangular to people on the ground as their minds filled in the space between the lights, as happens in the Kanizsa illusion.  Kean does not consider this possibility.

Moreover, it's strange that with thousands of people reporting these eyewitness sightings, almost no one took a photograph of what they saw, even though film cameras were widely available to Belgians at that time.

Kean does report, however, that on April 4, 1990, at 10:00 p.m. in the town of Petit-Rechain, one person with a camera did take a photograph, which was published in a French magazine.  Kean reproduces that photograph in her book.  Here it is:

Kean reports that experts carefully studied the original color slide, and their major findings were:

• No effect of infrared radiation.
• No indication of any tampering with the slide.
• The camera was stable, but the craft was moving slowly and had approximately a 45-degree bank when the picture was taken.
• The rotation of the spotlights did not occur around one central point.
• The middle light is very different from the three other lights.
• The lights are positioned symmetrically with respect to the structure of the craft.

She also reports that the experts concluded that the picture could not have been faked (30).  This became one of the most famous pieces of evidence for extraterrestrial UFOs.

But then in 2011, one year after the publication of Kean's book, a man by the name of Patrick Marechal explained in an interview for a Belgian TV channel how he had created the photo as a hoax: he cut a piece of styrofoam into a triangle, painted it black, embedded flashlights in each corner, hung it from a string, and then photographed it. 

HAPLESS ALIENS?

In many of Disclosure Day videos of ETIs, we see ETI corpses being recovered from spaceship crash sites.  If the ETIs are so superior in their intelligence and their technology, why are they so often crashing into the ground?  It doesn't make sense.

And why is it so easy for the humans to capture them alive, hold them in captivity, and torture them through brutal experimentation?  The ETI at the end of the movie is brought into the TV studio in a cage.  If he's so smart and so powerful, why did he allow this?  Why didn't he kill the humans holding him captive?

This meek submission of the ETIs to their human captors in this movie is especially strange because of the contrast to Spielberg's War of the Worlds, in which the ETIs are aggressive in conquering and killing the humans.

In his recent interviews, Spielberg has said that he's changed his mind--that he no longer accepts H. G. Wells' depiction of extraterrestrials as bellicose enemies of humanity.  But he is vague in explaining why he changed his mind.  He does invoke his theme of empathy.  But he doesn't explain why we should assume that extraterrestrial intelligences will be empathetic in their caring for human beings--particularly, when they're so badly mistreated by human beings.

A THREAT TO RELIGIOUS FAITH?

Disclosure Day also raises the question of whether the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life coming from distant planets beyond the Solar System would threaten religious faith, and particularly Christianity.  I have written about this question in previous posts.

The question is whether the plurality of worlds in the universe can be reconciled with the central doctrines of Christianity--particularly, the Story of Creation and the Story of Salvation.

The Genesis account of Creation says nothing about extraterrestrial life in the universe, although it does of course speak of divinities and spiritual beings (such as angels) as living in the heavens.  The Earth is identified as the only planet in the universe.  And the Moon is the only moon in the universe.  The stars do not have any planets orbiting around them.  Moreover, Genesis seems to present a geocentric cosmology with Earth at the center.  That's why Galileo got into so much trouble with the Church in defending the Copernican heliocentric universe.

But then we could say that God gave us the Bible not as a science textbook but as a book to tell us what we need to know about salvation.  Or, as Galieo put it, the Bible tells us "not how the heavens go," but "how to get to heaven."

In Disclosure Day, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), the Abbess of the Monastery of St. Clare of the Dawn, is asked about whether the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would contradict the Creation Story.  She responds by asking why God would "make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us," which seems to be speaking for Spielberg.  At the end of the movie, when the "Disclosure" is broadcast around the globe, we see Sister Maura watching the broadcast, and she smiles in an expression of wonder at God's creation.

And yet, many Christians--such as the creationists affiliated with Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis--will argue that the Bible clearly implies that the Earth is unique in the universe--that it was made for humans to inhabit and call home--and that God did not create alien life on any other planet (Faulkner 2015).

