Surveillance only substitutes for religious authority where the state itself is trusted

Evidence

We found that reminders of effective secular authority reduced distrust of atheists, but did not affect feelings toward three other groups—gay men, Muslims, and Jewish people. … These results nicely match the cross-cultural pattern and suggest that secular authority reduced atheist distrust among believers. But it is important to emphasize that these studies were conducted in Canada, a country with strong government and high levels of trust toward secular institutions. Had the present experiments been conducted in a country where people have little trust in their government, reminders of an inept or corrupt government might instead have increased atheist distrust. Having a watchful government that monitors every move of its citizens is not going to replace religion and reduce atheist distrust. Corrupt police states such as Pakistan, Syria, and Belarus, after all, have watchful governments but populations that have little trust in them, and therefore score quite low in rule of law. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s analytical integration: the Japanese authorities in Silence are precisely the ‘corrupt police state’ case—a watchful government whose coercion fails to replace religion, explaining why Rodrigues’ apostasy signals religious solidarity breakdown rather than state success.
• DEEPTHINKING: This refines the Big God mechanism: mere watchfulness is insufficient; watchfulness needs legitimacy to substitute for supernatural enforcement. This is a genuinely nuanced addition to the omniscient-observer thesis.