The state-run Saudi news agency announced that a woman named Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was publicly beheaded because she claimed to be a healer who could cure ailments for a fee of $800. The religious police arrested her for practicing “witchcraft,” which in this case sounds like a euphemism for faith healing outside of Wahabbist orthodoxy. In Saudi Arabia it is perfectly acceptable to pray to Allah for healing but it is a death sentence to appeal to any other kinds of spirits or forces for healing.

In an interview with Bikya Masr, a Saudi activist complained: “It is wrong and disgusting to kill anyone in this way. Doing this just gets people thinking we live in the Dark Ages.” It apparently would be better if the unorthodox faith healer had been executed in some other less disgusting way. Saudis are living in a high-tech version of the Dark Ages, even if executions remain low-tech.

At the same time Science reports the Saudis are pumping billions of dollars into flagship universities “to help the country move from an oil-based to a knowledge economy.” It goes without saying that only certain kinds of narrow scientific and technological knowledge are acceptable.

This, however, hasn’t deterred at least 60 scientists from accepting yearly stipends of $72,000 for doing little more than naming Saudi universities as affiliate institutions on all their academic publications. Such listings result in higher rankings for Saudi universities.

Scientists can rationalize this however they want and when money is being offered, they will. Neil Robertson, a mathematics professor at Ohio State, commented:

It’s just capitalism. They have the capital and they want to build something out of it. Yes, visibility is very important to them, but they also want to start a Ph.D. program in mathematics. I’m thinking this might be a breath of fresh air in a closed society.

Robertson is “hopeful that outside influence” will help accelerate social reforms in the Kingdom. Unless Robertson can devise equations which prove that beheading a woman for unorthodox beliefs is wrong, I can’t see it happening. Scientists and other academics should think hard about selling their souls to the Saudis.

The second chapter, which examines the origins of the Iroquois League, highlights the role of religion in group formation and cohesion. Although I have serious reservations about group level selection (and doubt that it exists), the Iroquois may be the closest thing to an historical example.

During the 1400s, the five tribes (Mohawk, Seneca, Onondoga, Oneida, and Cayugas) that eventually formed the Iroquois League were constantly at war with one another and their neighbors.

Map of Iroquois and Neighboring Tribes

Aside from all its other unpleasantness, the constant cycle of retributive war had devastating demographic effects on the tribes.

Though it is difficult to separate fact from subsequent hagiographic fiction, legend has it that Hiawatha lost several children in the warfare and wandered into the forest, grieving and inconsolable. Literally losing his mind, Hiawatha encountered a supernatural being named Deganawidah, The Great Peacemaker. Hiawatha was given rituals and a message that he carried to the five tribes, which heeded the words and formed “The Great League of Peace and Power.” Although this is often abbreviated to “Iroquois League,” the shortened form obscures the purpose of the confederation: peace between the five tribes and power or war against non-member outsiders.

While the Longhouse and wampum rituals are the most famous of those allegedly given to Hiawatha, perhaps the most important were the mourning and condolence rituals which surrounded warfare and slave-taking. Richter explains:

The connection between war and mourning rested on beliefs about the spiritual power that animated all things. Because an individual’s death diminished the collective power of a lineage, clan, and village, Iroquois families conducted “Requickening” ceremonies in which the deceased’s name, and with it the social role and duties it represented, was transferred to a successor.

Such rites filled vacant positions in lineages and villages both literally and symbolically: they assured survivors that the social function and spiritual potency embodied in the departed’s name had not disappeared and that the community would endure. In Requickenings, people of high status were usually replaced from within the lineage, clan, or village, but at some point lower in the social scale an external source of surrogates inevitably became necessary.

The “external source of surrogates” were nearly always war captives. Such captives were inspected, tested, and either adopted into the tribe or ritualistically killed and actually eaten. In the case of adoption, the physical power of the prisoner was appropriated. In the case of eating, the spiritual power was appropriated (giving “food for spiritual thought” an unsettling meaning).

