The Catholic Integralist Critique of Locke on Toleration: The Holy Spirit Cannot Overcome Religious Pluralism

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.

 

I have long argued that the desire for religious understanding is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  If the good is the desirable, then 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. 

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 understanding 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.  Whatever the Holy Spirit might have whispered to Pope Gregory the Great was not 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 creating a marketplace of religion in which churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market.  I have elaborated this argument in some previous posts.

But I haven't yet responded to Derek Remus's integralist critique of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration.  This was originally published at the website for The Josias, the main online outlet for integralism, and then published in print in Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from The Josias, volume 2: The Two Powers, edited by P. Edmund Waldstein (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2022), 335-371.  Remus first wrote this paper as an undergraduate thesis at Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, California).  Father Remus is now an Associate Pastor at St. Luke's Catholic Church in Calgary, Canada.

Remus's introduction to his paper is a brief history of Christianity and the relation between church and state.  He then states his thesis--that the Catholic Church is right about the proper relation between church and state, and Locke is wrong.

To support this thesis, the main body of his paper has three parts:  a summary of Locke's claims in A Letter Concerning Toleration, an exposition and defense of the Catholic Church's position on church and state that relies largely on Thomas Aquinas's teaching, and then a Catholic refutation of Locke's position.  

Finally, Remus adds an Appendix on the question of whether the Catholic integralist understanding of church and state can be defended in the modern world where Catholics are in the minority in many Western countries (such as the United States).

I will respond to each of these parts of his paper.  My references to Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration will be to the Liberty Fund edition edited by Mark Goldie (2010).

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE

Remus's first two paragraphs survey the first 1600 years of the history of Christianity in relation to the state:

"The first three centuries of the Catholic Church's existence were a period of violent and bloody persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire--that is, the state.  The Church persevered through this trial, however, and, instead of diminishing, increased in proportion to the persecutions she suffered, until at last she was granted freedom of worship and hers was made the official religion of the Empire.  This was the beginning of that harmonious union between Church and state which gave rise to Christendom--a union in which the state recognized that its proper good was ordered toward a higher good, namely, eternal beatitude, and the Church, to the extent that affairs of state bore upon the salvation of souls, was solicitous about those affairs."

"This union lasted throughout Europe for twelve hundred years.  Then came the Protestant Reformation.  The divine origin of the papacy was challenged; the religious unity of Europe was shattered; Christendom unraveled.  The Church still existed, however, and the question of how governments ought to deal with her under the new order of things became an urgent problem for political philosophers" (335).

Remus then notes that while political philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza thought the head of state should also be the head of the Church to ensure religious peace, Locke thought there should be a separation of church and state, with the church devoted to the salvation of souls in the afterlife, and the state devoted to securing the earthly goods of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Moreover, Locke thought the state should tolerate all religions except when religious doctrines or practices threatened the peace of the community.

Remus observes that the United States has clearly adopted the Lockean position through Locke's influence on American Founders like Thomas Jefferson who insisted on "a wall of separation between Church and State."  Consequently, many American Catholics have adopted the Lockean view of church-state relations as the ideal that all nations should follow.

But this kind of thinking, Remus asserts, is "clearly opposed to that of the Church's Magisterium."  The "Magisterium" of the Catholic Church is its "teaching" function--the authority of the Church through the popes and the bishops to truthfully interpret the revealed Word of God as conveyed through the Bible and the Church's tradition.  So, here, Remus interprets the Church's Magisterium on the relation between Church and state by quoting from the papal pronouncements of three popes--Pius IX (1846-1878), Leo XIII (1878-1903), and Pius XI (1922-1939).  They all agree, in the words of Leo XIII, that the state is bound by divine law to support the "public profession of religion . . . not such religion as [men] may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only true religion"--the religion of the Catholic Church (337).  Here Remus is quoting from the encyclical Immortale Dei (par. 6).  This shows, then, that Locke is wrong in arguing for the separation of church and state, because this contradicts the Catholic Church's teaching.

