Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.
"The Areas of the Continents and Regions Are Determined by Estimations of the Comparative Percentage of Inhabitants" (Goldstein 2026:xiii). SBNR on the Transcenders continent stands for "spiritual but not religious." You can click on the image to enlarge it.
In her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinks through the central paradox of the human condition, which she expresses by saying: "We are creatures of matter who long to matter."
We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us. And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death. We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives. We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do.
We have to feel that we matter if we are to feel our lives worth living. Goldstein observes:
We don't want to live if we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never truly matter. The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are "I don't matter." It's no accident that the URL for the US Hotline for Suicide Prevention is https://youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org (2).
I have not been able to find this website. But I have found a suicide prevention organization named "You Matter" at https://www.youmatterawareness.org.
Previously, I have written about Goldstein's book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. In that book, she suggests that the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.
But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.
And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.
FOUR CONTINENTS ON THE MATTERING MAP
In her new book, Goldstein identifies these people who rely on religious belief to demonstrate that their lives really matter as "transcenders." But if you look at Goldstein's Mattering Map, you'll see that transcenders are one of four continents that represent the four kinds of "mattering projects." These are four ways of answering the question--Do I matter? The transcenders say, I matter because I matter to the spiritual presence that is the transcendent ground of the universe. The socializers say, I matter because I matter to others. The heroic strivers say, I matter because I can achieve a standard of excellence in my chosen area of striving. The competitors say, I matter because I matter more than others.
Each of those four continents is divided into regions that represent subgroups within each category. The different kinds of transcenders correspond to different religious movements, such as Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. The socializers differ in the people they identify as the others to whom they matter: so, for example, some socializers want to matter to their friends and lovers, while others want to be famous and thus matter to many people who are not known to them. Heroic strivers differ in their chosen areas of achievement--intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical. Finally, competitors differ as to whether they compete as individuals against other individuals or as members of a social group against other groups.
Notice that most of the transcenders continent is covered by the "Axial Age" religions identified by Karl Jaspers--the major religious traditions that originated in roughly the same period, from 800 to 200 BCE (202-206). The "folk/traditional" category would include shamanism, the original evolutionary seed of all religious experience.
Goldstein claims that since the Axial Age, for "much of our history," almost all human beings have been transcenders. The ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) introduced a "secular approach" to mattering, which was lost during the Middle Ages, but then renewed by modern secular philosophers such as Spinoza and Locke (204-205).
Notice that the dimensions of the four continents suggest that about one-third of human beings today are transcenders, while two-thirds are not. And of those that are not transcenders, about half are socializers, who think they matter because they matter to others.
FOUR PEOPLE WHO MATTER
Goldstein fills in her Mattering Map with narratives of the lives of people who represent the different kinds of mattering projects. So, for instance, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is an example of a transcender. For a long time, he worried about the insignificance of his life in the cosmos: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified." But then, in one night, he had a mystical experience of being in the presence of God and Jesus Christ. He wrote down some notes about his experience on a scrap of paper, in which he concluded: "Let me never be separated from Him. He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel: Renunciation, total and sweet. Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director. Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on earth. May I not forget your words. Amen" (200-201). From that moment, he knew that his life mattered because he mattered to God--the divine creator of the infinite immensity of spaces that had previously terrified him.
Angela Rubino is an example of a socializer who found the purpose of her life when she became a cult follower in Trump's Make America Great Again movement in 2020. She lives in Rome, Georgia, in the congressional district represented by Majorie Taylor Greene. Before 2020, she had never felt that she mattered as a citizen. But then she became captivated by Donald Trump because he seemed to be speaking for her. She became one of the leading political activists for the MAGA movement in Georgia. She was determined to find evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through fraudulent vote counting. She was sure that the county election board in Rome had destroyed many of the ballots cast for Trump. So one night, she jumped into the dumpster outside the election board office. She found two plastic bags crammed with paper shavings. She took the bags back to her home where she tried to put the strips of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle that would show voting ballots for Trump that had been shredded.
She said that her being part of the MAGA movement made her feel "recognized and even important" for the first time in her life. She had found her purpose. She said that her wondering about the purpose of her life began when she was eight years old, sitting in the back seat of her mother's car on the way to a religion class.
The thought just came into my head. I was thinking, "What are we doing this for? What are we doing any of this for if we're just going to die? You die, and it's over. So, what's the point?" I felt afraid. Afraid to the point of not wanting to think about that anymore.
Speaking to a journalist with the Washington Post, she confessed:
Sometimes I'm like, what if I'm wrong? It crosses my mind. Then I ask God: If I'm doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out. Because I really want to understand what the point is. This can't be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home. That as humans, we're nothing (19-20).
Goldstein quotes this as showing the most melancholic thing about the longing to matter--we can never be sure that we have chosen the right way to make our lives matter. But even if we can't conclusively know that we matter, we must somehow appease the longing to matter--perhaps by becoming a political cult follower--if we are to get on with our lives.
