How God got so great (according to a Sikh anthropologist)
If you ever wondered how God got to the lofty place He is today in the hearts and minds of so many around the world, Manvir Singh, a Sikh anthropologist who is a professor at UC Davis, explains the whole thing in his recent article that appeared in The New Yorker entitled “How God Got So Great.”
Singh, who recently authored Shamanism the Timeless Religion, says, “Before he was God, Yahweh was a subordinate figure in a polytheistic drama headed by El, the white-bearded king of the gods. El was worshipped throughout the ancient Levant, and, together with his consort Asherah, he presided over an assembly of deities who included the storm god, Baal; the sea god, Yam; and the ruler of the underworld, Mot.”
Singh then goes on to assert: “El, not Yahweh, was probably the original patron deity of the people called Israel ... Yahweh was a god of weather and war, bursting with thunder and rain clouds and associated with a mountainous wilderness beyond the Dead Sea. Around the turn of the first millennium B.C.E., he displaced El as Israel’s heavenly head.”
If this is news to you where the elevation of God to His current status is concerned, I’m not surprised. You may also be in the dark as to the primary reason God exists for us.
Singh argues that the true significance of God lies less in theology and more in His social and political function. Belief in one God, Singh says, helps create strong group identities, moral cohesion, and large-scale cooperation among believers, which he thinks explains the global expansion of Christianity and Islam.
So, if you’re a Christian, the value in your faith is not in God being the ultimate reality, and having salvation and eternal life, but in its social mechanism for building trust with culture and a shared identity with others like you. That’s why and how God got so great.
Except it isn’t.
Why God is actually great
As you might imagine, there’s lots to unpack in a long article like Singh’s and, unfortunately, I don’t have room here at CP to respond to it at length. So, let me give you the Cliff Notes version by highlighting the top three problems I see with his thesis.
First problem: Singh assumes a naturalistic framework that excludes divine revelation
This isn’t surprising given he’s a secular anthropologist and thus treats religion as something that evolved sociologically, rather than something revealed by God. This is a foundational methodological error.
As Christians, we affirm first that God did that whole “creation thing,” which makes Him pretty great to begin with. After that, He revealed Himself progressively through Scripture, acted and continues to act in history, and is the ultimate reality that brings us truth, clarity of ourselves, life, and is by no means a cultural invention. Singh doesn’t consider this a possibility.
Second problem: Singh's claim that Israel’s God evolved from polytheism isn’t well supported
He asserts that God was originally a subordinate deity under ‘El’, early Israelite religion was polytheistic, and later in the article claims its monotheism only developed during the Babylonian exile. Singh’s not alone in saying this; it’s a common modern critical theory.
However, the Bible presents the concept of one true God not as a late development, but as a core early fact. Scripture says, “The LORD is God; there is no other besides Him” (Deut. 4:35) and “I am the LORD, and there is no other” (Is. 45:5). Of course, some Israelites practiced idolatry (which the Bible condemns), but that does not mean Israel itself was polytheistic.
As to ‘El’ being a primary deity over Israel’s God, the Bible often uses 'El' simply as a generic word for ‘God.’ In Hebrew, ‘El’ can mean either a proper name or a title, and so they can refer to the same reality using different labels, not different gods. Lastly, there is no clear archaeological record showing the biblical God being subordinate to El in Israelite worship.
Third problem: The process of reducing religion to just social cohesion fails to ask the right question
Singh says God became great because the deity concept creates group identity, builds trust, unifies societies, provides a moral pathway, and motivates conquest. God is a kind of sociological glue that regulates behavior, promotes cooperation, and organizes societies.
By contrast, as Christians, we reject this reductionism and affirm that God is real, biblical doctrines correspond to truth, and moral law comes from God’s nature, not social needs. Singh tries to explain Christianity without ever asking the most important question: Is it true?
Moreover, the moral recommendations made by Singh are particularly bothersome. He concludes his article by saying that one God and religion is problematic because:
“Cohesion built on exclusion sits uneasily with the ambitions of pluralistic democracy. It offers a veneer of solidarity while forcing Jains, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, agnostics, and genuine nonbelievers to perform moral acceptability in unfamiliar languages. ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,’ Voltaire famously declared. The harder, and more valuable, task is to construct moral communities that can function without Him.”
As even atheists admit, without God, absolute morals are an impossibility. But with God, you have universal human dignity, real moral accountability, and equality before divine law.
Absent God, the world devolves into the worst form of polytheism imaginable: billions of little “gods” deciding what is right and wrong based on their individual feelings.
And history is replete with dark examples of how that’s worked out.
In the end, Singh’s religious backwards-facing roadmap follows a secular academic approach called the “history of religions school” that presuppositionally assumesreligions evolve naturally, myths develop into theology, and religious teachings reflect social pressures. Its philosophical framework starts with the assumption that divine revelation did not occur and then reconstructs history to fit it.
Singh’s idea that the Christian faith is instrumentally useful but not necessarily true is a category mistake. Christianity is not asocial technology, moral myth, or political identity marker. Instead, it makes a statement about ultimate reality and says its theological claims are not mere sociological phenomena.
Instead of asking what social function Christianity serves, Singh needs to ask: Is it true? The answer to that fundamentally changes the conversation and perspective and reveals the real reason why God is so great.
Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master's in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.
