Religion drives conflict through monitoring, bonding, and sacralized values that block compromise.

Evidence

We are now in a position to attempt a preliminary answer to this question, bearing in mind that our knowledge is limited. Religious tendencies contribute to intolerance and violence in at least three ways. The first one involves the workings of supernatural monitoring as a group-building social device. This leads to a sliding scale of distrust toward those who fall outside of one’s own supernatural jurisdiction. Second is the social bonding power of religious participation and ritual that could exacerbate conflict between groups. Third, religion fosters sacred values, making them immune to trade-off, which in turn blocks compromise in conflict situations. Interestingly, within all three pathways to conflict, there is fluidity. There is, seemingly paradoxically, the potential for religion to reduce conflict as much as to create it. Religion appears to be both a maker and an unmaker of conflict. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 523

Categorization

• XREF: The three-pathway framework (supernatural monitoring, ritual bonding, sacred values) is the exact machinery the reader is using to analyze Rodrigues’ situation in Big Gods reading — especially sacred values blocking compromise, mirroring the Japanese authorities’ escalation. — connects to: Material offers to resolve sacred-value conflicts backfire and increase violence, while symbolic concessions work. — Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges, Sacred Values and Cultural Conflict, 143; Sacred values and resource scarcity create an irreconcilable tension in social life. — Philip E. Tetlock, Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values…, 2
• DEFINE: Defines the three distinct mechanisms by which religious tendencies produce conflict, useful as an analytical scaffold.
• DEEPTHINKING: Top-tier in density: religion as both maker and unmaker of conflict, with the same three mechanisms able to reduce as much as create violence — a genuinely paradigm-shaped claim resisting one-line summary.