Religious Origins and Sociological Theory

Abstract

IF THE QUESTION of religious origins is a scientific question at all, it would seem to belong to the theoretical sociologist rather than to the historian, the archaeologist, or 'the anthropologist. The historian's documentary and monumental evidence does not go back far enough to reveal the first signs of a human interest that is by common consent very old indeed. The archaeologist retraces the course of religious evolution somewhat farther, but even for him the earliest data, whether in the form of artifacts, cave-paintings, or mortuary practices, show religion as already well established. The student of primitive contemporaries realizes now that, after all, the cultures he investigates are as far removed in time from any starting-point which may be posited as other cultures more advanced. For some while it was thought that the anthropologist had the answer. Did he not deal with the simplest cultures known? Was it not fair to assume that the Andaman Islanders or Tasmanians or Australians or some other group were still standing on the lowest conceivable levels of human nature and culture, fixated right where their more progressive cousins began their ascent? Spencer refused to yield this logical ground of his evolutionary scheme and was condescending when he wrote: to assert 'that the human type has been evolved from lower types, and then to deny that the superior human races have been evolved, mentally as well as physically, from the inferior, and must once have had those general conceptions which the inferior still have, is a marvellous inconsistency. Even in the absence of evidence it would be startling; and in the presence of contrary evidence it is extremely startling.' The notion that all cultures have passed through the same stages was axiomatic with Comte and Spencer and is a tacit assumption in many more recent writings. It dies hard, even with those who lampoon it. But it ought to be laid away entirely. The socalled primitives have been evolving as long as anybody else. Some aspects of certain primitive cultures are by no means simple. Consider the eligibility rules for marriage among the Arunta or the ceremonialism of some of our American Indians. Compared with the religious life of the little brown church in the vale, many primitive religions seem highly evolved and complex. And this is precisely what would be expected where people have made the religious interest a primary one for a long period of time. The anthropologist has made his contribution, to be sure, to the understanding of religious change. He has expanded the range of comparative data and made them available for checking the validity of inclusive cross-cultural sociological generalizations.2 This is no mean service, but it does not disclose the beginnings of religion in human life. must agree with Andrew Lang who said, nearly a half-century ago: We have thus, in short, no opportunity of observing, historically, man's development from blank unbelief into even the minimum or most rudimentary form of belief. can only theorize and make more or less plausible conjectures as to the first rudiments of human faith in God and in spiritual beings. find no race whose mind, as to faith, is a tabula rasa.3