By all accounts, the Iroquois League was powerful and feared. Although it changed considerably over the centuries through its interactions with European powers and colonizers, the League’s success and durability says something important about the power of shared beliefs.

It would be unwise, however, simply to conclude this is an example of group level selection. As is apparent from the taking and adopting of captives, the Iroquois were neither homogenous nor insular. Under group level selection theory, groups must be distinct and there can be only minimal or no immigration.

Even if we assume this is an example of group level selection, it says nothing about the selective origins and evolution of religion. Group level selectionists (most of whom are evolutionary theists) like to argue that religion is adaptive and was targeted by selection because it makes humans more cooperative, prosocial, and “moral.” Of course it has to be this way because God designed the whole thing.

These theorists simply ignore the several lines of evidence which suggest that humans, as the most social of primates who can actually talk about cooperating, were already this way and didn’t need “religion” for small group success. It is only after the advent of agriculture, when group sizes increase exponentially, that something like religiously driven group level selection might come into play.

The Iroquois were sedentary horticulturalists, not Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Numbering around 25,000 people, they were in need of an ideology or religion which could bind the group. Hunter-gatherers, whose group size ranged from 30-150 for the immediate group and 300-500 for the extended group, had no such need.

As the process of explication began to unfold, one of the more troubling issues revolved around the fact that Nazi Germany was a thoroughly Christian nation. When Hitler came to power in 1933, 54% of Germans identified as Christian Lutheran and 40% as Christian Catholic. These numbers were unchanged on the eve of World War II.

For some, this issue had to be explained or explained away. German Christianity had to be disassociated from German Nazism. One of the ways in which this was done was to argue that Nazism was the godless product of materialist Darwinism. Thus was born a veritable cottage industry of apologetics which associates Nazism with evolution and disassociates Nazism from Christianity.

Yet anyone who has studied Nazism and the Third Reich knows it was drenched in a metaphysics with which German Christians were quite comfortable. The Nazis did not repudiate German Christianity: they drew on its resources to advance their nationalist project. German Christianity was deeply imbricated with Nazism.

In one of the best treatments of this relationship I have seen, astrophysicist Coel Hellier recently posted a nine-part article titled Nazi Racial Ideology was Religious, Creationist and Opposed to Darwinism. In this richly sourced piece, Hellier debunks the apologist mythology which associates Nazism with Darwinism and disassociates Nazism from Christianity.

Here are some excerpts from the summary, but I encourage you to read the whole thing:

The Nazi doctrine of race was fundamentally opposed to and incompatible with Darwinism. Instead Nazi racial theory and their justification for extermination of the “sub-human” races was religious and creationist.

The main ideas of Darwinism are that natural selection, operating over lengthy time periods, can cause species to transform into other species, and that all modern mammals descend from a common ancestor. Both of these notions the Nazis explicitly rejected, finding them abhorrent, materialistic notions that would strip man of his soul and of his special status.

The Nazis preferred, as do many other religious people, to see man as God’s special creation. It was seeing, in particular, the Aryan race as “God’s handiwork” that led the Nazis to consider it sinful to allow the destruction of the Aryan race by allowing racial inter-marriage, and hence the necessity for removing the possibility by finding a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

The labelling of the Nazis as “atheistic” is similarly motivated and is also the exact opposite of what the evidence says. The Nazi ideology was theistic and religious and an offshoot of Christianity, merging Christianity with Nazi racial theory. It is true that the Nazified Christianity was opposed to more mainstream Christian views, and thus that the Nazis wanted radical reform of the Christian religion, but in no sense was it “atheistic.”

As is evident from the piece, Hitler professed belief in a creator God to whom the Nation and Volk were indebted. He led by example:

Hitler Attending Church

Mormonism’s best inheritance from Joseph Smith was his passion for education, hardly evident in the anti-intellectual and semi-literate Southern Baptist Convention. I wonder though which is more dangerous, a knowledge-hungry religious zealotry or a proudly stupid one? Either way we are condemned to remain a plutocracy and oligarchy. I can be forgiven for dreading a further strengthening of theocracy in that powerful brew.

