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Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict
A groundbreaking account of how religion made society possibleHow did human societies scale up from tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today—even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods"—the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths—spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization answer each other.Sincere faith in watchful Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, yet at the same time it introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups. And in some parts of the world, societies with atheist majorities—some of the most cooperative and prosperous in the world—have climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away.Big Gods answers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions and helps us understand the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.
257 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
58 people are currently reading
1726 people want to read
About the author
Ara Norenzayan
5 books26 followersProfessor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Co-director of UBC's Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture.
He has published widely on the evolutionary origins of religion, and the psychology of religious diversity in today’s globalized world.
He has published widely on the evolutionary origins of religion, and the psychology of religious diversity in today’s globalized world.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
February 20, 2020
Tranquilamente um dos livros que mais me marcou. A tendência de muitos estudiosos/céticos/ateus escrevendo sobre a relação entre religião e o cérebro ou a evolução humana é dispensar o pensamento religioso como efeito colateral do cérebro. Quase uma deficiência que ganhou vida própria.
Não é o caso aqui. Norenzayan faz uma discussão excelente sobre o papel social e de coesão da religião. De uma maneira que explica vários fenômenos que alguém como o Dawkins não consegue explicar. Por exemplo, entre comunidades alternativas estabelecidas nos EUA, as comunidades religiosas tinham muito mais chances de dar certo e se manter funcionando por bem mais tempo do que outras. Para Dawkins, isso seria um gasto de energia das pessoas envolvidas, um comportamento sem propósito. Para Ara Norenzayan, essa interação e uma crença em comum são parte do que faz as pessoas criarem vínculos, relações de confiança e estabelecerem uma espécie de justiça quando não há nenhuma.
Um livro que gostei de ponta a ponta. E achei especialmente importante a discussão final sobre o papel social que o Estado acaba assumindo, que desloca ou diminui a importância religiosa. Ele coloca a religião, especialmente a mudança para o monoteísmo e para uma presença divina diferente no dia-a-dia, mais leve do que em vertentes fundamentalistas, como uma "escada" que conduz a sociedade para patamares de maior colaboração e confiança. E onde o Estado se estabelece de maneira forte e participante, como em países nórdicos, a religião acaba perdendo essa importância social e as pessoas que transitaram acabam chutando essa escada – vide a queda da religiosidade nos países nórdicos. Uma discussão que esclarece muito sobre o conflito religioso com o papel do Estado e porque em países onde o Estado não é forte, garantir que ele continue fraco pode ser importante para as religiões continuarem com o poder que exercem.
Não é o caso aqui. Norenzayan faz uma discussão excelente sobre o papel social e de coesão da religião. De uma maneira que explica vários fenômenos que alguém como o Dawkins não consegue explicar. Por exemplo, entre comunidades alternativas estabelecidas nos EUA, as comunidades religiosas tinham muito mais chances de dar certo e se manter funcionando por bem mais tempo do que outras. Para Dawkins, isso seria um gasto de energia das pessoas envolvidas, um comportamento sem propósito. Para Ara Norenzayan, essa interação e uma crença em comum são parte do que faz as pessoas criarem vínculos, relações de confiança e estabelecerem uma espécie de justiça quando não há nenhuma.
Um livro que gostei de ponta a ponta. E achei especialmente importante a discussão final sobre o papel social que o Estado acaba assumindo, que desloca ou diminui a importância religiosa. Ele coloca a religião, especialmente a mudança para o monoteísmo e para uma presença divina diferente no dia-a-dia, mais leve do que em vertentes fundamentalistas, como uma "escada" que conduz a sociedade para patamares de maior colaboração e confiança. E onde o Estado se estabelece de maneira forte e participante, como em países nórdicos, a religião acaba perdendo essa importância social e as pessoas que transitaram acabam chutando essa escada – vide a queda da religiosidade nos países nórdicos. Uma discussão que esclarece muito sobre o conflito religioso com o papel do Estado e porque em países onde o Estado não é forte, garantir que ele continue fraco pode ser importante para as religiões continuarem com o poder que exercem.
June 18, 2014
Excellent book! This book is full of big ideas - borderline 5-Stars. The writing was a bit dense at times, but well worth it - stick with it and you will be well-rewarded.
Early human bands were small, composed mostly of kin. Everyone needed each other, and everyone knew each other. Cooperation was essential. Social monitoring could be performed by the group. Reputations could be monitored and social transgressions were difficult to hide. There may have been gods or spirits responsible for the plants and animals that inhabited their worlds that needed to be appeased. But spirits and gods were not involved in the moral lives of people.
However, as societies grew during the agricultural age, social monitoring became more difficult. There were more encounters with strangers, both within the tribe and with outsiders (trade, etc.). They needed to some other way of preventing anti-social behavior. Bigger societies needed bigger gods. Thus the responsibilities of their gods and spirits were expanded to include supernatural monitoring. Watched people make good people, says Norenzayan, and mean gods are more effective in promoting pro-social behavior than kind, forgiving gods: hell is stronger than heaven. And without some degree of omniscience and omnipotence, these gods could not be effective monitors.
Believers were more prone to cooperate and sacrifice for the group. However, it would be easy to pretend belief, if that’s all that was required. How to prevent freeriders, or outsiders? Thus, costly displays of devotion and hard-to-fake commitments, such as taboos, fasts, and extravagant rituals, were used to demonstrate belief, since non-believers would be less likely to fake these costly practices. Religious groups maintain solidarity through synchronous movement (dance, ritual), self-regulation, and fictive kinship.
In general, believers could trust that other believers were part of the group and would engage in cooperative behaviors. Eventually, as trade expanded and groups came into contact with other groups with different beliefs, believers were likely to trust and business with believers in other groups, and the premise that costly displays signaled a commitment to a group, and thus to prosocial behavior. Those who didn’t demonstrate such belief or commitment were regarded unreliable partners, and generally shunned or avoided. This, Norenzayan claims, explains why atheists are one of the most disfavored groups even today.
Norenzayan then posits that prosocial behavior can also be promoted by secular monitoring - i.e., by strong social institutions such as police, courts, juries, etc. He cites several Western examples, such as Sweden and Denmark. While he does acknowledge the failure of secular monitoring in the totalitarian communist states (USSR, China), he doesn't adequately explain what accounts for the big difference. I don't disagree with his premise, but it was the weakest part of the book.
