Strong secular institutions can substitute for watchful gods in enforcing morality.

Evidence

Strong, reliable governments might be another potent factor underlying inCREDulous atheism. We know that belief in watchful gods who monitor and intervene in human affairs may culturally spread by encouraging cooperative tendencies that allow anonymous groups of strangers to expand in size. However, reliable secular institutions such as governments, courts, and the police can serve these same functions and therefore supplant religion. We saw earlier that people perceive God and government as interchangeable sources of external control and stability. Belief in God, commitment to supernatural monitoring, and distrust of atheists all decline as societies develop strong secular alternatives to religion. Combined with conditions of existential security and relative absence of sincere religious displays, effective secular institutions undermine religion and its place in society. As religion plays a less prominent role in society, it declines further still, as there is simply less opportunity for religious displays to influence cultural learners. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Core mechanism for the reader’s analytical frame: government-as-Big-God-substitute explains why Japanese authorities needed fumi-e to enforce apostasy — they could not rely on the priests’ own omniscient-god psychology once a strong state claimed the monitoring role.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the reader’s ‘Grafting’ or sacrifice articles only loosely, but directly supports the analytical bridge to Norenzayan’s own Big God argument: state power and divine surveillance are functional substitutes.