“Separation of church and state.”

It is revealing that this phrase, a shibboleth of sorts, means so many things to so many different people. In law, there are endless arguments over the extent to which government may entangle itself with religion or religious institutions. In politics, there are endless arguments over the extent to which these words should or should not be applied as a matter of policy.

As Craig Martin shows in Masking Hegemony, there is a sense in which all these arguments are beside the point or miss it entirely. While “separation of church and state” is a juridical and political construct that is constantly being negotiated, much of this negotiation is surface and ignores the reality that religious power, in the form of “private” socialization, circulates freely within and through “public” institutions. It is a kind of fiction that serves hidden interests.

Martin begins his analysis of this fiction or “rhetoric” by stating what everyone knows, even if most disagree about its meaning and application:

“Separation of church and state” – and its corollary: proper religion is a private, not a public matter – is one of the sacred cows of American discourse. The public/private and religion/state binaries are taken for granted by almost everyone, even by those who argue that there should not be a separation of church and state (7).

Martin’s thesis is that this rhetoric makes no sense and the sense it does make is superficial. It renders invisible or “masks” the very real ways in which supposedly private-sphere religion influences the public-sphere state. Martin’s goal is to unmask or render visible the genealogy of this rhetoric and explain where it “comes from, how it works, what it accomplishes, and what it obscures” (7). Because intellectual genealogies are a form of debunking, we can surmise that Martin’s project is to expose a fallacy or upset received wisdom. How does he do it?

Martin begins with a sophisticated analysis of the public-private binary which is integral to “separation of church and state.” This binary is rooted in history and can be traced to Luther and Locke. It was Martin Luther (1483-1546) who developed the Augustinian idea that there are two realms: one “spiritual” or religious and the other “temporal” or secular. Having posited the existence of two spheres, Luther argued that church authorities should regulate “private” matters of the (heavenly) soul, whereas governmental authorities should regulate “public” matters of the (earthly) body.

This two spheres doctrine was troubled from the start. It was an ideal prescription rather than actual description. Church authorities have always been convinced that the proper working and maintenance of the public-governmental sphere depended on the proper working and maintenance of the private-religious sphere. While religious leaders paid pragmatic lip service to “separation,” they did not believe that actual separation was workable or desirable. There might be a de jure distinction, but the de facto reality was that the polity rested on a religious foundation.

It was not, however, only church leaders or religious authorities who subscribed to these ideas. That great champion of liberalism, John Locke (1632-1704), did so as well. Like other political theorists of the time, Locke was embedded within the cultural matrix of Christianity and could not envision a political order which did not presuppose a Christianized “natural religion.” Martin dissects the “toleration” which Locke famously championed and concludes it is limited in scope: “In sum, for Locke the only way in which societies would be able to create the conditions for civil order or public welfare would be to habituate Christian moral norms into all citizens from childhood” (44). The lesson to be drawn from Christian-on-Christian violence engendered by the Reformation was not that the state and religion should be wholly separate; it was that the identity of the state should be separate from Christian factionalism and specific kinds of Christian institutions.

Translating this limited separation into liberal political theory required considerable discursive skill, which Locke certainly possessed. By closely attending to Locke’s maneuvers, Martin shows how Locke’s liberalism “contributed to making the invisible the continuing authority of Christian ideology for the state” and notes the effect: “Although it eventually came about that there occurred a separation of ‘religion’ from the ‘state’ at the top levels (insofar as ecclesiastical orders no longer had control of kings and vice versa), the ‘visible church’ was clearly active in socializing the bodies of citizens and magistrates with Christian ideology” (54).

