One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism

by Rodney Stark

Western history would be unrecognizable had it not been for people who believed in One True God. There would have been wars, but no religious wars. There would have been moral codes, but no Commandments. Had the Jews been polytheists, they would today be only another barely remembered people, less important, but just as extinct as the Babylonians. Had Christians presented Jesus to the Greco-Roman world as ''another'' God, their faith would long since have gone the way of Mithraism. And surely Islam would never have made it out of the desert had Muhammad not removed Allah from the context of Arab paganism and proclaimed him as the only God.


The three great monotheisms changed everything. With his customary clarity and vigor, Rodney Stark explains how and why monotheism has such immense power both to unite and to divide. Why and how did Jews, Christians, and Muslims missionize, and when and why did their efforts falter? Why did both Christianity and Islam suddenly become less tolerant of Jews late in the eleventh century, prompting outbursts of mass murder? Why were the Jewish massacres by Christians concentrated in the cities along the Rhine River, and why did the pogroms by Muslims take place mainly in Granada? How could the Jews persist so long as a minority faith, able to withstand intense pressures to convert? Why did they sometimes assimilate? In the final chapter, Stark also examines the American experience to show that it is possible for committed monotheists to sustain norms of civility toward one another.


A sweeping social history of religion, One True God shows how the great monotheisms shaped the past and created the modern world.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Sociology, Christian, Cultural Studies

336 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2001

About the author

Rodney Stark grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, and began his career as a newspaper reporter. Following a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, he received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He left Berkeley to become Professor of Sociology and of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington. In 2004 he joined the faculty of Baylor University. He has published 30 books and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide, and city life in ancient Rome. However, the greater part of his work has been on religion. He is past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. He also has won a number of national and international awards for distinguished scholarship. Many of his books and articles have been translated and published in foreign languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Slovene, and Turkish.

Reviews

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Horrible, like much of Stark

It's both ignorant and willful.

Two comments of his, one about Hinduism and one about Buddhism's fate in India, will illustrate these two points.

Calling Hinduism monotheistic is pure bullheaded willfulness, shoehorning to fit a preconceived theory. THe further south/nonAryan one goes in India, the dichotomy between the normally feminine household/village deities and the "received Hindu hierarchy" alone shows just how wrong this is.

The idea that Buddhism died out in India because it was too intellectual and did not offer a satisfying deity ignores several facts.

First is the Mahayana/Theravada division of Buddhism, developing in and around India long before Buddhism lost its position at the top in India. The division arguably weakened Buddhism in the face of a resurgant Hinduism, not to mention showing the metaphysical diversity of Buddhism already arising..

Which leads to the fact that Stark ignores a resurgent, indeed reformed, Hinduism as the primary reason Buddhism did not remain in India. Given the amount of pages he has written on Christian history, he should have easily seen analogies to the Catholic Counter-Reformation, but either failed to or chose not to.

Remember, or know, two simple facts about Stark before you read any of his books.

1. His academic training is as a sociologist; he is neither a trained historian nor a trained scholar of comparative religion.

2. When he leaves his academic speciality, he invariably makes some sort of right turn straight into evangelical Christian apologetics. (He now teaches at Baylor.) Every book he has written has at least some degree of that stamped on it.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, the book makes interesting correlations and provided a solid overview of monotheism that I hadn't known before. Stark, unlike some historians, wrote this in a really easy-to-understand way without ego. The writing was a little dry, but I think Stark accomplished what he intended to do.

[Gwynfor · Rating 2 out of 5]

✔️
This is a genuinely terrible book. Never trust anyone who uses themself as a supporting reference more often than they do any other scholar.

[Luke Franklin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting here and there, and firmly rooted in classic sociology (I'm pretty sure he quotes Weber and Durkheim more than anything else, and takes their views on non-Christian religions as holy writ, which seems slightly silly. Though them guys were purty smart, they didn't exactly have the tools of modern anthropology, for instance, at their disposal, and were unsurprisingly Eurocentric and limited to mostly secondhand accounts of other relgions). In addition, Stark occasionally says incredibly stupid things (from the introduction, where he declares atheism to be entirely unscientific, as it can't be "proved" there is no god, but a page later, he seems happy to assert that no one knows the secret of eternal life. I'd love to see him "scientifically prove" the latter "belief," as he doesn't seem to see the irony...) to his conclusions on the Lemba population, a brief paragraph that I read over several times to make sure I hadn't missed something (so-called Jewish genetic signature found in a black African people that claims Jewish descent indicates, no, not (maybe limited) intermarriage way back when, but missionary Judaism... Otherwise the argument that Judaism was proselytizing at certain times in history seems valid, why back it up with this tossed-off anecdote that makes him look foolish rather than backing up his claim?)

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book. Stark wasn't a Christian when this was written--hence it is a materialist's perspective on religion--specifically the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some of the most interesting things I learned was that Judaism was once a missionary-minded religion. He also argues that Christianity never deeply penetrated Europe--its mission was abbreviated and hence was mostly superficial. That's not to say that it didn't deeply penetrate some, or even many. But there was never a golden age of Christian belief in the past. This is an important insight--especially in light of having just read a book on post-millenialism (Heaven Misplaced). There was a lot of good stuff here, but it is otherwise diminished by its materialist perspective. Stark became a Christian believer a few years after this book and has written some other great books including "The Victory of Reason."

[Roger Green · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a bit outdated but it still has some things to offer. It begins strong but it relies on an economic / cost-benefit approach to religion (rational choice theory). By chapter 3 it diverges from its main thesis and, while I don't think Stark intended it, has a tendency to minimize persecution of Jewish people by Christians during the late medieval era. It ends with an interesting take on the formation of American "Civic Religion" while illuminating aspects of Adam Smith's take on the Reformation. It is pre-9/11 yet tends to align Christianity and Judaism against Islam, at least implicitly, focusing especially on "secular" Jews in the United States. Some of the information is good but the initial claims about monotheism get lost in the mix.

[Tanya Spackman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enlightening. Chapters 4 and 5 are absolute must-reads, though the earlier chapters contained good info too. Chapter 4 has fascinating implications for Mormonism.