In this introductory section of his paper, Remus makes three dubious claims.  The first is that from the beginning of Christianity, the Catholic Church has been "the Church," the only Church, because it is the only truly Christian Church, or even "the only true religion," as Leo XIII declared, as confirmed by "certain and most clear marks."  

This denies the historical fact of religious pluralism in Christianity.  Contrary to Remus's assumption that there was no religious pluralism in Christianity prior to the Protestant Reformation, the history of Christianity beginning with the first Christians has been a history of disagreement over Christian doctrines and practices as manifest in the many schisms and heresies among Christians.  A Christian schism is when one Christian group divides into two groups that cannot live together as one religious community.  A Christian heresy is one Christian's religious belief that is considered false by other Christians.

Beginning in the early history of the Christian Church, there have been constant battles with one group of heretics after another.  For example, between AD 150 (with the Marcionist schism) and 1054 (with the Great Schism that separated the Latin Church in the West from the Greek Orthodox Church in the East), there were at least twenty-two major schisms in Christianity.

The Church Councils that met during the first five centuries of Christianity were called to rule against the numerous heresies that sprang up, many of which had to do with how to understand the place of Jesus Christ in the Trinity.  The first Council of Nicaea in 325 ruled against Arianism--the anti-Trinitarianism of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, who believed that while Jesus was the Son of God, he was not equal to God.  The Council of Ephesus in 431 ruled against Nestorianism--the teaching of Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, that the incarnate Christ had two separate natures--one divine and the other human--and that Mary was only the mother of the human Jesus, and thus not the Mother of God.  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ruled against the view of the Coptic Churches that Christ had only one divine nature (monophysitism) and in favor of the view that Christ had two distinct natures, one divine and one human, but united in one person (dyophysitism).  The Coptic Churches continue today in North Africa, the Near East, and Ethiopia.

Surveying the entire history of Christianity, Wikipedia has lists of over 50 schisms and over 40 heresies.  That's what I mean by religious pluralism in Christianity.  Later in his paper, Remus speaks of "that great achievement of contemporary man called religious pluralism" (370), as if there had been no religious pluralism until recently.  But that is obviously not true.

This religious pluralism in Christianity also denies Remus's second dubious claim in his introductory section--that there was a "harmonious union between Church and state" that sustained Christendom for twelve hundred years prior to the Protestant Reformation.  Beginning with Constantine, rulers who tried to enforce Catholic orthodoxy, often through violent coercion, were frustrated by the heresies and schisms that made it impossible to sustain any "harmonious union" of Christians.

In 313, the Roman Emperor Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan that granted religious freedom: Christianity and all other religions would be free from persecution.  Later, in 380, the Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica that declared Christianity as defined by the Nicene Creed of 325 as the official religion of the Empire; and those who disagreed with any part of the Nicene Creed--such as the Arians who denied that Jesus was of "the same essence" as God--could be punished by the Church and the state.  But the debate over trinitarian theology--often a violent debate--continued to fester for centuries.  These and other theological disputes created a religious pluralism among Christians that neither the Church nor the state could suppress.  Remus is silent about all of this theological conflict within Christianity.

The irresolvable problem of religious pluralism in Christianity eventually forced the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council to issue the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" or Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration.  This denied the teaching of Leo XIII that divine law requires the state to enforce Catholicism as the true religion.  

This refutes the third dubious claim in Remus's introduction to this paper--the claim that the Church's Magisterium opposes Lockean religious liberty.  Strangely, however, Remus never even mentions Dignitatis Humanae anywhere in his paper.

Remus might agree with Thomas Pink's argument that Dignitatis Humanae was a change in policy but not a change in doctrine.  Pink explains: "The Church is now refusing to license the state to act as her coercive agent, and it is from that policy change, and not from any change in underlying doctrine, that the wrongfulness of religious coercion by the state follows."  The unchanged doctrine is that while the state has no authority on its own to coerce religious belief, because the ultimate authority over religious belief belongs to the Church, the Church can authorize the state to act as the "secular arm" of the Church in enforcing religious belief.  In particular, the Church can ask the state to punish those baptized Christians who have been condemned by the Church as heretics, apostates, or schismatics.  