Early human bands were small, composed mostly of kin. Everyone needed each other, and everyone knew each other. Cooperation was essential. Social monitoring could be performed by the group. Reputations could be monitored and social transgressions were difficult to hide. There may have been gods or spirits responsible for the plants and animals that inhabited their worlds that needed to be appeased. But spirits and gods were not involved in the moral lives of people.
However, as societies grew during the agricultural age, social monitoring became more difficult. There were more encounters with strangers, both within the tribe and with outsiders (trade, etc.). They needed to some other way of preventing anti-social behavior. Bigger societies needed bigger gods. Thus the responsibilities of their gods and spirits were expanded to include supernatural monitoring. Watched people make good people, says Norenzayan, and mean gods are more effective in promoting pro-social behavior than kind, forgiving gods: hell is stronger than heaven. And without some degree of omniscience and omnipotence, these gods could not be effective monitors.
Believers were more prone to cooperate and sacrifice for the group. However, it would be easy to pretend belief, if that’s all that was required. How to prevent freeriders, or outsiders? Thus, costly displays of devotion and hard-to-fake commitments, such as taboos, fasts, and extravagant rituals, were used to demonstrate belief, since non-believers would be less likely to fake these costly practices. Religious groups maintain solidarity through synchronous movement (dance, ritual), self-regulation, and fictive kinship.
In general, believers could trust that other believers were part of the group and would engage in cooperative behaviors. Eventually, as trade expanded and groups came into contact with other groups with different beliefs, believers were likely to trust and business with believers in other groups, and the premise that costly displays signaled a commitment to a group, and thus to prosocial behavior. Those who didn’t demonstrate such belief or commitment were regarded unreliable partners, and generally shunned or avoided. This, Norenzayan claims, explains why atheists are one of the most disfavored groups even today.
Norenzayan then posits that prosocial behavior can also be promoted by secular monitoring - i.e., by strong social institutions such as police, courts, juries, etc. He cites several Western examples, such as Sweden and Denmark. While he does acknowledge the failure of secular monitoring in the totalitarian communist states (USSR, China), he doesn't adequately explain what accounts for the big difference. I don't disagree with his premise, but it was the weakest part of the book.
December 18, 2024
Fascinating points and arguments, yet you have to wade through a lot of extraneous material to get to them.
The book opens with his key points:
1) Watched people are nice people. ("supernatural monitoring")
2) Religion is more in the situation than in the person.
3) Hell is stronger than heaven.
4) Trust people who trust in God.
5) Religious actions speak louder than words.
6) Unworshipped Gods are impotent Gods.
7) Big Gods for Big Groups.
8) Religious groups cooperate in order to compete.
and chapters whirl and wind their way to explain the sociology and history behind the statements.
While the first few chapters were bogged down by Norenzayan's redundant descriptions of social science experiments and their inherent limitations, particularly the over-reliance on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples, he hits his stride midway through the book. His discussion of atheist prejudice raised thought-provoking questions about how societal trust is built and whether religious belief is a prerequisite for morality, relating to #4 on the above list. Relating to #6 above, he effectively contrasts the ancient worship of Zeus with the modern reinterpretation of Greek myths as entertaining stories, prompting reflection on how cultural narratives evolve over time. In another section, he explores the distinctions and dissonance between mythology and personal devotion. Is Santa Claus, for instance, a god for children?
Latter chapters touched on long history of inter- and extra- religious conflicts, and Noranzayan discusses how organized religions numbers are falling and what the future could look like with secular humanism, becoming more common and accepted, i.e. morality and goodness with G/god.
There's a lot to unpack and reflect upon here, but the dense academic prose may make it a challenging read for some... like me, since it took over 2 months for me to complete this one!
3/5*
The book opens with his key points:
1) Watched people are nice people. ("supernatural monitoring")
2) Religion is more in the situation than in the person.
3) Hell is stronger than heaven.
4) Trust people who trust in God.
5) Religious actions speak louder than words.
6) Unworshipped Gods are impotent Gods.
7) Big Gods for Big Groups.
8) Religious groups cooperate in order to compete.
and chapters whirl and wind their way to explain the sociology and history behind the statements.
While the first few chapters were bogged down by Norenzayan's redundant descriptions of social science experiments and their inherent limitations, particularly the over-reliance on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples, he hits his stride midway through the book. His discussion of atheist prejudice raised thought-provoking questions about how societal trust is built and whether religious belief is a prerequisite for morality, relating to #4 on the above list. Relating to #6 above, he effectively contrasts the ancient worship of Zeus with the modern reinterpretation of Greek myths as entertaining stories, prompting reflection on how cultural narratives evolve over time. In another section, he explores the distinctions and dissonance between mythology and personal devotion. Is Santa Claus, for instance, a god for children?
Latter chapters touched on long history of inter- and extra- religious conflicts, and Noranzayan discusses how organized religions numbers are falling and what the future could look like with secular humanism, becoming more common and accepted, i.e. morality and goodness with G/god.
There's a lot to unpack and reflect upon here, but the dense academic prose may make it a challenging read for some... like me, since it took over 2 months for me to complete this one!
3/5*
July 13, 2025
Really interesting, 4 stars instead of 5 only because the final chapter heavily emphasised (despite arguing that religion has social benefits) how good it would be if we could shift to an atheistic society where religion is no longer needed. I don't disagree that religious belief is higher where there is more social inequality and a lack of secular order, so it is in a sense something that we can grow out of; but those of a religious persuasion evidently believe in their beliefs and it feels belittling to argue that they will eventually "kick away the ladder" of religion. Perhaps though many people need a stronger foundation to their faith, relying on it not only as a crutch in times of hardship nor to answer questions as yet unanswered by science, but as a practice.
April 2, 2021
This book was not what I expected. From the title, I assumed it would be historical. Instead, it's an extended exposition of a theory in evolutionary psychology. It puts together a persuasive argument of the cultural advantages of a "Big Gods" society. So far, so go. But then it makes this huge leap-- because I have a logically coherent, persuasive explanation for how things could have happened over thousands of years, it must be true. I'll then pick and choose empirical evidence that appears to support my overarching claim. If you disagree with me, you fail to see the big picture-- it couldn't be otherwise.
This approach is similar to that of Ian Morris, Peter Turchin, and Harvey Whitehouse, all who seem to relish their arrogant conviction that they've figured it all out. But there's one area where they disagree-- did the Big Gods belief system make big society possible (i.e. was it a prerequisite?) Or are the Big Gods a product of big societies, which they employed to legitimize and stabilize themselves? Norenzayan seems to think that the Big Gods belief was a prerequisite to grow to any appreciable size. Turchin thinks you can get big through despotism then co-opt whatever religious elements are extant in society. Whitehouse has argued that religious rituals are what can initially stabilize society, and beliefs are secondary, both in importance and in chronology.
