Belief in divine moral punishment enabled the Zhou kingdom’s expansion

Evidence

Finally, over time, the written record reveals an increasingly clear connection in early China between morality and religion. Heaven dictates norms for moral behavior, and a failure to adhere to norms—either in outward behavior or one’s inner life—was to invite instant supernatural punishment. This “heavenly” moral code legitimized the dynasty and provided a shared sense of sacred history and destiny across the growing Zhou polity, facilitating the Zhou’s unprecedented ability to expand militarily and politically. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 437

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the Big God mechanism the reader is tracing — the omniscient-moral-monitor pathway predicting group expansion in Norenzayan’s framework.