Pink relies heavily on a passage in the first section of Dignitatis Humanae: "Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society.  Therefore, it leaves unchanged (integram) traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ."  Pink infers that if "traditional Catholic doctrine" remains "unchanged" by Dignitatis Humanae, that must mean that the traditional doctrine about the Church's authority to use the state as the "secular arm" of the Church in coercing religious belief has not been changed by Vatican II.  That Remus agrees with Pink about this is perhaps suggested by the fact that Remus's paper in Integralism and the Common Good is immediately preceded by a paper by Pink, and both papers are in a section of the book with the title "Religious Liberty."

As I have argued, there are lots of problems with Pink's reading of Dignitatis Humanae.  One is that there is no reference anywhere in Dignitatis Humanae to the "secular arm" doctrine of the Catholic Church.  Another problem is that when the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2105) quotes the passage about the "unchanged traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion," the Catechism explains this as affirming the moral duty of the Church to be "constantly evangelizing men," and nothing is said about the possibility of using a "secular arm" to coerce Catholic faith.  Remus is silent about all of this.

LOCKE'S FIVE ARGUMENTS FOR TOLERATION

In summarizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Remus correctly identifies four of Locke's main arguments (341-42).  But he fails to recognize the importance of a fifth argument, which is actually Locke's primary argument.  

Remus also fails to see the importance of Locke's numerous references to the New Testament as providing crucial scriptural support for his arguments.  Unlike Locke, Remus provides almost no scriptural support for his arguments--he quotes from the New Testament only once.  Consequently, Remus seems unwilling or unable to refute Locke's claim that the New Testament teaches liberal toleration.

Locke makes four arguments for why the state (or "Commonwealth" as Locke calls it) secures only the "civil interests" or "civil goods" in caring for "the things of this World," and therefore it must be separated from the churches that secure the salvation of souls in "the World to come."

First, the care of souls has not be committed to any civil magistrate by anyone--neither by God nor by consent of the people (LCT, 13).

Second, "the care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force: But true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind; without which nothing can be acceptable to God" (LCT, 13).

Third, even if outward force could influence people's religious beliefs, this would not necessarily lead to the salvation of their souls, because given "the variety and contradiction of Opinions in Religion" among political rulers, most rulers would favor false religions that would lead to the eternal damnation of most people (LCT, 14-15).

Fourth, the duty of the magistrate to secure the civil interests of everyone does not require enforcing any religious belief, because my neighbor's religious beliefs do not affect my civil interests (LCT, 20, 37, 44-46).  Thomas Jefferson expressed this Lockean argument for religious liberty in a memorable way: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (Notes on Virginia, Query XVII).

Although Remus rightly identifies these four arguments, he ignores Locke's primary argument set forth in the first pages of the Letter Concerning Toleration--that toleration is "the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church," because "every one is Orthodox to himself," and Jesus taught Christians to show "Charity, Meekness, and Good-will in general towards all Mankind," so that the "Toleration of those that differ from others in Matters of Religion, is . . . agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ" (7-12).

To prove this, Locke quotes from the New Testament 6 times in this introductory section, and a total of 14 times in the whole of the Letter Concerning Toleration.  He also quotes from the Old Testament 5 times in order to contrast the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament and the religious liberty of the New Testament.  The "Commonwealth of the Jews" was an "absolute Theocracy," so that there was no difference between the Commonwealth and the Church; and "God himself was the Legislator."  "But there is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth," because Jesus "instituted no Commonwealth."  "Nor put he the Sword into any Magistrate's Hand, with Commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former Religion, and receive his" (42).

As I have argued in previous posts, the proponents of early modern classical liberalism like Locke could plausibly read the New Testament as teaching religious toleration and religious liberty.  Remarkably, Remus is silent about all this.  He quotes from the Bible only once when he quotes Matthew 28:19: "Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (357).  So, he never attempts to refute Locke's interpretation of the Bible.

Last year, I wrote about how the coronation of King Charles III of Great Britain showed the acceptance of Locke's liberal interpretation of New Testament Christianity as supporting toleration and religious liberty. 

