Where did religion come from? Classic theories and the Church's own frameworks, tested against the evidence

Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim, Freud, Schmidt's primordial monotheism, Girard, Justin Martyr and Nostra Aetate, each tested against the evidence.

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Where did religion come from? In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries scholars offered confident answers: animism, magic, society worshipping itself, a primal murder. A Catholic priest answered that the first religion was belief in one God. The Church has its own frameworks too, from Justin Martyr's "seeds of the Word" to Nostra Aetate and the Catechism. This post sets out each theory of the origin of religion in its own words where the notes have them, and tests it against the evidence from Parts 1 to 5.

Part 7 of How did religion develop?. Previous: From Jesus to the Schism. Next: Is religion dying?.

The classic secular theories

Tylor: animism (1871). E. B. Tylor proposed "as a minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings", which he termed animism. He was more cautious than his reputation suggests: "It cannot be positively asserted that every existing tribe recognizes the belief in spiritual beings" (Primitive Culture). He even allowed that degeneration theory might, "no doubt in some instances with justice", claim some beliefs as remains of a higher religion, as Andrew Lang later pointed out.

Frazer: magic, religion, science. James Frazer concluded that "the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to science". His own hedges are in the text: "perhaps", and "as I venture to surmise" (The Golden Bough).

Durkheim: the sacred and the community (1912). Émile Durkheim defined religion as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them" (Elementary Forms).

Freud: the primal crime (1913). Sigmund Freud stated "the conclusion that the beginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex". In the same book he noted that "primitive races are not young races" (Totem and Taboo), an aside that undercuts his own method.

Marx: protest as well as opium. The full sentence matters: "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering" (Marx 1843–44). The famous "opium of the people" follows.

Evans-Pritchard's verdict

In 1965 the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, a Catholic convert, reviewed the whole genre and found "how inadequate, even ludicrous, is much of what has been written in explanation of religious phenomena". Of Tylor's animism he wrote: "The theory has the quality of a just-so story like 'how the leopard got his spots'. The ideas of soul and spirit could have arisen in the way Tylor supposed, but there is no evidence that they did." He called the method the "'if I were a horse', fallacy": imagining what one would think in a savage's place (Theories of Primitive Religion).

The hinge of his critique is that every classic theory treated living "primitive" peoples as fossils of the first humans. As the rest of this post shows, that error cuts against theological origin theories as much as secular ones.

Primordial monotheism: Lang and Schmidt

Andrew Lang (1898) noticed something animism-first theory could not easily absorb. Some of the "most backward races", in his period's language, held a moral, creator High God. He asked whether such beings "can be, as anthropology declares, mere developments from the belief in ghosts of the dead". His chapter titles include "High Gods of Low Races" and "Supreme Gods Not Necessarily Developed out of 'Spirits'" (The Making of Religion). He was honest about the limit: "I do not pretend to know how the lowest savages evolved the theory of a God who reads the heart". Evans-Pritchard notes that Lang's ideas fell into oblivion until Wilhelm Schmidt revived them.

Wilhelm Schmidt, a Catholic priest of the Society of the Divine Word, defended Urmonotheismus (primordial monotheism) in the many volumes of Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (1912–1955). He held that monotheism was the original form of theism, later degraded into polytheism (overview). Anthropology rejected his diffusionist "culture circle" method and the degeneration story. An encyclopedia entry notes that some Catholic theologians did not support his degenerationist views either, and that his articles were written partly in support of the Church's struggle against Modernism. Raffaele Pettazzoni held that true monotheism comes from a reformer's revolt against polytheism. Guy Swanson argued it was not the religion of the simplest societies (Encyclopedia of Religion). Evans-Pritchard, who sided with Schmidt on other points, still called him "as intellectualist and evolutionist as others of the time".

The modern test. The phylogenetic reconstruction of Peoples, Duda and Marlowe (2016) from 33 hunter-gatherer societies found that "the oldest trait of religion, present in the most recent common ancestor of present-day hunter-gatherers, was animism", and that "ancestor spirits or high gods who are active in human affairs were absent in early humans". It also found that "the trait 'high gods' stands apart, suggesting that belief in a single creator deity can emerge in a society regardless of other aspects of its religion" (Peoples et al. 2016).

That result needs careful reading. It reconstructs active, moralising high gods as absent at the root, but the notes did not confirm from the full text whether it rules out remote, inactive high gods there. So "high gods were not ancestral" goes beyond what has been checked. The "stand-alone" finding is mildly congenial to Lang: high gods do not look like a late outgrowth of ancestor cults. The method also reaches only to the common ancestor of the living societies sampled, from 33 cases.

Verdict. Lang's datum survives: some foraging societies do believe in creator high gods. Lightner and colleagues (Part 5) add that moralizing gods are common in small-scale societies. Schmidt's chronology, monotheism first and degeneration after, does not survive. It made the same error Evans-Pritchard charged against Tylor, treating today's simplest societies as the earliest.

Girard, Eliade and the phenomenologists

René Girard offered the most ambitious origin theory by a Catholic thinker: rivalry born of imitated desire leads to violence, "partially solved by a scapegoat mechanism, but ultimately, Christianity is the best antidote to violence". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists the main objections. Critics say he twists texts to favour Christian doctrine. Claiming all culture derives "from an original murder, is perhaps too much". And because non-violent myths are treated as erased traces, "Girard's work is not falsifiable in Popper's sense", the "same Popperian objection leveled against Freud" (IEP). Girard is the clearest case of a Catholic theory that strains against the evidence for the same reasons Freud's does.