William James is an example of a heroic striver whose striving was for intellectual achievement in philosophy and psychology. But for many years as a young man, James could not identify the project that would make his life worth living, and consequently, he fell into long periods of persistent depression. He suffered such a disgust for life that he would lie in bed for days contemplating suicide. In 1860, at the age of 18, he became interested in art, and he spent a year studying with the prominent artist William Morris Hunt. But he decided art was not his calling, declaring, "Nothing is more contemptible than a mediocre artist." In 1861, at age 19, he entered Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard. But after three years there, without getting a degree, he switched over to the Harvard Medical School in 1864, at age 22. He received his medical degree in 1869, at the age of 27. But he never practiced medicine. And shortly after leaving the Medical School, he fell back into a severe depression, in which he felt a "horrible fear of existence" (127-132).
Finally, in 1872, at age 30, he began to teach at Harvard, first teaching comparative anatomy and physiology, and later teaching psychology and philosophy. At that point, it seemed that he had found his life's calling, although he continued to endure occasional bouts of depression. The publication of his book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890 made James the founder of American psychology. The publication of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in 1902 made him the first evolutionary psychologist of religion. The publication of his book, Pragmatism, in 1907 made him one of the founders (along with Charles Sanders Peirce) of the pragmatist tradition of philosophy.
These intellectual achievements arose from his conviction that he could decide what matters in life, and in that decision he could make his own life matter. As he once said, he could "believe in my individual reality and creative power." Or, as he said in his lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?": "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
Frank Meeink Tells His Story--From Neo-Nazi to Faithful Jew
Frank Meeink is an example of a group competitor who thought that his life mattered because he belonged to a neo-Nazi group of white supremacists who mattered more than the targeted groups--particularly, Blacks and Jews--whom he hated. He grew up in the brutal neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where he faced daily violence not only on the streets but in his home, where his stepfather regularly beat him and called him a retard.
Then, at age 14, spending a summer with relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he came under the influence of a cousin who was a neo-Nazi skinhead, who persuaded him to join a white supremacist group. Later, he explained:
They knew what to do and say to snag the interest of a fourteen-year-old half-Irish, half-Italian kid from Philly whose real dad was an addict, whose stepdad was an asshole, whose mom was indifferent, whose school was a war zone, and whose only real desire was never to feel like a fucking victim again: they gave a shit about me. The Lancaster County white supremacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become. Then they told me I had a destiny. They told me I could become a warrior. They told me all I had to do was look in the mirror and see the truth: I was white and that was all that mattered. . . . For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered (261).
By the end of the summer, he had earned the red shoelaces in his combat boots by having shed blood. When he returned to Philadelphia, he organized his own neo-Nazi group, and he became a charismatic leader. But at one point, he had so many warrants out on him that he was sure he would be soon arrested. So he left Philadelphia, and eventually ended up in Springfield, Illinois, where he organized a skinhead group.
But then, at age 17, when he was convicted of kidnapping and torturing another teenager, he was incarcerated for three years. In jail, he became friends with two Black inmates. When he was released, he found that he could no longer hate Blacks.
Out of prison, he was looking for jobs, but someone with his record had dismal prospects for employment. He was so desperate that he took a job with a Jewish antique dealer in New Jersey who needed someone to move his heavy merchandise. But when it came time to be paid, the boss was not around. Frank assumed that the Jew was going to jew him out of his pay--because he had heard people talking about jewing as what you should expect from a Jew. But instead, his boss paid him a little extra for his good work and offered him a full-time job. Now Frank could no longer believe the stereotypes about Jews.
One day, Frank accidently broke a piece of valuable furniture. He apologized for being so "stupid." But his boss became angry that he so often called himself stupid. He told Frank: "Listen hard to what I'm saying. Smart people can fake being dumb, but dumb people can't fake being smart. You are just smart. Get used to it."
Those words had a powerful effect. When Frank quotes these words today, he tears up. That was the beginning of his transformation. He explains: "When people started to talk to me like I was a fellow human, it changed everything. We have to start talking. It's human beings being human beings among human beings."
He became a cofounder of "Love After Hate," an organization that helps to rehabilitate people who have been members of hate groups. An avid hockey fan and player, he organized "Harmony Through Hockey," associated with the Philadelphia Flyers, to teach kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, from different racial groups, to play together on a team. He has also lectured widely about his life. And he has testified before the U.S. Congress about the threats coming from white supremacist groups--particularly, the police brutality that comes from neo-Nazis who have joined police departments.
So at that point, Frank's self-mattering came from his moral activism against racist hate groups. He had changed his location on Goldstein's Mattering Map--moving from being a group competitor to being an ethical heroic striver.
But then another change in his sense of how his life matters came when he discovered that he was Jewish! He talked with a rabbi who told him that Meeink was clearly an Ashkenazi Jewish name, and that Frank also looked Jewish. Frank then discovered that his mother's maternal great-grandmother had been Jewish. Since Jewish identity is matrilineal by Jewish law, this lineage makes Frank Jewish.
Now, after years of studying Judaism under the instruction of rabbis, Frank has become an observant Jew. He frequently invokes Ha-Shem, which is a Hebrew word which means the Name. This is the way observant Jews refer to God to avoid violating the divine commandment against taking God's name in vain.