REMUS'S REDUCED INTEGRALISM

After explaining Locke's account of the separation of church and state, Remus turns to "the way things really are," or to "the truth about Church and state" as taught by the Catholic Church.  This is a teaching about "the primacy of the common good," and defending this teaching must move through five steps, as explained by "the Common Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas" (337, 346-47).

First, Remus shows how the common good is preferable to the private good.

Second, he shows how the end of the state is the political common good.

Third, he shows how religion promotes the political common good.

Fourth, he shows how the end of the Church established by Christ is the common good of eternal beatitude.

Fifth, the rulers of the state are subject to the rulers of the Catholic Church in so far as the lower common good of politics must serve the higher common good of eternal beatitude.

Although Remus does not explicitly say that this teaching is Catholic Integralism, it clearly is.  But what's remarkable about Remus's account of this teaching is that it is a reduced Catholic Integralism.  A full Catholic Integralism, such as found in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and in the history of the Catholic Church prior to Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, includes the claim that the Catholic Church has the divine right to employ the state as its secular arm in persecuting and even killing heretics.  Remus rejects this claim because he agrees with Locke about "the unjustness of using the state to kill and persecute one's neighbor on account of religion" (338, 362).  Although he does not explicitly explain to his reader what he is doing, Remus is reducing or revising the Catholic tradition of integralism by rejecting the traditional integralist claim that the Church is divinely commanded to persecute and even kill heretics.

The clearest indication of what Remus is doing is in his selective reading of Thomas Aquinas and of the history of the Catholic Church's persecution of heretics.  Remus is silent about Aquinas's endorsement of the Inquisition.  Aquinas taught that heretics--those who claim to be Christians but deny some of the doctrines of the Church--can be rightly compelled to keep the faith.  Heretics must be given repeated chances to recant their heretical beliefs, but if they refuse, they can be rightly executed (ST, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3).  Aquinas cannot cite any passages from the New Testament that condone the killing of heretics, because as Locke pointed out, there are none.  Remus says nothing about this.

Remus also says nothing about the history of the Catholic Churches execution of heretics.  For example, in 1415, Jan Hus, a Catholic priest who sought to reform the Church, was condemned by the Council of Constance to be burned at the stake for heresy.  He sang hymns as he was burned to death.  Hus was a charismatic priest who inspired his followers in Bohemia to defeat five consecutive papal crusades against them from 1420 to 1431--the Hussite Wars.  Hus and the Hussites were intensely pious Christians.  Similarly, Martin Luther and the other Protestant Reformers were all intensely pious.  Thus does the mystical experience of grace--of being divinely inspired with an experience of the transcendent--often move Christians to dissent from Catholic orthodoxy.

Remus says nothing about this.  He claims that God's revealed truth is conveyed to believers by the "grace of the Holy Spirit" (356).  But he is silent about how pious Christians like Jan Hus and the Protestant Reformers were inspired by the Holy Spirit to dissent from the Catholic Church, which exposed them to the violence of the Inquisition.  This shows that the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by conveying the message of revelation so clearly that all or most believers can agree on that revealed truth.

Remus also says nothing about how some of the recent popes--John Paul II and Benedict XVI--have asked forgiveness for the Church's history of violence against heretics.

A REFUTATION OF LOCKE'S "GODLESS STATE"?

Remus begins his paper by promising his readers that he will refute Locke's position on church and state in the light of the Church's position.  But when Remus comes to that part of his paper, his supposed refutation of Locke's "godless state" actually agrees with Locke on some crucial points, which explains why his reduced Integralism is so different from the Church's traditional Integralism.

As already indicated, Remus agrees with Locke that it is unjust to persecute and kill people because of their religious beliefs.  He also says that "the Catholic Church agrees with Locke that it is unjust for the state to force its citizens to perform acts whereby they become members of a given religion, even if that religion is the true one" (362).  The reason for this is that Locke is right in saying that faith is not real if it depends on "outward force" without "inward and full persuasion of the mind."

But still, Remus observes, Locke is wrong not to see how even though the coercive force of the state cannot influence the mind and will directly, that force can influence the mind and will indirectly by creating social conditions that help Catholic citizens fortify their faith and become more effective in persuading non-Catholic citizens to become Catholics. 

