The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith
Timothy Larsen
Abstract
Throughout its entire history the discipline of anthropology has been perceived as having a bias against Christian faith. Many of its most prominent theorists have been agnostics who assumed that ethnographic findings and theories had discredited religious beliefs. E. B. Tylor, the founder of the discipline in Britain, lost his faith through studying anthropology. James Frazer saw the material in his highly influential work, The Golden Bough, as demonstrating that Christian thought was based on the erroneous thought patterns of ‘savages’. On the other hand, some of the most eminent anthropolog ... More
Throughout its entire history the discipline of anthropology has been perceived as having a bias against Christian faith. Many of its most prominent theorists have been agnostics who assumed that ethnographic findings and theories had discredited religious beliefs. E. B. Tylor, the founder of the discipline in Britain, lost his faith through studying anthropology. James Frazer saw the material in his highly influential work, The Golden Bough, as demonstrating that Christian thought was based on the erroneous thought patterns of ‘savages’. On the other hand, some of the most eminent anthropologists have been Christians, including E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, and Victor and Edith Turner. Moreover, they were willing to give public, articulate reasons for how their religious convictions cohered with their professional work. This book asks a number of questions. Why have so many anthropologists believed that the discoveries of their discipline undercut Christian beliefs? And how, then, have some of the most renowned anthropologists been able to maintain and defend intellectually their own Christian faith? Why did figures such as Evans-Pritchard and Victor and Edith Turner convert to Catholicism even after they had done their ethnographic fieldwork? And how did they integrate these two, discreet areas of thought?
Keywords:
anthropology,
British social anthropology,
Christianity,
ethnography,
theology,
faith and doubt,
history of social sciences,
agnosticism,
Christian intellectuals
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199657872 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657872.001.0001 |
