In the late 19th Century, when the fields of anthropology and sociology were still in their infancy, David Émile Durkheim was travelling around the world studying various tribal religions of Stone Age societies. Naturally curious about the development of religion, he set out to visit Polynesian societies within the Pacific Basin, Alaskan Inuit, Native Hawaiians, and even some of the Pacific Northwest American Indian groups. His original theory was that each of these religions shared similar traits that could connect them to a much more ancient worship system rooted somewhere within Asia.
As he prepared his research for his latest work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, he made an observation in the Pacific Northwest that not only confounded him, but also caused him to question his own faith in God. As a child, Durkheim had been raised as an Orthodox Jew in France. As he attended higher education at the end of the Nineteenth Century, he adopted humanism and forsook all but the ceremonialism of his childhood faith, more out of tradition than out of reverence. Before his death in 1917, Durkheim had returned to worshiping the God of his fathers but with a stronger passion and zeal than he had as a child, a fact rarely discussed in academic circles today. The explanation of his change of heart towards the God of his youth came from his academic inquiry of the Pacific Northwestern Indian totem poles.
As Durkheim began to catalogue the totem poles that he encountered in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and the Canadian Pacific Coast, he learned that each small tribe had at least one to as many as three totem poles in each village, depending on the age of the village. He also learned that each village would, within a generation, choose which gods or spirits to be featured on the totem pole. Normally, these various tribes would select animals that they believed had the best qualities that they all should aspire to have. He noticed that strength was represented by a bear, intelligence was represented by birds (either an eagle or owl), ravens represented negotiation skills, turtles represented strength and determination, foxes represented quickness and agility, and fish represented a giving spirit.
What he began to notice is that each of these things assigned to animals – called “personification” within anthropology – was actually traits that the members of the village already, in some form or fashion, already possessed. Within the process of creating a totem pole containing representations of these traits, these Indian groups were not worshiping animals or spirits, but were actually worshipping themselves – they had created their gods in their own image! Durkheim saw a visual interpretation of what the Holy Spirit led Isaiah to write, Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made (Isaiah 28). In Durkheim’s last year of life, he decided to use his theories on the Pacific Northwestern Indian religion and apply it to his own Jewish faith from childhood. What he discovered was that just as the Pacific Northwest Indians crafted their own faith to match their needs, he had actually done the exact same thing with his Jewish faith, changing the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into a God that could not be trusted and only recourse was to adopt a godless existence through humanism. For the rest of his life, Durkheim returned to the Orthodox Judaism of his childhood with a renewed appreciation of his faith.
As Christians, if we are not careful, we can do the exact same thing in our quest to understand our relationship to God. The prophet Jeremiah, as he was led by the Holy Spirit, wrote, Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods? (Jeremiah 16:20). The apostle Paul pondered this tendency of man to create God in his own image as he wrote to the early Christians in Galatia, Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods (Galatians 4:8). What both verses show is that while we know the truth about God and what he expects from us, there is a strong fleshly desire to create shortcuts, different interpretations of scripture, or a justification of our actions. When we do these things, we now are worshipping a Jesus of our own making – or a totem Jesus.
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