Remus says that "in a nation where most people are Catholic," and the rulers are Catholic, there are four ways in which the state can rightly use force to indirectly favor the Catholic Church without directly forcing anyone to become a Catholic (360, 362).   The state can refuse to give marriage licenses to Catholics who have been married in a non-Catholic marriage ceremony, because according to the Catholic Church, this is not a real marriage.  The state can require that students in state schools are instructed in the Catholic faith.  The state can prohibit the building of non-Catholic schools.  And, finally, "the state also has the right to prohibit the propagation of opinions in the press which are opposed to its citizens' attainment of heaven, such as opinions that are blasphemous or constitute an attack on the Church" (360).  This is what I mean by Remus's reduced Catholic Integralism: the state uses force to favor the Catholic Church, but without the killing of people for public heresy and blasphemy that was part of traditional Integralism.

But notice that Remus recommends this only for countries where the majority of the citizens are Catholic, and the rulers are Catholic.  Why couldn't Protestants turn this argument around to say that these same four ways for the state to enforce religious belief could be used to enforce a Protestant religion in countries where most of the people and the rulers are Protestant?

In fact, that was the argument of the High Church Anglican Protestant Jonas Proast, who wrote three tracts criticizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, which provoked a prolonged debate between Proast and Locke.  Like Remus, Proast argued that while Locke was right in saying that the mind cannot directly be coerced into religious belief, Locke failed to see how legal coercion with moderate penalties without persecution could indirectly dispose men's minds to submit to religious instruction.  Also like Remus, Proast insisted that this use of legal coercion to enforce religion was proper only for enforcing the "true religion."  But, of course, for Proast, the evidence clearly showed that Anglicanism was the true religion, and Catholicism was a false religion.  (Proast's three tracts are available in the 5th volume of The Reception of Locke's Politics, edited by Mark Goldie [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999], 25-128.)

Here's Remus's response: "To say that the state has a care of souls and that it has a duty to worship God, however, is not to say that the state may adopt whatever religion it happens to like or even judges to be true.  Rather, it is to say that the state has a duty to adopt the religion which has truly been revealed by God, namely, the Catholic religion" (363).  Remus then quotes from Leo XIII's Immortale Dei (1885), saying that "it is evident that the only true religion is the one established by Jesus Christ Himself, and which He committed to His Church to protect and to propagate."  Remus does not notice, however, that Leo cited many New Testament verses as supporting this claim.

The most important New Testament text for Leo and other Integralists as establishing Catholicism as the true religion was Matthew 16:18-19, where Jesus says to Peter: "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."  The Latin version of these words is inscribed around the base of the dome of the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, in letters six feet high.  On these few words rests the entire structure of the Roman Catholic Church.  Catholics interpret these words as teaching that the Apostle Peter was chosen by Jesus Christ Himself to be the first pope--the Bishop of Rome--and all the other popes have been the direct successors of Peter as the Bishop of Rome, and thus have had the papal authority granted originally by Jesus.

                                                      The Dome of St. Peter's Basilica

Remarkably, Remus says nothing about Matthew 16:18-19.  Locke denies that Jesus ever conferred on any bishop of a church "Ruling Authority derived from the very Apostles, and continued down unto the present times by an uninterrup0ted Succession" (16).  But, oddly, Locke never mentions Matthew 16:18-19.

Locke could have argued that there are good reasons to doubt the Catholic interpretation of these verses.  First of all, these words in the Gospel of Matthew do not appear in any of the other Gospels, which should make one suspicious.  Secondly, it's not clear what Jesus meant by these words.  The word for "church" (ecclesia) occurs only twice in the four Gospels, and it's not clear that Jesus was really thinking about founding a church.  Moreover, Jesus says nothing about Peter having an endless number of successors who would inherit his apostolic authority; and Jesus says nothing about there being bishops in Rome.  And one would think that Jerusalem would be more important than Rome for Jesus.  Furthermore, there is no evidence in the New Testament that Peter ever went to Rome.  There is no contemporary reference to Peter as having been a bishop in Rome.  And the first indications of there being a bishop in Rome come from the second century.