For all of these scholars, religion is merely an instrument, a strategy. While that _may_ be true, their methodologies don't really allow any alternatives ways of thinking about it.
My other complaint is that these scholars don't really seem to take human history seriously. By history I mean the various contingencies, actions, accidents and values that drive human behavior and events. Instead, I think these scholars practice a form of natural history in which principles and processes are what's really interesting. Actual events and the humans within them are just one instantiation of a simulation which could be run and re-run, none more important than another. Any truly unique events, as well as anomalies, get washed out of the narrative.
And that's fine. I think natural histories are important. But they should be labeled as such and leave room for human histories-- accounts that do their best to try to discover, understand, and explain the details and peculiarities of what happened once, and perhaps only once, far into the past. Of course, that has its own limitations. It's really hard, perhaps impossible, to understand the big picture, while looking at individual slices of a vast and complex history. But we should not dismiss it either because you'll never know if you'll stumble upon something that will change your understanding of everything else.
This approach is similar to that of Ian Morris, Peter Turchin, and Harvey Whitehouse, all who seem to relish their arrogant conviction that they've figured it all out. But there's one area where they disagree-- did the Big Gods belief system make big society possible (i.e. was it a prerequisite?) Or are the Big Gods a product of big societies, which they employed to legitimize and stabilize themselves? Norenzayan seems to think that the Big Gods belief was a prerequisite to grow to any appreciable size. Turchin thinks you can get big through despotism then co-opt whatever religious elements are extant in society. Whitehouse has argued that religious rituals are what can initially stabilize society, and beliefs are secondary, both in importance and in chronology.
For all of these scholars, religion is merely an instrument, a strategy. While that _may_ be true, their methodologies don't really allow any alternatives ways of thinking about it.
My other complaint is that these scholars don't really seem to take human history seriously. By history I mean the various contingencies, actions, accidents and values that drive human behavior and events. Instead, I think these scholars practice a form of natural history in which principles and processes are what's really interesting. Actual events and the humans within them are just one instantiation of a simulation which could be run and re-run, none more important than another. Any truly unique events, as well as anomalies, get washed out of the narrative.
And that's fine. I think natural histories are important. But they should be labeled as such and leave room for human histories-- accounts that do their best to try to discover, understand, and explain the details and peculiarities of what happened once, and perhaps only once, far into the past. Of course, that has its own limitations. It's really hard, perhaps impossible, to understand the big picture, while looking at individual slices of a vast and complex history. But we should not dismiss it either because you'll never know if you'll stumble upon something that will change your understanding of everything else.
November 18, 2019
I bought this book with great hopes. They’ve been dashed.
First, religion is defined as
Religion = God, gods, goblins and jinns
When it she be this:
Religion = God, gods, goblins and jinns
PLUS
nation, language, state,race, class, people
The book has no time for the great and terrible secular religions of nineteenth century Europe: nationalism, statolatry, fascism, communism, democracy....
(The author seems never to have read Ninisn Smart’s “The World’s Religions” which begins with a remarkably accurate definition of religion - both traditional and secular.)
These were all novel modes of social organization: worship of language, nationalism, came to underpin social
organization in the modern world.
In the Communist world - of which there isn’t an atom of discussion- worship of class - the proletariat - came to form the basis of social cooperation, however flawed.
Benedict Andersen calls nations “Imagined Communities” - they are fictions, like jinns and angels.
If you can believe in nations, you can believe in anything.
A hopelessly flawed, stunted book.
First, religion is defined as
Religion = God, gods, goblins and jinns
When it she be this:
Religion = God, gods, goblins and jinns
PLUS
nation, language, state,race, class, people
The book has no time for the great and terrible secular religions of nineteenth century Europe: nationalism, statolatry, fascism, communism, democracy....
(The author seems never to have read Ninisn Smart’s “The World’s Religions” which begins with a remarkably accurate definition of religion - both traditional and secular.)
These were all novel modes of social organization: worship of language, nationalism, came to underpin social
organization in the modern world.
In the Communist world - of which there isn’t an atom of discussion- worship of class - the proletariat - came to form the basis of social cooperation, however flawed.
Benedict Andersen calls nations “Imagined Communities” - they are fictions, like jinns and angels.
If you can believe in nations, you can believe in anything.
A hopelessly flawed, stunted book.
May 27, 2015
A fun, informative pop research book about a very interesting topic (the sociological history of religion), written in a language that I love (randomized control trials! natural experiments! the Dictator Game!). The main thesis is that religions that feature supernatural morality monitors - i.e. Big Gods - enabled proto-agricultural settlements to grow beyond the confines of immediate social boundaries. In other words, Big Gods make sure that strangers can cooperate. Hence, you get towns! And then eventually states. Definitely a book for fans of Acemoglu and Robinson, or James C. Scott. Except - unlike Acemoglu+Robinson or Scott - this book's academic density is leavened by occasional moments of real, laugh out loud wit.
August 21, 2021
A big force leading from gemeinschaft (small, intimate community) to Gesellschaft (civil society) was prosocial religions with Big Gods. Prosocial religions, with their Big Gods who watch, intervene, and demand hard-to-fake loyalty displays, facilitated the rise of cooperation in large groups of anonymous strangers. These expanding groups took their prosocial religious beliefs and practices with them, further ratcheting up large-scale cooperation in a runaway process of cultural evolution. Religious beliefs and rituals arose as an evolutionary-byproduct of ordinary cognitive functions that preceded religion. These cognitive functions gave rise to religious intuitions, and the most successful institutions spread at the expense of less successful groups. We can summarise the book in eight principles:
- WATCHED PEOPLE ARE NICE PEOPLE: Social surveillance keeps people in line. Beliefs about gods and spirits arise because of theory of mind, which supplies a cognitive basis for mind-body dualism, the idea of the immortal soul, and teleology. The ordinary capacities for perceiving minds allow believers to make inferences about the mental states of supernatural beings, which enable believers to respond and interact with their gods, who monitor people at all times. Social surveillance is a powerful and reliable mechanism to boost prosocial behaviour. But because human monitoring can go so far, cultural evolution stumbled on supernatural monitoring.
