As groups grow, religion acquires harder-to-fake markers that convert strangers into moral communities

Evidence

Taken together, the cross-cultural and historical evidence points to a converging pattern. As groups expand in size and in social complexity, religion acquires a moral dimension. Gods become more powerful, interventionist, and demanding of hard-to-fake commitment. Rituals become more frequent, routinized, and in the service of transmitting dogma. Once belief-ritual complexes begin to take shape, other commitment devices (discussed earlier in chapter 6), are added to the mix by the processes of cultural evolution: synchronous movement (song and dance), practices encouraging self-control (including habitual suppression of self-interest and other socially undesirable behaviors), and a sense of fictive kinship (treating co-religionists as if they were brothers and sisters). Packaged together with supernatural monitoring and extravagant displays of faith, these “cultural gadgets” further ratchet up levels of cooperation and social cohesion in prosocial religious groups, and turn anonymous strangers into moral communities. This process, giving rise to larger and more cohesive groups over time, unfolds in the context of intensifying competition and conflict between groups. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 450

Categorization

• XREF: This confirms the causal chain the reader’s analytical project relies on: group size drives demanding Big Gods and hard-to-fake commitment signaling, which connects directly to Baumard’s partner-choice signaling and the fumi-e as a forced, observable apostasy ritual.