God Is A Sociologist. - One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism - book review

One True God
Historical Consequences of Monotheism
Rodney Stark
Princeton University Press, $24.95, 301 pp.

Rodney Stark is a widely published and well-reputed sociologist of religion. He has written in the past on such matters as the origin and spread of Christianity, the nature and sociological significance of religious experience, and the reasons why some new religious movements flourish and others do not. He is a theoretical thinker whose interests almost always push him to a high level of abstraction. While he doesn't quite want a theory of everything, he has in the past gone so far as to tilt at the windmill of a complete theory of religion, and in this book he attempts nothing less than a theoretical understanding of monotheism that will be, as he likes to put it, "sociologically useful," by which he means capable of handling the historical in an illuminating way.

Stark's theory has monotheism--the belief that there is just one God, just one giver of supernatural blessings and curses--as its object. He wants to explain monotheism's origins and development, to show its main effects upon the behavior and attitudes of social groups, and to account for the fact that monotheists are sometimes aggressively intolerant of those who do not share their beliefs and at other times civilly forebearing.

The theory of origins that he offers is not new: people, he says, are interested in the gods because they want to get from them otherwise scarce or unavailable goods (cures from sickness, material prosperity, immortality, and so on). People will, he thinks, tend to prefer gods who are reliable and predictable, and who have the power to deliver what's wanted; they will, then, over time tend to evolve monotheistic beliefs, because it's easier and better to deal with one God than with many, especially with a God whose power is limitless.

This is an evolutionary theory of a delightful quaintness. Reading it took me back to the texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scholars debated endlessly and passionately the origins of monotheism (Did it evolve out of polytheism? Or is polytheism a degenerate form of monotheism? Or...). We do not know enough to be able to answer the question, and we never will; perhaps only sociologists with broad-scope historical interests have not realized this. What Stark offers on this topic is of no more historical value than attempts to derive a global history of belief in the gods and God from the narratives of the Book of Genesis. Fortunately, Stark does not spend a great deal of time on this aspect of his theory of monotheism. His main interest is in accounting for what monotheism makes people do, not in how they got to be that way.

One of the things that monotheism makes people do is attempt conversion of those who do not share their beliefs. Stark treats this at length, and illuminatingly. He is entirely correct to perceive that monotheism sits well with the missionary impulse, and that this is not merely a theoretical point but also one for which there is good historical evidence. He is interesting, too, on the difference between missions aimed at cultural elites (his paradigms here are the spread of Buddhism to China in the early centuries of the Christian era, and the evangelization of northern Europe by Catholic Christians). Missions of this sort, he says, typically result in the people never being successfully evangelized, and therefore in a shallow-rooted (and easily uprooted) presence of the missionary faith. Stark claims, strikingly, that Scandinavia and Latin America have never been properly Christianized. Missions that establish local networks on the ground, by contrast (he often calls these "authentic" missions, meaning, I think, not only that they are successful but that he approves of them), will root the missionizing faith deeply and make it more difficult to extirpate.

More problematic is Stark's attempt to differentiate sharply between the Abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and missionary traditions such as Buddhism. His claims about Buddhism, especially, seem often to be the product of imagining an orthodox Buddhism that never existed. Did the founder of Buddhism, Gotama S-akyamuni, reject supernatural beings, as Stark claims? There is absolutely no evidence to suggest this and much to suggest the contrary, and this is only one error among many on Buddhism and Asian traditions in general.

The best part of the book is Stark's analysis of the fact that monotheists sometimes kill those who aren't monotheistic (or those who adopt a different form of monotheism). This topic is given a pressing poignancy in light of the events of September 11, and this is especially so if, as seems likely, the deaths caused in those events were in part motivated by a particular construal of Islamic monotheism.

What, then, in Stark's view makes the difference? Why do monotheists sometimes kill in the name of monotheism and sometimes not? The likelihood that monotheists will kill the alien is maximized, says Stark, when a particular monotheism is under threat, either by another (as when European Christians felt themselves threatened by Islam), or by some external circumstance such as natural disaster (as when the Black Death killed one-third of the population of Europe in the fourteenth century). In such cases, it is likely that the threatened monotheists will act violently toward aliens in their midst. And, as Stark's investigation convincingly shows, outbreaks of Christian Jew-killing in Europe can be tightly indexed to just such conditions. It follows that in order to minimize the use of violence, such conditions ought to be removed. And this is best done, claims Stark, when religious diversity is maximized and no one, or two, monotheisms hold the reins of political power. Under such conditions, civility on the part of monotheists is not only possible but likely, and this without loss of deep conviction.

This is an interesting argument to consider in light of September's events. On one reading, those events confirm Stark's analysis. If it is the case that Muslims planned and executed the killings in the name of Islam, then it's likely they did so in part because they felt themselves under threat from the United States as a world-dominating cultural force. But in another way, perhaps, Stark's analysis is called into question by the events. For an element in the perceived threat of U.S. political and social culture is precisely its advocacy of deep religious pluralism and maximal religious diversity. What Stark presents as the condition for the possibility of monotheistic civility may in this case have been (and may continue to be) among the conditions for the possibility of continued violent hostilities. This is not a pleasing prospect.

There is much to be grateful for in One True God. Stark writes with clarity and wit, and offers a theory of considerable plausibility and interest, even if it is also one that moves at such a high level of generality that it is often difficult to know how it could be falsified. But there is also much to give pause. Stark's picture of the conditions under which monotheistic violence will be minimized and monotheistic civility maximized is, of course, an approximate depiction of those obtaining in the United States now, and is clearly intended as such. Is his book then to be understood as one more paean of praise to American exceptionalism? Is it yet another apologia for the glories of the American experiment with religious liberty? That this is likely the case is shown by the fact that Stark wants to emphasize that the deep pluralism of the American scene is compatible with equally deep religious conviction. We can, he thinks, have it all: civility, peace, monotheistic passion. But to think so is, surely, the fundamental American illusion, and Stark's subjection to it explains why he so drastically underemphasizes the corrosion and privatization of monotheistic commitments caused by the very social conditions that he takes to maximize monotheistic civility. It is also why he does not see that advocacy of just the kind present in this book is an ingredient in the present troubles.

Paul J. Griffiths holds the chair in Catholic studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

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