What is said in the New Testament about the first Christian churches confirm Locke's claim that they were "voluntary and free societies" that did not use violent coercion to enforce belief, although they did excommunicate those they deemed deviants from church norms.  And while these churches had bishops, there is no evidence that there was a strict hierarchy of bishops with the bishop of Rome enforcing orthodoxy on all the churches.

So, again, it seems that the New Testament teaches the classical liberal principles of religious liberty and religious toleration.

INTEGRALIST CATHOLICS ARE INTOLERABLE

In his Appendix, Remus responds to the objection that in modern countries like the United States with religious pluralism, and where Catholics are in the minority, it seems absurd to propose that the Catholic Church should be the established church enforced by the state.  Remus's answer is that yes, in these circumstances, a Catholic confessional state is not practicable, and so it would be imprudent for the Catholic Church to insist that the governments in these countries should subject themselves to the religious rule of the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, Remus argues, the imprudence of doing this does not deny the truth of what he has said about the proper relationship between the Church and the state.  Consequently, Catholics are obligated to strive to win as many converts to Catholicism as they can, as they work toward achieving the social and political power over their societies that will someday allow the Catholics to establish the rule of the Catholic Church and to use legal force to restrict the religious freedom of non-Catholics.

Locke argued that churches that do not teach and practice religious tolerance of other religions cannot themselves be tolerated.  Remus agrees!  "A government which holds in principle that it must treat all religions within its domain equally and that those religions must in turn refrain from any intervention in politics cannot tolerate the Catholic Church and be consistent with itself" (371).

Amazingly, the final conclusion of Remus's argument for Catholic Integralism and against Lockean toleration is that Lockean liberal regimes like the United States must not tolerate Catholic Integralists.

 

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?

Are Most of Us Going to Hell? Is Don Giovanni Already There?

J. D. Vance has said that Kamala Harris "can go to Hell" for her failure to investigate the killing of 13 U.S. military service people during the evacuation from Afghanistan in August of 2021.  When he was asked whether he should apologize for using such language, he said that he would not apologize for using "a colloquial phrase" to express his moral disgust with Harris.  Of course, he is right that most of us today use the words "go to Hell" as a "colloquial" expression of our emotional disgust with someone.  

This suggests that we have forgotten that for most of Christian history, orthodox Christians spoke of "going to Hell" as a literally true Christian doctrine--that most human beings after they die will go to Hell where they will be eternally tormented by God as punishment for their wickedness.  As I have indicated in my recent posts on Vance and his association with Catholic Integralism, Vance professes to be a traditionalist Catholic who believes in the truth of Christian orthodoxy, who also believes that the identity of America as a Christian nation depends on enforcing belief in that Christian orthodoxy.  

For the Catholic Integralists, the highest end of man is to avoid eternal torment in Hell and enjoy eternal beatitude in Heaven.  And achieving that end requires a Catholic theocracy: the temporal power of the state must serve the spiritual power of the Catholic Church, the only true Church that can lead human beings to eternal salvation and away from eternal punishment.  But as I have argued previously, the Catholic Integralists don't really believe this, because they are still liberals who accept the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.

Moreover, people like Vance and the Catholic Integralists--and most Christians generally today--believe that the truth of Christian orthodoxy has been divinely revealed by the Holy Spirit through scripture and tradition.  But that belief is denied by the fact of religious pluralism--by the fact that devout Christians cannot reach agreement on fundamental Christian doctrines such as the doctrine of Hell as eternal torment for most human beings.  This confirms Locke's claim that "everyone is orthodox to himself," and for that reason we need to secure the religious liberty and toleration that will allow a free debate over religious doctrines without any coercive enforcement of one church's orthodoxy over another's.

Last year, the Gallup polling organization reported that the proportion of Americans professing to believe in God, Heaven, and Hell has declined over the past 24 years.  In 2001, 90% believed in God, 83% believed in Heaven, and 71% believed in Hell.  In 2023, that had gone down to 74% (God), 67% (Heaven), and 59% (Hell).  In some other countries, the percentages are lower.  In Great Britain, for example, it's 49% for God, 41% for Heaven, and 26% for Hell.  Hell is always less popular than Heaven.  Nevertheless, the international surveys report that in a few countries--like Egypt and Morocco--almost 100% of people report believing in Hell.

