Folks have been stumbling onto the site of late asking, “Was Joseph Campbell atheist?”
No, Joseph Campbell was not an atheist. He believed in God first as a Catholic growing up, then in something like Brahman — or Sat — later in life, culminating in the “great spirit” of many native tribes. This is the sort of thing Paul talked about when he encouraged his contemporaries to seek out, “An unknown God.”
In some ways, therefore, he actually understood monotheism better than many presbyterians and atheists understand him. To borrow from the concision of David Bentley Hart here on the monotheism of Vedantic Hinduism (the Hindu monotheism of the Upanishads), Islam, Judaica, Christianity, many other forms of many other tribal faiths that would have kept Joseph Campbell atheist tendencies from manifesting:
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