So while the rhetorical relationship between the state and the visible church changed over time and due to Locke’s efforts, the underlying reality remained the same: “at no point did Christian ideology cease to be a foundation and justification for the shape of the public order” (55). This is not, however, to say there is no kind of separation: “My intention is not to argue that the discourse of separation does no work of any sort; I merely want to argue that there is not, in fact, a separation, and I want to explain precisely how channels of power reach from so-called ‘private’ institutions into ‘public’ ones” (55).

Although Martin’s arguments revolve around European political history and theory, American readers will immediately recognize their relevance to current debates. Liberals and progressives might feel more than a bit queasy to realize that a favorite argument made by some on the right – that the United States is a Christian nation – has more truth to it than might be admitted. This truth, however, is deeper and older than stale arguments about the Founders, whether they were Christians, and whether Christian ideas are embedded in the Constitution. The irony here is that those same people on the right – the ones who argue that “separation of church and state” is not found in the Constitution and therefore is illegitimate – fail to understand what they gain by it: “The separation of church and state discourse did not separate the state from churches, but assisted in making their imbrication largely invisible” (90).

It is, according to Martin, naïve to think that people who are socialized as Christians by families and churches in the private sphere somehow shed this socialization when they participate in the public sphere. Christian ideas cultivated in private have profound impacts on ideas espoused in public. The difference is that “private” Christian ideas can be explicitly stated, whereas “public” Christian ideas are – out of respect for the separation shibboleth – implicitly acknowledged as being the natural order of things. Separation rhetoric thus masks the hegemony of Christian socialization and the effects wrought by this dominance:

Groups that achieve a hegemonic status are more capable of serving their desires and interests than other groups, often because they are capable of presenting their identity markers, behaviors, and discourses or ideologies as ‘normal,’ thereby instituting a regime of privileges that benefits their own group over others (161).

The strength of Martin’s book is to show how this hegemony arose (as a matter of history) and how it works (as a matter of rhetoric and theory). By the end, we are left with the distinct impression that Martin is right – on historical, rhetorical, and theoretical grounds – but are left wondering how all this plays out in the real world. Americans will of course sense that it does. Those of us who live in a highly religious and staunchly Christian culture are continuously aware of the ways in which that worldview shapes the parameters of public debate and understanding, even if we haven’t given much thought to how separation rhetoric and law conceal the true power of these ideas.

If there is a weakness to Masking Hegemony, it is that it ends. In another or ideal next book, we would be treated to an empirical exploration of the “private” institutions responsible for hegemonic or Christian socialization. We would then look at the specific ways in which ostensibly private religious socialization plays itself out in public or “secular” arenas. We would find (by examining a series of debates on education, taxes, abortion, euthanasia, marriage, etc.) that despite all the legal and rhetorical lip service paid to separation of church and state, there is much less separation than supposed. For conservatives this will be good news but for progressives the tidings are less glad.

Masking Hegemony cuts across several disciplines and should appeal to a wide audience, including those studying religion, political philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociology. One audience, in particular, should read it: those who study and practice law. Perhaps no group would benefit more from arriving at a deeper understanding of the ways in which “separation of church and state” masks an underlying reality that is constituted and negotiated to serve certain interests.

Despite what law students are taught or attorneys and judges may believe, Establishment Clause jurisprudence is not played out in a pristine legal vacuum; it takes place within a loaded cultural matrix. Frankly acknowledging this rather than pretending otherwise is an essential first step toward intellectual honesty and integrity.

With this famous sentence, Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his masterful critique of political power. Less well known is another sentence from The Social Contract (1762): “No State has ever been founded without Religion serving as its base.”

My reading of history is that Rousseau was right. State-formation has always been accompanied and enabled by religion. If archaeologists have ever excavated an ancient or Neolithic city-state that did not clearly evince the marriage of power with religion, I am unaware of it.

When it comes to more recent city-states, such as Rome, we needn’t rely on archaeological evidence. The record is clear: Roman political power was inextricably linked to Roman civic religion. It is commonplace for historians to observe that the founding of Rome (~750 BCE) “is shrouded in myth.” While true, this is not the simple result of story accretion or faulty memory. The myths were deliberately created and deployed.