Over the years, I have written many posts on the evolutionary history of Heaven and Hell.  And in the last four hundred years of that evolutionary history, particularly in Europe and North America, there has been a notable decline in belief in the Christian orthodox doctrine of Hell as the place for the eternal torment of most human beings.

DID DON GIOVANNI GO TO HELL?

Recently, I had to think more about this when my wife and I attended performances of Verdi's La Traviata and Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Santa Fe Opera.  Don Giovanni was a legendary libertine who was reputed to have seduced (or raped) over 2,000 women.  The Italian libretto for Mozart's opera, written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, is based on this old story.

At the beginning of the opera, in seventeenth-century Seville, we see the Don struggling with Donna Anna, who is resisting his sexual assault.  Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, comes out of his palace, and he challenges Don Giovanni with a sword.  At first, the Don is reluctant to fight with an old man, but finally he draws his sword and easily kills him.  Leporello, the Don's servant, is horrified by what he has seen.  The Don and Leporello leave together.  

Meanwhile, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, her betrothed, come out of the palace and are shocked by the dead body of the Commendatore.  Together, they sing about their "oath to the gods . . . to avenge that blood."  That sets the recurrent theme in the opera of "vengeance" as indicated by the many appearances of the Italian word vendetta in the libretto.  Every woman who is assaulted or betrayed by Don Giovanni seeks vengeance against him.  And as they warn other women about his predatory ways, the Don fails in all his attempts at new conquests because he cannot escape his bad reputation.

Near the end of the opera, the Don and Leporello are walking through a graveyard with monuments and statues, including one of the Commendatore.  The Commendatore's marble statue speaks: "You will cease laughing before dawn!"  Mozart uses three trombones here for the first time in the opera.  In the eighteenth century, trombones were used mainly for religious music and for supernatural scenes in operas.  This sudden entrance of trombones in what is a comic opera must have awed Mozart's audiences.

Don Giovanni is surprised, and he asks Leporello to read the inscription on the statue: "Here I await vengeance [vendetta] on the wicked man who brought me to my death."  Leporello is frightened.  But the Don is amused.  He invites the statue to come to dinner.  The statue agrees.

Later, Don Giovanni is having a grand party in the banquet-hall of his palace.  The statue arrives and enters the room.  He invites the Don to have dinner with him.  The Don agrees.  He gives his hand to the statue as his pledge.  The statue's hand is freezing cold.  He orders the Don:  "Repent, change your life, it is your last moment!"  Giovanni refuses to repent.

Roaring flames begin to surround Giovanni, and demon voices are heard from below: "All is as nothing compared to your crimes! Come!  Worse is in store for your!"

Giovanni cries: "Who tears my spirit?  Who shakes my innards?  What twisting, alas, what frenzy!  What hell.  What terror."

With the demon voices screaming, Giovanni cries "Ah!" as he is enveloped by flames and sinks to hell.

A few minutes later, all of the main characters appear in the room.  Leporello explains what happened: "right over there the devil swallowed him up."  Don Ottavio says: "we all have been avenged by heaven."  The opera ends with all singing the "very ancient song"--"And the death of wicked men is always just like their life."

Don Giovanni has always been one of the most popular of all operas.  And some opera critics have said that it is the greatest of all operas.  And yet many people have found the end of the opera with the Don's descent into Hell unsatisfying.  This ending just does not feel right.

                     Don Giovanni, the Commendatore Scene, from the Movie Amadeus

Or perhaps it does not feel right only for modern secular audiences and opera directors who have no understanding of Mozart's Catholic Christian conception of Hell as the place where evil men like Don Giovanni will be eternally tormented for their sins.  

But that's not a good answer, because the religious language in Don Giovanni sounds more like a vaguely pagan polytheistic view of the Underworld rather than a Christian view of Hell.  The characters invoke "the gods" without any reference to the God of the Bible or to Jesus.  In explaining what has happened to the Don, they say that he has gone to be with "Proserpina and Pluto"--the ancient Roman gods of the Underworld.  This is very strange for people supposedly living in the Catholic Spanish world of 17th century Seville!