There is another theological question here that never comes up in Disclosure Day--whether the existence of alien life would be compatible with the Story of Salvation.  This is the story of how Adam's sin put a curse on all humans, how Jesus was incarnated to become the Savior, and how His resurrection creates the promise of redemptive salvation for all of humanity.  If Christians discovered that there really were extraterrestrial intelligences on distant planets, wouldn't they have to wonder how they could be saved?  Did Jesus go to those planets to save them?  Or is it possible that they don't need to be saved because Adam's curse did not affect them?

A SURROGATE FOR RELIGIOUS FAITH?

Rather than being a threat to religious faith, belief in extraterrestrial intelligences can be understood as a form of religious faith.  Disclosure Day suggests that in many ways.  For example, Margaret shows many of the traits of the Christian mystic--such as speaking in languages that she does not know.  On the Day of Pentecost, Christians filled by the Holy Spirit spoke in foreign languages that they did not know.  Margaret can do this because she is filled by the ETI Spirit.

If there is a natural desire for religious transcendence--as I have argued--then we should expect that even many atheists will long for some kind of religious experience--or what I have called atheistic religiosity.  This has been manifested in recent years in some surveys of religious belief where a growing number of people identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious."  They don't belong to any traditional religious institutions, and they don't believe in traditional religious doctrines.  But they still long for some kind of spirituality.  On Rebecca Goldstein's "mattering map," these people belong to the continent of the "transcenders": they believe that they matter because they matter to some transcendent intelligence in the cosmos.  For traditional religious believers, that transcendent intelligence is God or some kind of divinity.  For the believers in UFOs, that transcendent intelligence is the extraterrestrial intelligence that comes from a distant planet.

Clay Routledge is a psychologist who has studied the belief in extraterrestrial intelligence as an expression of the "religious mind" (Routledge 2017; Routledge et al. 2017).  Routledge argues that many studies have shown that traditional religious belief satisfies our natural longing for meaning or significance in the universe.  When we think about how small and unimportant we seem in the grand scheme of things, we look for some way to give our lives some cosmic significance.  Religious belief satisfies that longing by giving us stories about how supernatural beings are watching over us, and how they will rescue us from death and extinction. 

Studies have shown that traditional religious believers are less inclined to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence than are atheists and agnostics.  The likely explanation for this is that since atheists and agnostics lack the religious faith that gives their lives some cosmic significance, many of them will choose to believe in UFOs and alien visitors, because then they can say that "we are not alone" in the universe, and there are superintelligent beings out there who are watching over us, who feel empathy for us, and who will save us from extinction by delivering their message to all of us from a TV studio in Kansas City.

That would explain the revelatory way Spielberg speaks about Disclosure Day: "Wouldn't it be wonderful for people to know all of this is true?"

REFERENCES

Barnes, Julian E. 2024. "Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence of Alien Cover-Up." New York Times, March 8.

Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. 2017. "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program." New York Times, December 16.

Dargis, Manohla. 2026. "'Disclosure Day' Review: Spielberg Plays His Greatest Cosmic Hits." New York Times, June 11.

Department of Defense. 2024. "The Department of Defense All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)."  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense.

Faulkner, Danny. 2015. UFOs and ETs: A Biblical and Cultural Exploration of Aliens. Petersburg, KY: Answers in Genesis.

Kean, Leslie. 2010. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Routledge, Clay. 2017. "Don't Believe in God? Maybe You'll Try UFOs." New York Times, July 21.

Routledge, Clay, Andrew A. Abeyta, and Christina Roylance. 2017. "We Are Not Alone: The Meaning Motive, Religiosity, and Belief in Extraterrestrial Intelligence." Motivation and Emotion 41:135-146.

Shermer, Michael. 2026. Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Love, Death, and Redemption: The Atheistic Religiosity of Roger Scruton and Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"

 

On December 3, 2019, Viktor Orban presented the Hungarian Order of Merit to Roger Scruton in London.  Scruton would die five weeks later from lung cancer.