Rome’s early leaders knew perfectly well that political power required religious backing. As was so often the case, what Rome lacked it borrowed. Much of this borrowing came from Rome’s older, more powerful and sophisticated neighbor to the north: Etruria. Although Etruscan influence on Rome was considerable, it was most pronounced in the realm of religion. Dominique Briquel (open access) explains:

Such a state of affairs stems from the fact that, in their national religious heritage, the Etruscans had at their disposal a collection of ritual and divination practices of which the Romans knew no equivalent. A great many such rites were borrowed by Rome from her northern neighbours, who had developed them long before Rome felt any such need. The most famous of these was the foundation ritual of cities: it was unanimously admitted that when Romulus founded the city, he had recourse to Tuscan specialists.

It was in the all important realm of divination or haruspicy, however, that Rome felt the greatest need to borrow:

The Etruscans had developed a body of divinatory knowledge which permitted them, for example, to assign meaning to patterns of lightning (keraunoscopy), to decipher the indications contained in the liver or in other organs of sacrificial victims (hepatoscopy), and generally to understand why the gods provoked the whole array of unusual phenomena behind which supernatural intervention was perceived, designated by the term “prodigies” (prodigia). The Etruscans had carefully studied all of these, and they had devoted to them an entire specialized literature called, quite simply, the “Etruscan books.” (Briquel 2007:154).

Bronze "Liver" with Etruscan Inscriptions

There were several categories of such books which together formed a body of knowledge known as “Etrusca disciplina.” This choice of words sheds considerable light on Roman epistemology: “The term ‘discipline’ is important, since it shows that the ancients considered it a veritable science, which is the meaning of the word in Latin, even if it was used specifically in the domain of religion” (id.).

Here we have a nice example of J.G. Frazer’s contention that divinatory practices, which might be considered a form of “magic,” presaged later scientific notions of cause and effect. I find it telling that the formative Chinese dynasties employed similar divinatory practices and linked them to political power. What Frazer called “magic” was simply a form of supernaturalism that can be found, in one form or another, in all religions.

Reference:

Briquel, Dominique (2007). Tages Against Jesus: Etruscan Religion in Late Roman Empire Etruscan Studies, 10 (1), 153-161

Jamil Anderlini of the Financial Times recently visited Shaolin for an interview with its controversial abbot, Shi Yongxin. When asked about the subservience of religion to the state in China, the abbot responds:  “Throughout history it is the same: Religion must respect the emperor, respect the government. If a religion doesn’t respect the government, it will have difficulty surviving. We have to rely on the government to publicize and promote us.” Anderlini’s impression is that the abbot sounds “like an executive from a global marketing firm.”

Perhaps, but I think the abbot sounds more like an astute historian and pragmatist. Since the rise of the Shang Dynasty in 1766 BCE, religion and government in China have been tightly linked. While some have claimed that later dynasties were essentially secular, most claims of this sort focus on Confucian legalism and court intellectuals; they minimize the large and important role that religion played in maintaining the realm and legitimating rulers.

In “The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture,” historian David Keightley explains the connections:

Shang religion was inextricably involved in the genesis and legitimation of the Shang state. It was believed that Ti, the high god, conferred fruitful harvest and divine assistance in battle, that the king’s ancestors were able to intercede with Ti, and that the king could communicate with his ancestors.

Worship of the Shang ancestors, therefore, provided powerful psychological and ideological support for the political dominance of the Shang kings. The king’s ability to determine through divination, and influence through prayer and sacrifice, the will of the ancestral spirits legitimized the concentration of political power in his person.

There were similar developments around the world, which varied according to time and place. Wherever we find newly organized or rising city-states, we find that religion is married to power. Keightly recognizes this: “There is nothing uniquely Chinese in this account so far. Religious belief has played similar roles in the genesis of other states.” While coercion can provide a measure of control in larger-scale societies, having people internalize power — or exercise “self control” — is far more effective. 