- RELIGION IS MORE IN THE SITUATION THAN IN THE PERSON: If Big Gods are omniscient and monitor people 24/7, why are religious people not acting according to their religious beliefs even without such reminders? People obviously don’t think of their gods all the time. To understand human behaviour, we must imagine that behaviour is embedded in a social field, where multiple forces (values, goals, cultural norms, etc) push and pull at an individuals mind. Unless a believer is thinking religious thoughts 24/7, a watchful God is merely one of the many competing imperatives that might influence an action at any given moment. Prosocial religious groups surround their members with constant religious reminders to induce honesty and cooperation within the group.
- HELL IS STRONGER THAN HEAVEN: Mean gods make good people. A punishing God keeps people in line, whereas a kind and forgiving God may encourage people to behave badly. Why resist temptation if one is going to be forgiven anyway? However, people who think that only God can judge are less likely to punish norm-violators; belief in divine punishment diminished the motivation for earthly forms of costly punishment. Though Hell might be better at getting people to be good, heaven is much better at making them feel good. So long as societies can find other ways of getting people to stay in line, then religions no longer have to shoulder that burden and they are free to drift towards the luxury of giving the individuals what they want.
- TRUST PEOPLE WHO TRUST in GOD: Big Gods have been for most people in history, a major ingredient of the social glue that bound anonymous people together. Strangers who showed sincere belief in being monitored were more likely to be trusted because people know that they fear the consequences of malfeasance. However, because belief is easy to fake, prosocial religious groups are in constant vigilance to identify and weed out impostors who masquerade under a cloak of devoutness to reap benefits from the group while contributing nothing. This means that there will be prejudice towards atheists, because the word of an atheist means nothing, (or so religious people think.) Atheists might think their lack of belief is a matter of private metaphysical speculation, but believers see atheism as a threat to cooperation and trust, because sincere belief in a morally concerned deity serves as a reliable cooperative signal.
- RELIGIOUS ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS: If belief in supernatural monitoring elicits more trust and cooperation, what would prevent religious hypocrites from faking belief in supernatural monitors to get into the group and receive benefits without contributing? Why would religious devotees do things that sabotage their fitness? Religious practices are often costly, emotionally loaded and appear irrational to outsiders; they communicate a hard-to-fake commitment to the beliefs of the religious group. Henrich calls these displays ‘credibility-enhancing displays’ or CREDs, behaviours that, in religious groups, are reliably associated with genuine belief in counter-intuitive gods and can be used to infer sincere commitment to them. Prosocial religious groups, by promoting trust among their members, attract adherents at greater rates than groups without mechanisms to enforce trust, and are politically and militarily more potent, allowing them to impose their beliefs on others through political coercion and warfare.
- UNWORSHIPPED GODS are IMPOTENT GODS: We pay attention to, remember, and transmit concepts that resonate with strong emotions, that help us understand and predict the world better, and that are moderately (but not totally) compatible with out intuitive understanding of the world. But why do we worship God, but not Santa Claus? After all, they both have supernatural powers of moral reprobation; why is one real and the other myth? Gods lack power if potential converts see little evidence of social proof - passionate devotion to them by zealous followers. If religious actions speak louder than words, then it follows that witnessing actions that convey genuine commitment to a particular deity will in turn lead to greater belief in and commitment to this God. People don’t believe any fiction that is interesting and memorable; they gravitate towards those that are backed up by credible displays of devotion (public prayer, painful rites, acts of sacrifice.)
- BIG GODS for BIG GROUPS: A cluster of mechanisms (synchronous movement, music, self-regulation, and fictive kinship) together with credible displays of faith in Big Gods who monitor and intervene, can be seen as the ingredients of religious solidarity and the creation of prosocial religions as communities that extends the boundaries of moral concern beyond genetic relatives and reciprocating partners to complete strangers. This mix, packaged together by the forces of cultural evolution, gave prosocial religious groups a competitive edge in the harsh race for cultural survival. In moving from the smallest scale societies to the largest and most complex, Big Gods are increasingly common, morality and religion are increasingly intertwined, rituals and displays of faith become regular, and supernatural punishment becomes increasingly focused on violations of group norms. These cultural gadgets ratchet up levels of cooperation and social cohesion in prosocial religious groups and turn strangers into moral communities. This process unfolds in the context of intergroup conflict.
- RELIGIOUS GROUPS COOPERATE IN ORDER TO COMPETE: Groups that develop or acquire cultural traits that are conducive to social solidarity while maintaining a large size outcompete groups lacking these traits. Religious beliefs and practices can spread by competition through several avenues: group stability, conversions or conquest, and reproductive success and population growth. Religious tendencies contribute to intolerance and violence in three ways. First, supernatural monitoring, as a group-building device, leads to a sliding scale of distrust towards those who fall outside of one’s own supernatural jurisdiction. Second, the social ties that religious practices help cement strengthen communities but also widen the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Third, religions create ‘sacred values’ that make individuals unable to think rationally about these very same values, which make certain clashes intractable. (Think of free speech vs Islam.) But even though parts of the religious bundle can create and intensify conflict, somewhere in the same bundle there lie the seeds of overcoming conflict.
- WATCHED PEOPLE ARE NICE PEOPLE: Social surveillance keeps people in line. Beliefs about gods and spirits arise because of theory of mind, which supplies a cognitive basis for mind-body dualism, the idea of the immortal soul, and teleology. The ordinary capacities for perceiving minds allow believers to make inferences about the mental states of supernatural beings, which enable believers to respond and interact with their gods, who monitor people at all times. Social surveillance is a powerful and reliable mechanism to boost prosocial behaviour. But because human monitoring can go so far, cultural evolution stumbled on supernatural monitoring.
- RELIGION IS MORE IN THE SITUATION THAN IN THE PERSON: If Big Gods are omniscient and monitor people 24/7, why are religious people not acting according to their religious beliefs even without such reminders? People obviously don’t think of their gods all the time. To understand human behaviour, we must imagine that behaviour is embedded in a social field, where multiple forces (values, goals, cultural norms, etc) push and pull at an individuals mind. Unless a believer is thinking religious thoughts 24/7, a watchful God is merely one of the many competing imperatives that might influence an action at any given moment. Prosocial religious groups surround their members with constant religious reminders to induce honesty and cooperation within the group.
- HELL IS STRONGER THAN HEAVEN: Mean gods make good people. A punishing God keeps people in line, whereas a kind and forgiving God may encourage people to behave badly. Why resist temptation if one is going to be forgiven anyway? However, people who think that only God can judge are less likely to punish norm-violators; belief in divine punishment diminished the motivation for earthly forms of costly punishment. Though Hell might be better at getting people to be good, heaven is much better at making them feel good. So long as societies can find other ways of getting people to stay in line, then religions no longer have to shoulder that burden and they are free to drift towards the luxury of giving the individuals what they want.