In his speech honoring Scruton, Orban praised him for his work in the 1980s aiding the anti-communist underground in Central and Eastern Europe, which included Hungary.  Orban concluded the speech by saying: "He was and is a loyal friend of the freedom-loving Hungarians, who knows that this freedom relies on nation states and Christian civilization."

To identify Scruton as a supporter of "Christian civilization" is disturbing to those of us who have argued that Scruton belonged to a Kantian conservative tradition of atheistic religiosity.  Atheistic religiosity is for those who want the "magic of religious feeling" as an expression of the human mind's "religious instinct," but without having to believe in the real existence of God independent of the human mind.  They don't believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion.  And yet they want to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines.  They believe that God is dead, but they also believe that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption if they are to escape the nihilism that comes from the death of God.

I suspect that many, if not most, of the conservatives who promote "Christian civilization"--including Orban--are really Christian atheists who believe a Christian culture supports the moral and political order of a nation, but without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines.  The flimsiness of this fake Christianity explains why Orban's promotion of Hungary as a Christian nation has failed to stop the decline of Christianity in Hungary.

I have been prompted to think more about this while reading Scruton's interpretation of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2004).  I have been doing this in preparation for attending a concert performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that includes the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde along with Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

REDEMPTION IN TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

Let's start with a brief synopsis of the story as Wagner tells it.

Set in the Celtic Middle Ages, the opera begins with Tristan, a knight of Cornwall, escorting Isolde, the daughter of the King of Ireland, to Cornwall where she is to marry King Marke, Tristan's uncle.  During the journey, Isolde is filled with rage and resentment towards Tristan for killing her fiancé, Morold, in battle.  Despite her anger, when Tristan stares into her eyes--which is marked musically by Wagner's "Look" motive--she is drawn to him, and their complex relationship unfolds throughout the opera.

Act 1.  Isolde, furious at her fate, wishes for revenge against Tristan.  She recalls how she had speared his life when he was wounded and disguised as Tantris.  As they approach Cornwall, she demands that Tristan drink a cup of atonement with her.  However, Brangane, Isolde's maid, secretly substitutes the poison with a love potion, causing both Tristan and Isolde to fall deeply in love with one another.

Act 2.  The love between Tristan and Isolde deepens, but they are caught in a web of duty and betrayal.  Tristan is torn between his loyalty to King Marke and his love for Isolde.  Their secret affair is discovered, leading to a confrontation that highlights the tragic nature of their love.  The act culminates in a passionate duet where they express their longing and despair.

Act 3.  The final act sees Tristan wounded in battle and longing for Isolde.  He dies in her arms, and Isolde, overwhelmed by grief, follows him into death.  The opera concludes with Isolde's poignant Liebestod (love-death) where she transcends the physical world, symbolizing the idea that true love can only be fully realized in death.

I will pass over the details of Scruton's meticulous interpretation of this opera and jump to his conclusions. 

Scruton argued that Wagner's agenda as an artist was "nothing less than the redemption of humankind," which he accomplished in Tristan and Isolde.  According to Scruton, Wagner saw that the yearning for redemption was a religious yearning, an expression of the religious instinct that is universal to human beings, and that it could be fulfilled only in "otherworldly renunciation."  But Wagner "set out to discover a redemption that needs no god to accomplish it," because he would "make man his own redeemer" (3).  He would show "what redemption could mean, when detached from every promise of a life after death" (14).

Wagner himself once described Tristan and Isolde as a story of "endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living--longing, longing unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, a languishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption--death, surcease, a sleep without awakening" (29).

Thus could Wagner's opera stir religious feelings of redemption in his audience without requiring any belief in religious doctrines (like the existence of God and the eternal afterlife).  In this way, Scruton insisted, Wagner proved "that religion could live again in art and did not need God for its survival," and "that man can become holy to himself with no help from the gods" (190, 196).