Mircea Eliade, a Romanian Orthodox scholar, built his account on the hierophany, a manifestation of the sacred. Like Rudolf Otto's mysterium tremendum et fascinans (1917, bibliographic), it protects the irreducibility of religious experience but makes few testable historical predictions. Any use of Eliade also needs the critical note that his early support for an ethnic nationalist state and his links with the Iron Guard are documented and debated (overview).

G. K. Chesterton (1925) made a rhetorical point rather than a theory: that "it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial" (The Everlasting Man). The point about the investigators' commitments anticipates Evans-Pritchard by forty years. Timothy Larsen's The Slain God (2014) traces how Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas and Victor and Edith Turner, unlike Tylor and Frazer, were all Catholics, three of them converts after fieldwork (Luhrmann review).

The Church's own frameworks

The Fathers had no origin theory in the modern sense. They had frameworks for why truth appears outside Israel and the Church.

  • Justin Martyr (second century) taught that Christ is the Word "of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus" (1 Apology 46). Each thinker "spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word", but "the seed and imitation impacted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the thing itself" (2 Apology 13). The same work blames devils for persecution of the righteous, and the notes record that Justin ascribed pagan cult to demonic imitation, a half of his account that modern irenic readings often drop.
  • Clement of Alexandria: philosophy was the Greeks' "schoolmaster", as the Law was for the Hebrews (Stromata 1.5).
  • Augustine, late in life, wrote that the thing now called the Christian religion was not absent from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, and only then began to be called Christian ("nec defuit ab initio generis humani"; Retractationes 1.13.3, translation from the notes, not a published one; Latin text). This is the strongest patristic precedent for a primordial true religion. But it is a claim about the continuity of the true worship of God among the just, not an ethnographic claim about early humans.

The modern magisterium continues this line:

  • Nostra Aetate §2 (1965): "From ancient times down to the present, there is found among various peoples a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history; at times some indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father." The Church "rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions", which "often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men" (vatican.va).
  • The Catechism: religious expression is "so universal that one may well call man a religious being" (§28). Goodness and truth in other religions are "a preparation for the Gospel" (§843), but "men also display the limits and errors that disfigure the image of God in them" (§844) (CCC).
  • Dominus Iesus (2000) distinguishes "theological faith" from "belief in the other religions" and says that their followers are "objectively speaking" in "a gravely deficient situation" compared with those in the Church (vatican.va). This is the passage critics of Catholic inclusivism usually target.
  • Karl Rahner's "anonymous Christian" names non-Christians who, in the Stanford Encyclopedia's phrase, "unknowingly appropriate the salvific work of Christ" (SEP). It is contested within Catholic theology.

Orthodoxy has no counterpart to this sequence of documents. The 2016 Holy and Great Council in Crete said that local Orthodox Churches "can contribute to inter-religious understanding and co-operation... without this involving any religious syncretism" (holycouncil.org). That is a pastoral and civic statement, not a theology of religions. Orthodox thought tends to start from anthropology, as in Schmemann's homo adorans, rather than from a chronology.

Through the lenses: each theory against the evidence

Cognitive and evolutionary science

Tylor's animism fits the modern evidence surprisingly well as a description of early content: CSR's agents and spirits (Part 1) and the phylogenetic root (Part 2). As a mechanism (dreams leading to souls leading to spirits) it remains Evans-Pritchard's just-so story. Durkheim's emphasis on community survives in the CRED and ritual-cohesion work. Frazer's magic-to-religion-to-science sequence is not supported as a universal history.

Anthropology

Freud's primal murder and Girard's founding scapegoat share the same weakness: they are not falsifiable, and most myths and rituals do not display the violence the theory requires. Schmidt's primordial monotheism fails on chronology, while Lang's observation that high gods exist among foragers stands.

Catholic theology

The magisterial frameworks fit the evidence because they make no chronological claim. Nostra Aetate and CCC §28 assert a universal perception of a hidden power and a universal religious capacity. Animism first, high gods late, Big Gods after complexity: none of these contradicts that. The phrase "recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father" echoes Lang's high gods without claiming they came first. The strain point is elsewhere. Pius XII held that it "is in no way apparent how" polygenism could be reconciled with original sin from "an individual Adam" (Humani Generis §37), and that sits against population genetics, not the history of religions. The notes observe that this wording is weaker than an outright denial, and that some theologians have used it to keep the question open. That interpretive point needs its own sources.

Orthodox theology

Starting from homo adorans rather than a datable first religion avoids Schmidt's trap entirely. It shares the Catholic frameworks' strength, that it is compatible with any sequence, and their weakness, that it is hard to test.

What we can say with confidence

  • The classic origin theories were built on the assumption that the simplest living societies show the earliest religion. That assumption fails, against animism-first and monotheism-first alike.
  • Phylogenetic reconstruction puts animism at the root of the sampled foragers' religions, with active, moralising high gods absent there.
  • Some foraging societies hold creator high gods, so Lang's observation stands.
  • Catholic magisterial teaching on the origin of religion is anthropological and theological, not chronological.

What remains open

  • Whether remote, inactive high gods were present in the reconstructed ancestral state.
  • Whether any origin theory can be tested against a Palaeolithic record that is silent on content.
  • How the Catholic frameworks' fulfilment model should be weighed against pluralist critiques.

Sources

The notes behind this post: 07_theological_lenses.md, with the phylogenetic study also in 02_prehistory_archaeology.md.

Part 7 of How did religion develop?. Previous: From Jesus to the Schism. Next: Is religion dying? Secularization theory against the 2020s data.

Produced with AI assistance (Claude) from the cited notes in the religion-origins project.

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