by F.J. Foster

Created on: January 23, 2011   Last Updated: February 15, 2011

When we look at this subject, it is too often from an elitist and chauvinistic viewpoint. We peer into the mists of ancient times and assume  we can figure it all out. Maybe we can’t.

Modern ideas of religious origins range from the far extreme of alien meddling, with its imagined human worship of creatures in shiny suits, to the more common idea that those ignorant savages who preceded us invented gods and other beings to explain what they couldn’t understand. And in between - well, multiple other concepts wormed their way into a kind of progression that makes us moderns shake our heads and chuckle.

The assumed religious process tookan evolutionary tack, to nobody’s particular surprise, since that mode of thought prevails in today’s academia. Religious origins, we’re told, began with primitive magic and led to modern monotheism. Along the way, phases of spiritism, ancestor worship, polytheism (multiple gods), and henotheism (worship of only one god out of many) came and went. Finally, religion emerged today as monotheistic.

But, is there a problem here?  After all, primitive religion would logically lead, in steps, to modern religion, right?  It  seems so, but for a single snag. 

Not one shred of evidence supports it.  Rather, the great body of evidence points elsewhere. And so, therein we meet the late Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt, Catholic priest, anthropologist, linguist, ethnologist, professor, and prolific writer.

Schmidt, more than any other scholar, did the spade work that brought religious origins into focus. During a career spanning more than 60 years, from his ordination in 1892 until his death in 1954, Schmidt compiled  reams of data collected all over the world, into a 12-volume work, published in German.  A condensation of his findings, published in English, and titled "Origins of the Idea of God," followed.   What he discovered turns modern assumptions on their ear.

Wherever Schmidt searched, he found the earliest religious traditions to be monotheistic.  And his results applied, not just in the Middle East or in some other part of the world where monotheism might be expected, but everywhere. Even on remote islands, isolated by vast oceans, he found the same. 

Schmidt’s data revealed  constantly recurring original beliefs

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