But I would say that at best what Wagner proved is that his operatic art could induce a fake emotion of religious redemption that could not really redeem human beings.  After all, how can human beings be redeemed through "otherworldly renunciation" if they believe that there is no "otherworld" beyond this world?

THREE POSITIONS ON REDEMPTION

The fake redemption of atheistic religiosity is only one of at least three possible positions that musical artists can take on redemption.  

A second position is the real redemption that can come through a musical composition like Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion or Handel's Messiah, which induce religious emotions of redemption but also teach religious doctrines of redemption by eternal salvation.  The members of the audience who are not Christian believers can feel the power of those religious emotions.  But the Christian believers in the audience can also understand the promise of their redemption because they know that their Redeemer really exists, and He will raise them from the dead to eternal life in Heaven.

A third position that a musical artist can take on redemption is that there is no need for redemption from life because life--even with its suffering, vulnerability, and mortality--is inherently good.  And for that reason, we can calmly accept the end of life in death as the completion of our life's journey.  That position is artistically conveyed in Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

In 1948, Strauss was 84 and composing his last music before his death the next year.  His Four Last Songs were for soprano and orchestra.  He wrote to Kirsten Flagstad to express his wish that she would be the soprano for the world premiere of these songs.  And indeed the premiere occurred in London in 1950, after his death, sung by Flagstad with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler.  (Remarkably, Flagstad had sang as Isolde at Covenant Garden, London, in 1936.)

As he composed this music for a soprano, Strauss probably heard the voice of his wife Pauline de Anha, who had sung as a professional soprano.

The lyrics for the four songs are poems.  The first three by Herman Hesse, the fourth by Joseph Eichendorff.

In the first, Fruhling ("Spring"), the soprano's voice rises up as she dreams of trees and sky, and the flute evokes birdsong.

In the second, "September," there is an allegorical passage from life to death.  The first stanza reads:

The garden is mourning,

the rain sinks coolly into the flowers.

Summer shudders

as it meets its end.

It ends with Summer closing "its large eyes grown weary."

In the third song, Beim Schlafengehen ("While going to sleep"), the soprano yearns to forget all thoughts in sleep.  The first stanza reads:

Now that the day has made me so tired,

my dearest longings shall 

be accepted kindly by the starry night

like a weary child.

In the final song, Im Abendrot ("In the twilight"), we hear about an old couple at the end of life.  It begins with an orchestral depiction of sunset, with two trilling flutes representing a pair of larks ascending into the sky (the souls of the old couple).  We can imagine that here Strauss was thinking of his long and happy marriage with Pauline de Anha, who would die in 1950 only eight months after his death.  Here in this song, they are contemplating the end of life together.

The light fades as the song unfolds, and then the soprano asks, in the last line, Ist dies etwa Tod? ("Is this perhaps death?") 

The orchestra then whispers the "transfiguration" theme from Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, which he had written 60 years before.  Strauss is saying goodbye by wistfully suggesting that he has come full circle from his early life to his end.

Although "transfiguration" might suggest the need for redemption, the tone and meaning of Strauss's Four Last Songs are very different from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.  Strauss's songs convey not an unquenchable longing for redemption from life (like that of Tristan and Isolde) but a serene completion of life in the old couple's calm acceptance of their inevitable ending of their lives together: "Is this perhaps death?"

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.

Conservatism and Religion: Moots, Koons, and the Problem of Multiple Orthodoxies

The Darwinian conservatism of the permanent things recognizes that the desire for religious transcendence is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  And since the good is the desirable, we can judge the goodness of a social order by how well it secures the conditions for human beings to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires, including the natural desire for religious transcendence.

As I have indicated in previous posts, the Catholic Integralists say that a Catholic Integralist regime is the best social order because it enforces belief in the one true religion in a Catholic confessional state and thus satisfies the natural desire for religious understanding.  But they are mistaken because they fail to see that the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  And there has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement.  Surveying the entire history of Christianity, Wikipedia has lists of over 50 schisms and over 40 heresies.  Whatever the Holy Spirit might have whispered to popes, bishops, and priests has not been clearly heard by others.