- TRUST PEOPLE WHO TRUST in GOD: Big Gods have been for most people in history, a major ingredient of the social glue that bound anonymous people together. Strangers who showed sincere belief in being monitored were more likely to be trusted because people know that they fear the consequences of malfeasance. However, because belief is easy to fake, prosocial religious groups are in constant vigilance to identify and weed out impostors who masquerade under a cloak of devoutness to reap benefits from the group while contributing nothing. This means that there will be prejudice towards atheists, because the word of an atheist means nothing, (or so religious people think.) Atheists might think their lack of belief is a matter of private metaphysical speculation, but believers see atheism as a threat to cooperation and trust, because sincere belief in a morally concerned deity serves as a reliable cooperative signal.
- RELIGIOUS ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS: If belief in supernatural monitoring elicits more trust and cooperation, what would prevent religious hypocrites from faking belief in supernatural monitors to get into the group and receive benefits without contributing? Why would religious devotees do things that sabotage their fitness? Religious practices are often costly, emotionally loaded and appear irrational to outsiders; they communicate a hard-to-fake commitment to the beliefs of the religious group. Henrich calls these displays ‘credibility-enhancing displays’ or CREDs, behaviours that, in religious groups, are reliably associated with genuine belief in counter-intuitive gods and can be used to infer sincere commitment to them. Prosocial religious groups, by promoting trust among their members, attract adherents at greater rates than groups without mechanisms to enforce trust, and are politically and militarily more potent, allowing them to impose their beliefs on others through political coercion and warfare.
- UNWORSHIPPED GODS are IMPOTENT GODS: We pay attention to, remember, and transmit concepts that resonate with strong emotions, that help us understand and predict the world better, and that are moderately (but not totally) compatible with out intuitive understanding of the world. But why do we worship God, but not Santa Claus? After all, they both have supernatural powers of moral reprobation; why is one real and the other myth? Gods lack power if potential converts see little evidence of social proof - passionate devotion to them by zealous followers. If religious actions speak louder than words, then it follows that witnessing actions that convey genuine commitment to a particular deity will in turn lead to greater belief in and commitment to this God. People don’t believe any fiction that is interesting and memorable; they gravitate towards those that are backed up by credible displays of devotion (public prayer, painful rites, acts of sacrifice.)
- BIG GODS for BIG GROUPS: A cluster of mechanisms (synchronous movement, music, self-regulation, and fictive kinship) together with credible displays of faith in Big Gods who monitor and intervene, can be seen as the ingredients of religious solidarity and the creation of prosocial religions as communities that extends the boundaries of moral concern beyond genetic relatives and reciprocating partners to complete strangers. This mix, packaged together by the forces of cultural evolution, gave prosocial religious groups a competitive edge in the harsh race for cultural survival. In moving from the smallest scale societies to the largest and most complex, Big Gods are increasingly common, morality and religion are increasingly intertwined, rituals and displays of faith become regular, and supernatural punishment becomes increasingly focused on violations of group norms. These cultural gadgets ratchet up levels of cooperation and social cohesion in prosocial religious groups and turn strangers into moral communities. This process unfolds in the context of intergroup conflict.
- RELIGIOUS GROUPS COOPERATE IN ORDER TO COMPETE: Groups that develop or acquire cultural traits that are conducive to social solidarity while maintaining a large size outcompete groups lacking these traits. Religious beliefs and practices can spread by competition through several avenues: group stability, conversions or conquest, and reproductive success and population growth. Religious tendencies contribute to intolerance and violence in three ways. First, supernatural monitoring, as a group-building device, leads to a sliding scale of distrust towards those who fall outside of one’s own supernatural jurisdiction. Second, the social ties that religious practices help cement strengthen communities but also widen the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Third, religions create ‘sacred values’ that make individuals unable to think rationally about these very same values, which make certain clashes intractable. (Think of free speech vs Islam.) But even though parts of the religious bundle can create and intensify conflict, somewhere in the same bundle there lie the seeds of overcoming conflict.
January 24, 2022
Norenzayan begins with two historical puzzles: one presented by the rise of large-scale cooperative societies, and another presented by the spread of religions with all-powerful, watchful deities. His thesis is that each of these puzzles helps to solve each other: that religions with supernatural monitors, or "Big Gods", helped early civilizations manage problems of cooperation in increasingly anonymous societies. Norenzayan makes a compelling case for this thesis and, along the way, he offers a remarkably insightful exploration of the psychology of religion, including the psychology of atheism.
His focus is on the cultural evolution of religion, and he employs a model of cultural evolution that is based on biological evolution. But he avoids pushing the parallels between the two too far. His focus is always on the psychological propensities which lead us to favour certain cultural concepts and practices over others. The model of cultural evolution at work here thus avoids lapsing into the dubious sort of "group selectionism" to be found in many Darwinian accounts of religion.
Big Gods reports relatively new work from the social sciences on religion. It will be exciting to see what direction work in this area goes in the future.
His focus is on the cultural evolution of religion, and he employs a model of cultural evolution that is based on biological evolution. But he avoids pushing the parallels between the two too far. His focus is always on the psychological propensities which lead us to favour certain cultural concepts and practices over others. The model of cultural evolution at work here thus avoids lapsing into the dubious sort of "group selectionism" to be found in many Darwinian accounts of religion.
Big Gods reports relatively new work from the social sciences on religion. It will be exciting to see what direction work in this area goes in the future.
February 27, 2024
3,75 (7,5/10)
I had to read this book for a university course and I have to say I really enjoyed it. It’s structured and written in such a way that it is easy to follow along which made it an easy read. The theories seem so simple yet so clever (it all made so much sense). At some point I did start skimming the statistical and experimental evidence because those parts didn’t grip me as much as the theoretical/argumentative parts, but it was still very interesting to read them sometimes.
I really enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to understand why we so easily trust strangers (unconsciously) to cooperate in societal systems we encounter every day.
I had to read this book for a university course and I have to say I really enjoyed it. It’s structured and written in such a way that it is easy to follow along which made it an easy read. The theories seem so simple yet so clever (it all made so much sense). At some point I did start skimming the statistical and experimental evidence because those parts didn’t grip me as much as the theoretical/argumentative parts, but it was still very interesting to read them sometimes.
I really enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to understand why we so easily trust strangers (unconsciously) to cooperate in societal systems we encounter every day.
June 25, 2015
An excellent book with the most modern ideas about religion as a social and psychological phenomena based on hard data and meticulous experiments. Although I cannot rate this excellent because most of the ideas presented are in a very early stage.