Although these kinds of arrangements eventually broke down in many parts of the world (thus setting the stage for the Axial Age), in China they were transformed and reinvigorated (in large part by Confucian ideas). There has been a great deal of continuity in China for the last 3,000 years. The names may change, but the basic ideas are incredibly resilient.

Reference:

Keightley, David N. (1978). The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture History of Religions, 17 (3/4), 211-225

Although there are several striking parallels between the Levantine and Chinese Neolithic transitions (Underhill 1997), one Chinese tradition was early developing and distinctive: ancestor worship. In The Archeology of Ancient China, K.C. Chang asserts that burials dating from 3,000 BCE indicate such worship: “The probable lineage arrangement in the village cemetery and the regularity of the individual burials within the cemetery in many cases make it highly likely that the cult of ancestors to symbolize lineage solidarity had already been initiated.” Over the next several thousand years, parental reverence or “filial piety” became a cornerstone of Chinese culture and metaphysics. It remains so to this day.

In “The Place of Filial Piety in Ancient China,” Donald Holzman examines the early history of ancestor worship in China and traces its development over succeeding millennia. It is a fascinating history that seems completely foreign. As might be expected, Chinese rulers and elites found it expedient to have the microcosm (household) mirror the macrocosm (empire). Just as one must obey and revere one’s parents or elders, one must also obey and revere the emperor or state. As Holzman explains, this relationship was elevated to sacred status:

[A]t the very earliest stages in their history, the Chinese gave filial piety an extremely exalted position — treated it as something one might almost call an absolute, a metaphysical entity, something so exalted in their minds that it becomes difficult for us of another culture to appreciate it today. A brief discussion of the origin of filial piety in China will show that this phenomenon seems always to have been central in Chinese life and very seldom, if ever, called into question.

While Westerners may find this exceedingly odd, Holzman does not and compares it to Western belief:

It is a truism that the Chinese are, philosophically, down-to-earth, immanentists, uninterested in transcendence, whereas in the West God is felt to be transcendent, above and beyond us. It is also well known that the Chinese have not been interested, in their philosophies, in the origin of the world, in a Creator.

The only creators the Chinese know are the parents who gave them life and thus it is not surprising that those who have saintly natures have reacted towards their parents as men and women in the West have reacted towards the God they consider to be their Creator.

[F]ilial piety in China came to be seen as having absolute value and the worship of one’s parents (that is, one’s creators) can be compared to the worship of God in the West.

One question remains unanswered: Why did ancestor worship or filial piety arise in the first place? My guess would be that early millet and rice agriculture led to increasing social stratification — with unequal and potentially conflicting claims on land/water — and that certain families established priority for such claims. Under these circumstances, it becomes expedient to establish lineages and worship ancestors.

References:

Holzman, D. (1998). The Place of Filial Piety in Ancient China Journal of the American Oriental Society, 118 (2) DOI: 10.2307/605890

Underhill, A. (1997). Current issues in Chinese Neolithic archaeology Journal of World Prehistory, 11 (2), 103-160 DOI: 10.1007/BF02221203

[Bachmann] recommends Christian books and films that suggest non-Christians are trouble, that the government may be poisoning the water supply, and that America’s civil war was a theological battle that pitted the victimised Christian South against the godless North.

She is a fan of Nancy Pearcey’s book, “Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity“, which argues that only systems built on “Biblical truth” are correct.

[Bachman] says she was profoundly affected by Francis Schaeffer’s film series “How Should We Then Live?”, which again promotes the idea that the inerrant bible is the final authority, while also condemning the influence of the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Darwin, secular humanism, and postmodernism.

This brings to mind Mitt Romney’s Mormon beliefs, which Slate’s Jacob Weisberg interrogated in this 2006 piece:

By the same token, I wouldn’t vote for someone who truly believed in the founding whoppers of Mormonism. The LDS church holds that Joseph Smith, directed by the angel Moroni, unearthed a book of golden plates buried in a hillside in Western New York in 1827. The plates were inscribed in “reformed” Egyptian hieroglyphics—a nonexistent version of the ancient language that had yet to be decoded.

