No sooner had everyone accepted this claim, that the monotheistic religions had evolved from barbaric beginnings, than the evidence let them down. Andrew Lang...surveyed the most recent and reliable ethnographic accounts of religion in the most primitive societies and concluded that many of these tribes believed in High Gods of the kind associated with monotheism. The Making of Religion *1898) should have been a bolt from the blue...nevertheless his conclusion doomed his book to obscurity for a generation: since a substantial number f the most primitive societies believe in one high God, monotheism cannot always be the end product of a linear evolutionary process. Indeed, Lang argues, it is equally plausible that primitive forms of animism and ghost worship represent degeneration from earlier, purer forms of religion.
(Lang was later declared to be right, especially by a man called Radin - but Radin denied the possibility of degeneration of religion explaining animism etc; Stark's explanation of this is illuminating:)
Radin's dismissal was not surprising since by then anthropologists had been made fully aware of the theological possibilities inherent in Lang's position.
One True God, p.38&39
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