Furthermore, whenever the characters appeal to a "just heaven" to punish Giovanni, they seem to be projecting their own personal vendetta onto "heaven."  For example, Donna Elvira tells Giovanni: "A just heaven willed that I would find you, in order to accomplish its own vendetta and mine."

What I see here is confirmation of Judge Morris Hoffman's claim that evolution has built our brains to punish cheaters.  Our brains incline us to three kinds of punishment.  As first-party punishment, most human beings punish themselves for cheating through conscience and guilt.  As second-party punishment, wrongdoers are punished by retaliation and revenge (delayed retaliation) from their victims.  As third-party punishment, we punish wrongdoers for harming others with retribution.

It's clear to me that Don Giovanni has no moral conscience or sense of guilt, and so he doesn't punish himself for his wrongdoing.  He's a psychopath or what I have called a "moral stranger"--someone who does not feel the moral sentiments that most of us feel.

Nevertheless, Giovanni is punished by the second-party retaliation and revenge coming from his victims and by the third-party retribution coming from those who observed his wrongdoing.  If he really was sent to Hell by the gods of a "just heaven," that would be a supernatural form of third-party punishment.

Stephen Barlow--the Director of the Santa Fe Opera's production of Don Giovanni--disagrees with my claim that Giovanni has no conscience, and he even designed his production of the opera to show that Giovanni's guilty conscience drove him to kill himself at the end, and this self-inflicted punishment takes the place of his being thrown into Hell.

Barlow's idea was to alter the staging of Don Giovanni to make the story similar to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Dorian Gray is a young man in Victorian England whose beauty is admired by both men and women.  When an artist paints a portrait of Dorian, he realizes that while he will always be beautiful in the painting, he will lose his beauty as he ages.  So, he wishes that the face in the portrait would age, while he remains young and beautiful.  His wish is fulfilled.  He devotes his life to beauty and sensuous pleasures, and he experiments with every vice, even murder.  Reflecting the increasing degradation of his soul over the years, his portrait becomes ever more hideously ugly, while he still looks beautiful.

Struggling with his guilt, he decides that he must destroy the only evidence of his vicious conduct--the portrait.  He takes a knife and stabs the picture.  Doing that, he actually stabs himself in the heart and dies.  The next day, when people find his body, they see a withered and ugly corpse, while the portrait beside him is young and beautiful again.

To mimic this story, Barlow staged his Don Giovanni in Santa Fe as set in Victorian England.  At the opening of the opera, the audience sees a young and beautiful Giovanni having his portrait painted.  Then, at the end of the opera, the statue of the Commendatore is replaced by a portrait of the Commendatore, who looks like an aged and ugly Giovanni.  The Commendatore steps out of the portrait to challenge Giovanni.  Refusing to repent, Giovanni rushes toward the painting and stabs it with a knife.  But then Giovanni falls back and collapses.  He has actually stabbed himself and dies.  His guilty conscience has driven him to kill himself.

I do not see any evidence in the music or the libretto of Don Giovanni to justify Barlow's claim that Giovanni is punished and finally killed by his own guilty conscience.  The Don as depicted in this opera acts like a psychopathic libertine who has no conscience, whose punishment comes not from himself but from those provoked by his wrongdoing into a vendetta of retaliation and retribution.

I suspect, however, that many people in the Santa Fe audience found Barlow's clever alteration of the opera's ending more satisfying than Mozart's staging of the Don's descent into the eternal torment of Hell.  This is because in recent centuries, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belief in the Christian doctrine of Hell as a place of eternal torment has been in decline, particularly in Europe and North America.

In my next post, I will say more about this cultural evolutionary history of the symbolic reality of Hell, so that increasingly many people today, even devout Christians, can no longer believe in that traditional doctrine of Hell.

The Evolution of Religion from Shamanism Supports Religious Liberty

 

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

THE FIRST RELIGION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHRISTIAN SHAMANISM AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF PENTECOSTAL/CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CATHOLIC PENTECOSTALISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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