Now, as Frank goes through his day, he reminds himself to STAY--"stop thinking about yourself"--and instead think about serving Ha-Shem and praying to him at least an hour and a half every day to ask for his guidance.
He has changed his position on the Mattering Map again--he is not just an ethical heroic striver but also a Jewish transcender.
DONALD TRUMP AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON THE MATTERING MAP
Planned Kim Il Trump Statue at the Trump Presidential Library
Donald Trump is an example of an individualistcompetitor who thinks that his life matters only if he matters more than anyone else. That's why he becomes so angry when someone disagrees with him, challenges him, or just doesn't profess to love him as much as he loves himself. That's why he must hate every person who stands up to him or who does not bow down to him. That's why he can never have any friends because friends respect one another as equals.
When Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic interviewed Trump a year ago, they asked him if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. "The first time, I had two things to do--run the country and survive--I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world." A few days ago, Parker and Scherer reported that a Trump confidant had told them: "He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live."
For Trump, his life matters because he thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live--because he thinks he runs the country and the world--and therefore he matters more than any other human being who has ever lived.
Trump often compares himself with Abraham Lincoln. But while Lincoln was politically ambitious, his ambition was different from Trump's. Although Goldstein never mentions Lincoln, he is a good example of a political fame-seeking socializer whose noble ambition makes Trump's juvenile craving for attention look petty by contrast.
I have written about Lincoln's ambition and his suicidal depression when he thought that his ambitious strivings might never be fulfilled. For example, at age 32, Lincoln was plunged into one of his deepest bouts of melancholic misery while serving as an Illinois state legislator. He withdrew into his room in Springfield and stopped attending sessions of the Legislature. He considered committing suicide, and his friends removed all sharp instruments from his room. He spoke with his best friend--Joshua Speed--who later reported the conversation to William Herndon:
In the deepest of his depression, he said one day he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived; and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow-men, was what he desired to live for.
22 years later, shortly after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he reminded Speed of this earlier conversation about his ambition for doing something great so that he would be remembered forever, and he told Speed: "I believe that in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized."
Lincoln thought his life would matter if he could link his name to the vindication of the American principle of equal liberty by the emancipation of slaves. Trump thinks his life matters if he can exercise such absolute power over the world that everyone will be forced to pay attention to him.
THE MATTERING OF TRANSCENDERS IS SPECIAL
Goldstein does not rank any of the different kinds of mattering projects as better than the others. And she warns against the mistake of universalizing one's own mattering project by moving from "this is what most matters to me, if I'm to matter" to "this is what ought to matter to everyone, if they're to matter."
She does say, however, that the transcenders are special in that "there is no greater sense of mattering than that experienced by transcenders" (193). She explains:
To be a transcender is to believe that your personal existence has a role to play in the narrative of eternity. You would not be at all unless you had a role to play in the drama of all of existence. There is no greater mattering that you can conceive for yourself, short of imagining that you are yourself a transcendent being existing on an exalted plane beyond other mortals--in other words, short of lunacy. Compared to transcendent mattering, any other sense of mattering limps far behind, which again explains why psychologists keep producing data showing that the religious and spiritual report comparatively higher levels of life satisfaction (197).
What I see here is a suggestion of Goldstein's envy of the transcenders for having a greater sense of mattering than she does. Or perhaps it's a regret that she lost the transcenders' sense of mattering when she lost her ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith at age fourteen. As she reports in her book on Spinoza, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, she attended an ultra-Orthodox all-girls high school, where her favorite teacher--Mrs. Schoenfeld--warned the girls that they must never read Spinoza because he was a Jew who became an atheist. But then as Mrs. Schoenfeld described his atheistic philosophizing and how the Jewish community in Amsterdam had excommunicated him as a heretic, Goldstein felt an attraction to him: "The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man. I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld's class, and I felt that I loved him" (47).
Goldstein became a professional philosopher whose sense of mattering comes from her being an intellectual heroic striver who finds her life's purpose in achieving intellectual excellence. But she still feels some faint longing for that most intense sense of mattering that she once had as an ultra-Orthodox high school girl.
She hinted this in one of her conversations with Frank Meeink:
Frank asked me once about my own Jewish faith and observance. We were in an Uber returning from the quirky marina where his waterlogged boat is still docked.
When I come clean to him about my lack of religious belief and observance, he gave me his lopsided grin and tells me that it's all okay, but he hopes I know I'm going to hell. (A joke. Frank doesn't believe in hell.)
Wait a minute, I say, grinning back. You of all people have got to believe in redemption.
"Yeah, you're right," he says. "Me of all people. I gotta believe in redemption even if it ends up killing me."
Doesn't their awkward joking about believing in redemption suggest their aching longing for religious transcendence?
In my next post, I will argue that Darwinian Lockean liberalism supports Goldstein's theory of the Mattering Instinct.
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.
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
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Hong, Z. 2022. "Ghosts, Divination, and Magic Among the Nuosu: An Ethnographic Examination from Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspectives." Human Nature 33:349-379.
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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.
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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.
