Big God religions create social boundaries excluding outsiders through supernatural monitoring.

Evidence

The first path is a “soft” one to intolerance and exclusion, rather than to violent conflict. This path lies in the very fact that Big God religions build trust and cooperation and contribute to intergroup conflict, for the same underlying reason that these prosocial religions foster social cohesion that helps them compete with rival groups. Social cohesion inevitably involves setting up boundaries between those who can be trusted and those who cannot. After all, and despite some theological teachings about universal love and indiscriminate compassion, a religious community would not be a cooperative community if there were no social boundaries. Supernatural monitoring, then, excludes those who are seen as not following the same norms and believing in the same or similar supernatural watchers. In earlier chapters, we saw that believers’ trust of other religious groups declines to the extent that these outsiders are seen to lack proper supernatural monitoring beliefs or dissimilar prosocial norms. In the extreme case, atheists, who do not believe in a god at all, let alone believing in supernatural surveillance, are excluded as people who are beyond the pale. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 525

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anchors the reader’s stated project: the fumi-e trampling in Silence weaponizes exactly this boundary-exclusion mechanism — supernatural monitoring used to mark who is ‘in’ (Japanese converts, apostates) vs ‘out’ (priests).
• QUESTION: Is atheist exclusion a side effect of the same boundary mechanism, or does it cut deeper because atheists signal rejection of the monitoring premise itself?