By RODNEY STARK

If it is hard to believe that conceptions of the Gods are ignored in most recently written histories, it is harder yet to understand why Gods were long ago banished from the social-scientific study of religion. But that is precisely why I have devoted two volumes to demonstrating the crucial role of the Gods in shaping history and civilization, and to resurrecting and reformulating a sociology of Gods.

If asked what the word “religion” means, most religious people will say it’s about God or the Gods. Yet, for a century, most social-scientific studies of religion have examined nearly every aspect of faith except what people believe about Gods. When and why did we get it so wrong?

 ‰mile Durkheim and the other early functionalists, who emphasized the uses of religion, dismissed Gods as unimportant window dressing, stressing instead that rites and rituals are the fundamental stuff of religion. Seen from the perspective of “true” sociology, the concept of God “is now no more than a minor accident. It is a psychological phenomenon which has got mixed up with a whole sociological process whose importance is of quite a different order,” Durkheim wrote. “Thus the sociologist will pay scant attention to the different ways in which men and peoples have conceived the unknown cause and mysterious depth of things. He will set aside all such metaphysical speculations and will see in religion only a social discipline.”

Fifteen years later Durkheim had not wavered in his conviction that Gods are peripheral to religion, noting that, although the apparent purpose of rituals is “strengthening the ties between the faithful and their god,” what they really do is strengthen the “ties between the individual and society … the god being only a figurative representation of the society.” Thus began a new social-science orthodoxy: Religion consists of participation in rites and rituals — and only rites and rituals.

I have long suspected that the underlying “insight” that directed our attention away from God and toward ritual had to do with the fact that Durkheim and his circle were militantly secular Jews who, nevertheless, sometimes attended synagogue. In their personal experience, the phenomenology of religion would not have included belief in supernatural beings, but only the solidarity of group rituals. Those personal perceptions were then reinforced by their voluminous reading of anthropological accounts of the impassioned ritual life of “primitives” by observers who lacked any sympathy for the objects of those worship services.

Indeed, some of the most famous anthropologists advised against paying any attention to the reasons “natives” give for conducting rites. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown called it a “grievous error” to suppose anyone but a sophisticated outside observer could make sense of ritual activity. Thus, it was from his external vantage point that Radcliffe-Brown concluded that although “it is sometimes held that funeral and mourning rites are the result of a belief in a soul surviving death … I would rather hold the view that belief in a surviving soul is not the cause but the effect of the rites.” By the same logic, cultures are said to “discover” the existence of rain Gods as a result of performing rain dances — never mind how it was that they started doing rain dances in the first place. One must be a highly trained social scientist to believe such things.

This, and a great deal of similar “expert” advice, turned social-scientific attention to peripheral matters, giving primacy to what people did in the name of religion, which then appeared to be fundamentally irrational to social scientists who, having dismissed the objects of those activities, could not conceive of why people engaged in such actions.

If one truly believes that ritual is the essence of religion, then what is one to make of people who include very valuable “sacrifices” in their ceremonies, thereby depriving themselves? They must be crazy. Which is, of course, what many social scientists who devoted themselves to explaining “sacrifice” concluded. Royden Keith Yerkes stressed the blind irrationality of sacrifices in traditional societies, while Sigmund Freud claimed that the irrationality of sacrificial rites was rooted in the Oedipus complex. He argued that the burning of sacrifices commemorates the “original sin” in which the sons in a primal horde rose up and killed and ate their father and then had sex with his wives. That view was ratified at length by Roger Ernle Money-Kyrle, and, in his influential psychology textbook, Brian Morris referred to Freud’s thesis as “amazing” and “tantalizing.”

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