The evolutionary science of religious pluralism supports John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every Church is orthodox to itself," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians, except perhaps the belief that Jesus is the Messiah; and therefore, there is no one orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government.  

For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty and religious toleration is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness.  It does this by allowing the cultural evolution of religion in a free marketplace of religion, so that churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market. 

And yet metaphysical conservatives must scorn this Lockean liberal understanding of religious liberty and toleration because they believe that a conservative form of religion requires the legal enforcement of the traditional orthodoxy of the one true church.  The fundamental problem with this position is that it denies the reality of religious pluralism and mistakenly assumes that all believers can agree in identifying the one truly orthodox church.

This problem was evident at the Kirk Center conference panel on "Conservatism and Religion."  Glenn Moots (Northwood University) argued that for American and British conservatives Protestantism must be the only truly orthodox tradition.  But then he was followed by Robert Koons (University of Texas-Austin) who argued that the Catholic Church was the only truly orthodox church for conservatives, and the Protestant Reformation was the source of the three great errors that led to modernity--antipathy to medieval scholasticism, radical intellectual individualism, and radical secular egalitarianism (the "priesthood of all believers").  

There was no discussion between Moots and Koons on the panel.  So there was no attempt to resolve the obvious contradiction between their arguments.  

But from listening to their presentations and reading their texts, I could see suggestions of where they might find some common ground.  Koons conceded that it was possible to be a conservative Protestant who would deny the three errors of the Protestant Reformation: specifically, Koons identified the magisterial Protestants (Lutherans, Anglicans, and Presbyterians) as Protestants who could reject the three errors.  At the same time, Moots spoke in favor of the magisterial Protestants, as opposed to the Pietistic and evangelical Protestants.

But then Koons and Moots did not explain how it is possible to have more than one magisterium.  Isn't the magisterium by definition the authoritative Christian orthodoxy of the one true Church?  Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines "magisterium" as "the teaching function of the Roman Catholic Church."

Neither did Koons and Moots explain whether or how multiple magisteria can coexist peacefully.  As traditionally understood, the magisterium of the Catholic Church requires the Church to enlist the help of governmental authorities in persecuting heretics, which includes all Protestants.  At the same time, the magisterial Protestant reformers wanted to persecute all Protestant dissenters and Catholics as heretics.  Do Koons and Moots agree with this magisterial rejection of religious liberty?

Would Koons say that the Vatican II statement on religious liberty in Dignitatis humanae is heretical, and therefore that the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is heretical?  Actually, some traditionalist Catholics say exactly that.  For example, Michael Davies (in The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty [1992]) argues that the Catholic Church fell into heresy at Vatican II when it was corrupted by the influence of the "Americanist" heresy promoted by Father John Courtney Murray, S.J.  Would Koons agree? 

Are Koons and Moots saying that a conservative view of religion requires the legal enforcement of one church's orthodoxy over another's?  Are they committed, therefore, to perpetual religious warfare?  If not, then don't they have to endorse religious liberty and toleration as the best response to the fact of religious pluralism--to the fact that "every church is orthodox to itself"?  In that case, they would have to accept a Darwinian conservatism that secures the freedom of individuals to pursue the satisfaction of their natural desire for religious transcendence.

And, finally, to reiterate a point I made in a previous post, it was baffling to me that while both Koons and Moots praised Scruton for his conservative understanding of religion, they were silent about Scruton's atheism.  Scruton's atheistic religiosity is most evident in his writing about Richard Wagner: religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology.  Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning.  And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption.  The incoherent self-deception of such atheistic religiosity is ultimately self-defeating.  How can a fake religiosity satisfy our religious longings when we know it's fake?

Is this the dark side of conservatism and religion--that many of the conservatives who are most emphatic about the human need for religion are actually atheists?