Religion drives conflict through three fluid pathways that also allow it to reduce conflict

Evidence

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 ‘sliding scale of distrust toward those outside one’s supernatural jurisdiction’ plus ‘sacred values immune to trade-off’ map precisely onto the reader’s fumi-e analysis: forced public trampling weaponizes the boundary between supernatural jurisdictions and shows sacred-value devotion the Japanese understood deeply.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the exact same three mechanisms that build prosocial in-group cooperation also generate out-group violence—fluidity without a switch—is a dense, paradigm-seizing summary of religion’s dual role.