A must-read for atheist activism.
A must-read for atheist activism.
October 17, 2016
Boring. A few good points but really redundant and could have been said in a few pages.
up-next
November 21, 2019Note to Self: Look up more recent journal articles.
Co-author of this article: https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manusc...
Co-author of this article: https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manusc...
May 20, 2018
“Watched people are nice people.”
Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, by Ara Norenzayan, is likely to offend anyone who has fairly deeply held religious beliefs because it suggests religions, all religions, can be reduced to adaptive evolutionary behaviors unconsciously amplified by the arguably most effective socially cooperative animal on the planet.
It’s a fascinating look at how cognitive adaptions may have (probably) led to religiosity in humans. The basic thrust of his argument is twofold:
1) The feeling of being monitored, even by made up gods, ensures beneficial and socially constructive behavior within groups. The bigger the group, the bigger the god (in terms of omniscient and omnipotency) until at some point, secular laws can replace divine monitoring.
2) Easily identifiable religious affiliation ensures better collaboration (and trade, and cooperation, and reproduction) between individuals in the same group. The more costly the display, the more readily apparent in-group status becomes.
Big Gods is short but powerful, jam-packed with psychological experiments, cognitive studies and deep insights backing up the many ways humans, often unknowingly, manifest and are influenced by behaviors within those two sets of theories.
Norenzayan is a strong, no-nonsense writer that makes his points with simple, effective prose.
“…Big Gods are a solution to the problem of large-scale cooperation in big groups…”
“… greater numbers of true believers are able to trust each other in ever larger social networks, even when no one is capable of monitoring social interactions.”
“Prosocial religious groups therefore are in constant vigilance to identify and weed out imposters who masquerade under a cloak of devoutness to reap benefits from the group.”
This last bit gets to the heart of the concern many people have with those who claim to be religious, but don’t adhere to the core beliefs and behaviors (like, not being greedy or not supporting war) — being part of the in group, and not adhering to the actual tenets of faith, is the true advantage against a world of outsiders competing for resources and reproductive success.
There’s an especially interesting vein, well-explored, about how religions — given how important they have been for social development — ostracizes atheists who, because they can’t signal in group status and clearly don’t submit to constant deistic monitoring, are considered untrustworthy. And worse, it’s instinctive — experiments show that atheists are quickly categorized without so much as a second thought.
“If sincere belief in a morally concerned deity serves as a reliable cooperative signal, it follows that those who explicitly deny the existence of god are inadvertently sending the wrong single: they are being perceived as subversive noncooperators by the religious.”
And even worse, atheists (though Norenzayan highlights many successful secular societies with waning religiosity) are likely doomed to be outdone by by other groups because religious people out reproduce atheists, who don’t have enough children to sustain their numbers, and secular couples with less fervent religious beliefs. That’s because religious folks — again, regardless of which religion — have an internal prerogative to expand their group through reproduction, and, because of the adaptive advantage religion confers to reproduction, it means their numbers will grow more quickly.
This is a great book that I highly recommend, although it is somewhat disheartening. I agree with the author that the lack of understanding about the many ways we otherize outsiders, including through religion, contribute to the current state of affairs in which distrust, anger, violence, greed racism and xenophobia are dooming the planet to perpetual war, wealth inequality, resource scarcity and environmental degradation. Taking the time to understand how the brain works, and how the shortcuts that once helped our ancestors thrive might be dooming us in the modern day, is imperative.
As Norenzayan says, “that which we cannot explain in ourselves might be our downfall.” This book is an excellent starting point to reverse that trend.
Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, by Ara Norenzayan, is likely to offend anyone who has fairly deeply held religious beliefs because it suggests religions, all religions, can be reduced to adaptive evolutionary behaviors unconsciously amplified by the arguably most effective socially cooperative animal on the planet.
It’s a fascinating look at how cognitive adaptions may have (probably) led to religiosity in humans. The basic thrust of his argument is twofold:
1) The feeling of being monitored, even by made up gods, ensures beneficial and socially constructive behavior within groups. The bigger the group, the bigger the god (in terms of omniscient and omnipotency) until at some point, secular laws can replace divine monitoring.
2) Easily identifiable religious affiliation ensures better collaboration (and trade, and cooperation, and reproduction) between individuals in the same group. The more costly the display, the more readily apparent in-group status becomes.
Big Gods is short but powerful, jam-packed with psychological experiments, cognitive studies and deep insights backing up the many ways humans, often unknowingly, manifest and are influenced by behaviors within those two sets of theories.
Norenzayan is a strong, no-nonsense writer that makes his points with simple, effective prose.
“…Big Gods are a solution to the problem of large-scale cooperation in big groups…”
“… greater numbers of true believers are able to trust each other in ever larger social networks, even when no one is capable of monitoring social interactions.”
“Prosocial religious groups therefore are in constant vigilance to identify and weed out imposters who masquerade under a cloak of devoutness to reap benefits from the group.”
This last bit gets to the heart of the concern many people have with those who claim to be religious, but don’t adhere to the core beliefs and behaviors (like, not being greedy or not supporting war) — being part of the in group, and not adhering to the actual tenets of faith, is the true advantage against a world of outsiders competing for resources and reproductive success.
There’s an especially interesting vein, well-explored, about how religions — given how important they have been for social development — ostracizes atheists who, because they can’t signal in group status and clearly don’t submit to constant deistic monitoring, are considered untrustworthy. And worse, it’s instinctive — experiments show that atheists are quickly categorized without so much as a second thought.
“If sincere belief in a morally concerned deity serves as a reliable cooperative signal, it follows that those who explicitly deny the existence of god are inadvertently sending the wrong single: they are being perceived as subversive noncooperators by the religious.”
And even worse, atheists (though Norenzayan highlights many successful secular societies with waning religiosity) are likely doomed to be outdone by by other groups because religious people out reproduce atheists, who don’t have enough children to sustain their numbers, and secular couples with less fervent religious beliefs. That’s because religious folks — again, regardless of which religion — have an internal prerogative to expand their group through reproduction, and, because of the adaptive advantage religion confers to reproduction, it means their numbers will grow more quickly.
This is a great book that I highly recommend, although it is somewhat disheartening. I agree with the author that the lack of understanding about the many ways we otherize outsiders, including through religion, contribute to the current state of affairs in which distrust, anger, violence, greed racism and xenophobia are dooming the planet to perpetual war, wealth inequality, resource scarcity and environmental degradation. Taking the time to understand how the brain works, and how the shortcuts that once helped our ancestors thrive might be dooming us in the modern day, is imperative.