If you don’t know the story, it’s worth spending some time with Fawn Brodie’s wonderful biography No Man Knows My History. Smith was able to dictate his “translation” of the Book of Mormon first by looking through diamond-encrusted decoder glasses and then by burying his face in a hat with a brown rock at the bottom of it. He was an obvious con man.

Romney has every right to believe in con men, but I want to know if he does, and if so, I don’t want him running the country.

We also have Texas governor Rick Perry telling a New Hampshire boy that evolution is “a theory with some gaps in it,” which is code for “I’m a creationist.” As if on cue, Perry then states that in Texas public schools they teach “both creationism and evolution” (this is surely true, despite being illegal), and Perry figures the boy is smart enough to “figure out which one is true.” Unreal.

Apparently inspired by the show, one credulous soul posted this question over at Answers.com: “Can scientists prove that Stonehenge was not built by ancient astronauts?” The pithy answer shows admirable patience: “Probably not, but I don’t think anyone has proved that it was.”

For centuries Stonehenge has been the subject of speculation, some of it reasonable but much of it bizarre. It was this fact which prompted archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes to observe: “Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves — or desires.” If this is so, what does it say about our age?

In an effort to gauge the Zeitgeist without sticking my finger in an electrical socket (as Giorgio Tsoukalos, pictured above, appears to have done), I decided to research some of the more recent thinking on Stonehenge. I was surprised to learn that while publishers continue to capitalize on the public’s fascination with Stonehenge, professional thinking has not changed much since the 1980s. There appears to be, in other words, some kind of consensus on the basics.

For those who have no desire to wade through the thousands of books and papers on the subject, I recommend Benjamin Ray’s “Stonehenge: A New Theory.” Published in the esteemed History of Religions journal in 1987 (and unfortunately only available to subscribers or through JSTOR), Ray recounts the full history of Stonehenge hypotheses. If there is a better survey, I haven’t been able to find it.

This is not, however, a simple history. Ray critically assesses the competing views, gathers what is most plausible and parsimonious from each, and pieces them together. The synthetic result is masterful, and over 20 years of subsequent scholarship have not altered Ray’s assessments.

Though his conclusion may not be exciting, it is based on solid evidence and respectable theory:

On the assumption that ritual function relates to architectural form and that the history of the site is consistent, the several configurations of Stonehenge do, in fact, suggest a single, underlying ritual function: the periodic coordination of solar and (possibly) lunar cycles with the remains of the dead. This, I believe, is the fundamental ritual theme uniting the different phases of the monument’s history.

Contrary to Durkheim’s tautological contention that ritual constitutes the means by which society worships itself, ritual at Stonehenge served the interests of an aggrandizing elite:

[T]he change from segmentary, lineage-based systems to centralized authority involved the establishment of new religious forms focused upon the ruler, his ancestors, and universal symbols of religious power, superseding the territorial cults and ancestor shrines of the segmentary chiefs…[T]he Wessex chiefs would have erected Stonehenge as an expression of the celestial and ancestral foundations of the chiefship and as the ritual instrument for maintaining the vital connections between these sacred forces.

If the key to the sociopolitical order of the early Bronze Age was the institution of paramount chiefship, then the ritual function of Stonehenge can be reasonably supposed to have served this institution, perhaps being focused upon the person of the paramount ruler himself. To suppose otherwise would entail postulating other institutional arrangements for which there is at present no evidence.

While there is no evidence of aliens at Stonehenge, there is world-wide evidence that wherever Neolithic elites consolidated power, they did so in part by creating religions and controlling rituals. Stonehenge fits the pattern.

Reference:

Ray, B. (1987). Stonehenge: A New Theory. History of Religions, 26 (3) DOI: 10.1086/463079