Big Gods proliferated only where kin monitoring and reputation were insufficient

Evidence

We gain appreciation for why this is so when we realize that in these intimate, transparent groups, encountering kin is common, and reputations can be monitored and social transgressions are difficult to hide. Perhaps that’s why spirits and gods in these groups typically are not involved in the moral lives of people. Nevertheless, despite their relative infrequency in the supernatural panoply of hunter-gatherer societies, powerful, omniscient, interventionist, morally concerned gods, or as I call them in this book, the Big Gods of prosocial religions, proliferated in the last 12,000 years of the Holocene period through cultural diffusion, population expansions, and conquest. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 42

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the analytical bridge to the novel: Rodrigues’ omniscient God is the Big God mechanism that small intimate Japanese villages—which police each other without divine oversight—structurally lack.
• DEFINE: Establishes the defining contrast between intimate transparent hunter-gatherer groups and Big-God prosocial religions.