As Norenzayan says, “that which we cannot explain in ourselves might be our downfall.” This book is an excellent starting point to reverse that trend.
January 30, 2023
After the Agricultural Revolution’s consequent overpopulation of humans, how have we been able to organize into massive cooperative societies of anonymous strangers? The goal of this book is to answer that question. Author Norenzayan’s answer: religion. But it goes much further by addressing—with the aid of evolutionary psychology—why humans are religious at all. Norenzayan’s approach integrates the action (ritual) and belief (orthodoxy) perspectives as early causes for the cooperation of mass strangers, illuminated by the cognitive/genetic camp that sees religion as an accidental side effect of brain structure. For Norenzayan, religion is a result of biological and cultural evolution.
With the always watchful eye of tight-knit tribes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and their constant face-to-face moral judgment, there was no need for omniscient Big Gods. Big-Ag changed all that. The anonymity of too many people brought free riders, instability, and threats to group norms (selfish immorality). Big Gods with strong moral judgment in service of prosocial behavior for mass numbers of strangers seemed to patch that for the last 5000 years. Per Norenzayan, gods with prosocial moral concerns are the result of an “obscure cultural experiment… a peculiar cultural evolution” of the Holocene, that same period that saw mass population growth. The unifying consequence of Big Gods made societies more cooperative, bigger, richer, and more militaristic in competition with other Big God societies. This made Big Gods both “the fireman and the arsonist,” writes Norenzayan, good for the in-group, bad for the out.
But per Norenzayan (and Marcel Gauchet: The Disenchantment of the World), Big God cooperation, prosperity, and internal stability made them obsolete. In Northern Europe and Scandinavia, institutions and well-oiled governments have replaced prosocial moral gods, almost like a circling back to hunter-gatherer monitoring (albeit by strangers) where Big Gods aren’t needed. These nations—the happiest on earth—are also the most atheistic. And fortunately for the planet, they also have the lowest reproduction rates, while unfortunately for the planet, and perhaps for secular societies, fundamentalist Big God nations are reproducing at sky-high rates.
This book answers many questions about religious behavior and its frequent self-contradictions, like how Christians praying in circles of prayer about an 8-foot-high wooden cross at the U.S. Capitol on 1/6 could then impersonate 9/11 Al Qaeda jihadists. Fascinating stuff.
With the always watchful eye of tight-knit tribes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and their constant face-to-face moral judgment, there was no need for omniscient Big Gods. Big-Ag changed all that. The anonymity of too many people brought free riders, instability, and threats to group norms (selfish immorality). Big Gods with strong moral judgment in service of prosocial behavior for mass numbers of strangers seemed to patch that for the last 5000 years. Per Norenzayan, gods with prosocial moral concerns are the result of an “obscure cultural experiment… a peculiar cultural evolution” of the Holocene, that same period that saw mass population growth. The unifying consequence of Big Gods made societies more cooperative, bigger, richer, and more militaristic in competition with other Big God societies. This made Big Gods both “the fireman and the arsonist,” writes Norenzayan, good for the in-group, bad for the out.
But per Norenzayan (and Marcel Gauchet: The Disenchantment of the World), Big God cooperation, prosperity, and internal stability made them obsolete. In Northern Europe and Scandinavia, institutions and well-oiled governments have replaced prosocial moral gods, almost like a circling back to hunter-gatherer monitoring (albeit by strangers) where Big Gods aren’t needed. These nations—the happiest on earth—are also the most atheistic. And fortunately for the planet, they also have the lowest reproduction rates, while unfortunately for the planet, and perhaps for secular societies, fundamentalist Big God nations are reproducing at sky-high rates.
This book answers many questions about religious behavior and its frequent self-contradictions, like how Christians praying in circles of prayer about an 8-foot-high wooden cross at the U.S. Capitol on 1/6 could then impersonate 9/11 Al Qaeda jihadists. Fascinating stuff.
December 24, 2021
Norenzayan presents big religion as a critical step (but not final destination) in cultural evolution. He suggests that our psychology predisposes us to believe in supernatural entities, and that religion encourages prosocial behaviors within large groups, making them better able to compete with rival groups and grow. The group benefits of religiosity match the widespread lack of trust in atheists. In fact, many atheists promote the idea that the masses need religion in order to maintain order. However, the prosocial benefits of religion can also come from secular sources. A strong rule of law with high levels of trust in governmental institutions have the same prosocial effects on people. In fact, the only main advantage religion has over secular institutions (in terms of cultural evolution) is that secularism is often associated with a lower birth rate, making it less fit (less likely to spread and dominate).
The four “pathways” to religious belief:
1) theory of mind (we can imagine a god with desires who can punish and reward us)
2) ability and need to find comfort, meaning, and control in existence
3) exposure to the importance of religion in our culture
4) not thinking about it (the human default seems to be supernatural belief)
The four “pathways” to disbelief:
1) mind-blindness (deficits in understanding god’s mind)
2) analytic atheism (habitual analytic thinking encourages skepticism)
3) “apathyism” (an indifference to religion)
4) incredulous atheism (lack of credible public displays that one should believe)
The four “pathways” to religious belief:
1) theory of mind (we can imagine a god with desires who can punish and reward us)
2) ability and need to find comfort, meaning, and control in existence
3) exposure to the importance of religion in our culture
4) not thinking about it (the human default seems to be supernatural belief)
The four “pathways” to disbelief:
1) mind-blindness (deficits in understanding god’s mind)
2) analytic atheism (habitual analytic thinking encourages skepticism)
3) “apathyism” (an indifference to religion)
4) incredulous atheism (lack of credible public displays that one should believe)
June 7, 2022
This book puts religion under the scientific lens and examines the different components of religion and what kind of behaviors religion encourages in society. The book provides a comprehensive and extremely compelling case for the rise and fall of religion throughout history and is -- in my opinion -- the most thorough theory of religion from an objective and behavioral point of view.
However, I do have some grievances with this book.
First, I dislike the style of writing. It is very dry and academic and not at all enjoyable to read. Even though the subject matter was fascinating, it took me several months to get through the book because sometimes, it is just very difficult to read.
Second, in a few select chapters of the book, the authors seem to deviate from their objective, fact-presenting narrative and seem to hint that atheism is in some sense superior to religion. The authors are, of course, entitled to their opinions, but it feels jarringly out of place in a book in which the whole purpose seems to be an unbiased review of the scientific literature.
