Secular societies climbed the ladder of religion and then kicked it away

Evidence

With the benefit of time, when future historians look back at the course of human societies, they may see the prosocial religions as yet another crucial social transition—an intermediate cultural bridge between the small-scale human societies that dominated much of our evolutionary history and the complex secular societies emerging in parts of the modern world. These new institutions and traditions began to erode the foundations of religions with Big Gods. No doubt this is a complex question, and there are many unknowns. Yet there are indications that some societies with strong institutions and material well-being may have passed a threshold, no longer needing religion to sustain large-scale cooperation. In short: secular societies climbed the ladder of religion, and then kicked it away. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 560

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s analytical bridge: the modern secular state is the institutional successor that no longer needs the omniscient-gaze mechanism, paralleling how institutional trust substitutes for Big God enforcement.
• QUESTION: Which specific societies have ‘passed the threshold’ of not needing religion for large-scale cooperation, and is this reversible under institutional collapse?

Related

• Secular societies reached large-scale cooperation through religion then discarded it (similarity 0.94)
• Secular institutions can replace religion’s community-building and cooperation functions (similarity 0.88)
• Effective secular institutions drive religious decline by taking over its function. (similarity 0.84)
• Secular cooperative societies emerged through institutions that displaced religion (similarity 0.84)
• Strong secular welfare institutions make religion socially unnecessary. (similarity 0.83)
• Strong secular institutions raise trust and cooperation for believers and nonbelievers alike (similarity 0.82)
• Religious belief cannot be understood apart from secular authority structures (similarity 0.82)
• Religiosity declines as existential security and economic equality rise (similarity 0.81)
• Secular societies can coexist with religion through state separation. (similarity 0.81)
• Secular government functions as a continuation of religious authority by other means (similarity 0.80)
• Strong secular rule of law sustains trust and cooperation without religion (similarity 0.80)
• Secular governments and religious belief serve interchangeable functions, so strong states supplant gods. (similarity 0.80)
• Large atheist welfare states can replicate religion’s pro-social effects without gods (similarity 0.80)
• Secular institutions substitute for Big Gods by enforcing stranger cooperation (similarity 0.79)
• Secular institutions substitute for supernatural monitoring by enabling trust in strangers. (similarity 0.79)