‘What ideas influenced the religion of the Aztecs?’ (short 300-word response)
‘Which religions are not patriarchal?’ (short 300-word response)
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Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954) comes to mind. Schmidt was an anthropologist and Catholic priest who searched for “primordial monotheism”. I will describe it and show that it is controversial.
Schmidt argued that the earliest humans believed in a Supreme Being and that monotheism (belief in one God) was not late in the development of religious consciousness. Monotheism existed before polytheism, the latter of which Schmidt considered a degenerated state of monotheism. Belief in a Supreme Being was degraded into other phenomena such as ancestor worship, fertility cults, magic, and so on.
Schmidt’s motives are clear. This earliest God concept is similar to a Christian notion: eternality, omniscience, omnipotence, and authority to punish evil and reward good behavior.
Schmidt wanted to demonstrate the superiority of his God concept by placing it at the very beginning. I call this the ‘appeal to archaism’ as an apologetic legitimating strategy. The assumption is that an older religion is more legitimate than a younger one. This does not follow at all. Sometimes old ideas are poor, and new ideas are better.
Other challenges: the earliest evidence for religious beliefs dates to between 70,000 and 20,000 BP (before the present) and shows a “spiritual” connection with nature, shamanic practice, goddess veneration, and neanderthal burial practices indicating belief in life after death. To go beyond these in any way like Schmidt did is unwarranted based on the limited evidence, which often requires tentative inferences.
Belief in a Supreme Being is ancient and can be found among the much more recent Shang, Hindus, and historical African traditional religions. However, it is not necessarily clear that the Supreme Being among these people is identifiable with Schmidt’s monotheistic one. Sometimes they are plainly not (e.g., the Hindu brahman). When Christian missionaries came to Africa in the wake of colonial expansion, there was a process of editing, rejecting, and revising African beliefs, one of which was the concept of the Supreme Being. The result was confusion as missionaries disagreed over whether or not this was similar to or the same as a Christian monotheistic understanding.
Bishop's Encyclopedia of Religion, Society, and Philosophy 
It may be fair to say that Christianity is not really monotheistic either. Similarly to polytheistic religions, there’s a large panoply of lesser supernatural beings that adherents worship and pray to; angels and saints for instance, that posses god-like powers to intervene on behalf of humans. Certainly one could make the argument these beings can be described as demi-gods. The penultimate god being is made of three distinct characters that somehow are also one single being, which seems contradictory. Thus, in my view, to characterize Christianity as a monotheistic religion is a misnomer. By that definition, one could argue that the Ancient Greek and Roman religions, headed by a single, most powerful figure, should be considered monotheistic.
“Penultimate,” – should be “ultimate”
I am not sure this is accurate.
Christians believe in one God. Angels, demons, spirits, etc. are not considered gods but as supernatural beings with special powers. There is no concept of a pantheon in Christian theology in which the supreme God is a part.
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