In summary, I think the core theory of this book is fascinating and, in my opinion, very accurate. However, I would have prefered a more light read. The book would have been no less impactful if some of the details of the various experiments had been left out, and the book's central message distilled into a more concise and captivating book.
However, I do have some grievances with this book.
First, I dislike the style of writing. It is very dry and academic and not at all enjoyable to read. Even though the subject matter was fascinating, it took me several months to get through the book because sometimes, it is just very difficult to read.
Second, in a few select chapters of the book, the authors seem to deviate from their objective, fact-presenting narrative and seem to hint that atheism is in some sense superior to religion. The authors are, of course, entitled to their opinions, but it feels jarringly out of place in a book in which the whole purpose seems to be an unbiased review of the scientific literature.
In summary, I think the core theory of this book is fascinating and, in my opinion, very accurate. However, I would have prefered a more light read. The book would have been no less impactful if some of the details of the various experiments had been left out, and the book's central message distilled into a more concise and captivating book.
August 15, 2025
Big Gods is a compelling look at how religion evolved to support cooperation in large societies. I found the idea especially fascinating that belief in moralizing gods gave a fitness advantage - people acted more morally when they believed they were being watched.
It also explores how religion thrives when governments are weak but tends to decline with increased existential security. I appreciated the psychological angle, like seeing gods as attachment figures for comfort, and the inclusion of how autistic individuals might experience religious belief differently, adding another layer of nuance to the discussion about the cognitive mechanisms involved in faith.
That said, the book is very research-heavy and at times felt like a bit of a slog to get through. Still, it’s a rewarding read for anyone curious about the intersection of religion, psychology, and social behavior.
It also explores how religion thrives when governments are weak but tends to decline with increased existential security. I appreciated the psychological angle, like seeing gods as attachment figures for comfort, and the inclusion of how autistic individuals might experience religious belief differently, adding another layer of nuance to the discussion about the cognitive mechanisms involved in faith.
That said, the book is very research-heavy and at times felt like a bit of a slog to get through. Still, it’s a rewarding read for anyone curious about the intersection of religion, psychology, and social behavior.
September 28, 2024
This is a good overview of one theoretical approach to understanding religion. It pitches the idea that Big Gods (gods who are morally engaged and/or punitive) helped make big societies. This is interesting, and there's lots of good material here. Surprising to see a psychologist tackle what are fundamentally historical quesitons, but I assume he's worked with historians in developing his theory.
On content, this is 4-5 stars, but lost a few because it is dense and technically written, at times dry. This is fine, and the book serves its purpuse. But as a popular science book, it could be more engagingly written.
On content, this is 4-5 stars, but lost a few because it is dense and technically written, at times dry. This is fine, and the book serves its purpuse. But as a popular science book, it could be more engagingly written.
May 19, 2023
Quite pedantic in style. The thesis could've been demonstrated with a third as many words. It reads rather like a dissertation that was lightly edited into a book, and without much consideration for how the audience of a book differs from that of a dissertation (indeed, I rather suspect thats exactly what it is).
Some portions are more worthwhile than others. Chapter 6, on "True Believers" and the nature of religion qua religion was more substantive and novel than most of the rest.
dnf half way through chapter 8 of 10. i felt i'd got "the point" and it just couldnt hold my attention.
Some portions are more worthwhile than others. Chapter 6, on "True Believers" and the nature of religion qua religion was more substantive and novel than most of the rest.
dnf half way through chapter 8 of 10. i felt i'd got "the point" and it just couldnt hold my attention.
December 27, 2018
A nice, well presented, and well researched bit of discourse on how and why religions around the world have developed the way they have. Some of the reference studies seem dubious, however. Many of the studies were done by the same researchers, and many of them were colleagues of the author. This book sits awkwardly between scholarly text and reader friendly presentation, but does so in a way that the discerning reader can navigate with critical suspicion.
October 21, 2023
I did gain an appreciation why atheists are so distrusted. It was explained well by Norenzayan. This book seems to be to be a good companion book for anyone reading Sapiens by Harari. The assertions made in the book are generally well supported by experiments attempting to find core parts of behavior.
I did realize the book was a few years old when the author mentioned that Mormons were a really fast growing church. That statement has not aged well since this book was published.
I did realize the book was a few years old when the author mentioned that Mormons were a really fast growing church. That statement has not aged well since this book was published.
February 2, 2021
This book was excellent. Norenzayn writes authoritatively with copious researched support, yet makes the findings accessible to a layperson such as myself. There were sections that I had to re-read to ensure that I understood, but it was worth it. The numerous descriptions of psychological and sociological experiments not aided in understanding, but were intriguing and entertaining.
Currently reading
May 11, 2022Only two chapters in. But enjoying this.
But. The intro needs a revision. Ara talks, by way of an example, about Mormons coming out of nowhere in the 19th century and now looking set to conquer the world. Mormonism started to implode in 2012 and is rapidly shrinking. Life cycles vary, but faiths seem to follow this pattern.
But. The intro needs a revision. Ara talks, by way of an example, about Mormons coming out of nowhere in the 19th century and now looking set to conquer the world. Mormonism started to implode in 2012 and is rapidly shrinking. Life cycles vary, but faiths seem to follow this pattern.
October 14, 2023
Thought-provoking book about how "Big Gods" (think the major monotheistic religions) have allowed large social groups to exist and cooperate. The concepts of social surveillance and costly signaling were particularly intriguing as well as the discussion of how religion can foster both cooperation and conflict. I see all these in play within my religious tradition.
July 13, 2025
An Interesting take on the social origins of relgion. The chief thesis is that religion is an outgrowth of social evolution and acts as building block for socialll organised society. The book focuses mainly on relgions with "Big Gods", not the polythesitic, anamustic or shamistic forms of spirituality. Its a nice full of experimental data. I do beleive that it would have been a lot shorter
April 5, 2020
I thought this book has some biased wording, but does a good job of showing both sides and pointing out confounding variables. I thought the concepts were interesting, however, I found it a little repetitive/long-winded and somewhat hard to read.
November 19, 2021
This was mentioned in Brian Klaas's book Corruptible. I picked up Big Gods and wrote a little for Medium.
August 4, 2024
Well worth the read! In some places I couldn’t put the book down - so interesting. It lost one star because of the constant repetition, which is about the quality of the writing, not the quality of the thinking. A great book.
September 10, 2024
An interesting book, at times I was thinking it would be better as just a long article - in the end it was fascinating. Covers why Gods or governments tend to be the driving force in a society - and how stability moves people towards governments.
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