Based on a video lecture.

Video lecture: YouTube

Academic religious studies are relatively free of pseudoscience compared to, say, medicine. But one myth still deserves serious attention: it can be heard not only from outright cranks but from quite respectable scholarly works. The idea in question is primordial monotheism.

What the Myth Says

Primordial monotheism holds that monotheism, the belief in a single god, is the original form of religious consciousness. All subsequent development of religious ideas in paganism represents degeneration, the result of a fall from grace, a loss of revelation.

The logic seems tidy at first glance. If polytheism grows more complex over time and the number of gods increases, it is tempting to conclude that the original belief was in a single god, and a personal, moral, true one at that. A single god is a “simpler” concept than a pantheon of deities. Therefore the single god came first.

This is wrong. The evidence is substantial, and the argument falls apart on examination.

Where the Idea Came From

The idea of primordial monotheism emerged in the eighteenth century. Gotthold Lessing was the first to articulate it clearly, in his 1780 work The Education of the Human Race. In Russia, the topic was first developed in detail by Viktor Dmitrievich Kudryavtsev-Platonov, professor at the Moscow Theological Academy, in his 1857 article “On Monotheism as the Original Form of Religion.”

Kudryavtsev was an Orthodox apologist, and his argumentation was primarily biblical in character. His core claim: the first religion was “the pure knowledge of the true God,” but after the Fall humanity could no longer maintain the original purity of faith. This fits neatly into a religious worldview — people began as monotheists and then fell into paganism. Outside any specific confession, however, this line of argument carries no weight.

A more ambitious attempt to ground the theory empirically came at the start of the twentieth century from the German religious scholar and Catholic priest Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954). He was the leading representative of what was then a fashionable tendency in religious studies: theological expansionism.

Wilhelm Schmidt and His Theory

Schmidt was influenced by the Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang (1844–1912). They met in London in 1910, two years before Lang’s death. Lang had drawn attention to the fact that anthropologists documented belief in high beings among many “primitive” peoples. He did not consider himself an anti-evolutionist, but argued that primordial monotheism was itself the true evolutionism.

Schmidt went further. His central argument: belief in high supernatural beings is found among an enormous number of contemporary tribes, including peoples who can be considered close to ancient human societies — pygmies, for instance. Biblical monotheism, in his view, was therefore a return to original monotheism, not the culmination of a long evolution.

Schmidt presented his theory in the twelve-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (The Origin of the Idea of God), published between 1912 and 1955. He organized the arguments for primordial monotheism into four groups: arguments from the Bible; testimony from monuments of ancient peoples; ethnographic accounts of peoples at early stages of civilization; and philosophical arguments, particularly the claim that the idea of unity was simpler for primordial humans than the idea of plurality.

One important point must be made here. The fact that primordial monotheism is useful for defending the truth of Christianity, or that theologians find it attractive, or that the Church welcomes it, says nothing about whether it is right or wrong. The scientific method requires impartial examination of arguments and facts. That is exactly what Italian religious scholar Raffaele Pettazzoni did in 1922, when he subjected the concept to detailed criticism. What he lacked was the large ethnographic databases we now have access to.

How to Test the Claim

The logic of the test is straightforward. If a complex, personal, moral, single god genuinely existed at early stages of civilizational development, then most societies at those same stages of development should possess such gods. Otherwise the theory contradicts both logic and basic knowledge of how societies work.

So: do simple societies, hunter-gatherers in particular, tend toward monotheism? We can now answer this question with substantial data.

What Ethnography Shows

The Murdock Ethnographic Atlas, compiled in the 1960s by scholars at Yale University and repeatedly expanded since, contains data on hundreds of societies. The picture is clear.

In simple societies, including hunter-gatherers, gods do not typically function as moral agents. Powerful gods acting as moral agents appear in only around 10% of the simplest communal societies. As societies grow more complex, population density increases, and centralized authority develops, that percentage rises consistently. This is the finding from analysis of all available anthropological databases, including the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.

Rodney Stark, in a 2001 study of 427 pre-industrial societies, found that only around 24% had belief in an active god involved in human affairs and concerned with human morality. Big gods appear where societies reach a certain level of complexity, where agriculture and animal husbandry are developed.

Guy Swanson (1960), working with Murdock’s data, showed that monotheism is statistically associated with political complexity in a society: specifically with the number of politically significant structural units, and with the society’s capacity to grow grain at a given historical stage. Gerhard Lenski (1970), also drawing on the Murdock Atlas, showed the connection between technological development and monotheism. In his account, technology determines social structure, which in turn shapes religious beliefs.

What Archaeology Shows

At this point one might object: all of this is about contemporary societies. What do we know about what happened five, six, or seven thousand years ago? Perhaps at some point in the past a revelation of a single complex god was given to the world, and people later lost it.

Archaeology answers this. The work of Richard Lee shows clearly that before 4000 BCE, hunter-gatherer societies followed scattered, informal rituals — much like contemporary societies of the same type. In the fourth millennium BCE, chiefdom systems began to emerge, incorporating multiple settlements. Rituals became more ordered, and specialized ritual practitioners appeared. Only with the formation of unified states did religious life become fully organized: priests became a distinct social stratum, and conceptions of gods grew more elaborate. Gods acquired the features of moral, unified, complex beings that remind us of monotheism.

The same tendencies appear in ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and ancient India.

Many cultures traditionally regarded as “pagan” did have a conception of a supreme being. In China, alongside the well-known ancestor cult, there was Shang Di, a supreme moral god. But his emergence was the result of a long social evolution: Shang Di was understood as an ancestor of the Shang dynasty. To speak of complex gods in isolation from the social context in which they developed is simply naive.

The Verdict

The evidence is consistent: monotheism is not the original form of religion. Gods become more complex and acquire moral dimensions as societies themselves become more complex. The idea of primordial monotheism grew from theological needs and was developed most fully by scholars with a confessional starting point. That does not make it automatically false, but the empirical record does not support it.

Today there is scientific consensus: primordial monotheism is a scholarly myth.

Selected references:

  • Lee, R. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge University Press.
  • Norenzayan, A. et al. (2016). The cultural evolution of prosocial religions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
  • Purzycki, B. G., McKay R. (2022). Moralistic Gods and Social Complexity. PsyArXiv.
  • Stark, R. (2001). Gods, rituals, and the moral order. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40(4), 619–636.
  • Swanson, G. E. (1960). The Birth of the Gods. University of Michigan Press.
  • Zimon, H. W. (1986). Schmidt’s theory of primitive monotheism and its critique within the Vienna school of ethnology. Anthropos, 243–260.