Status Updates From Big Gods: How Religion Tran...

Big Gods reign supreme in places where government is corrupt and there is little faith in it. And when trust in government intensifies, religion loses its grip on society.

War made states, and states made war.

As groups expand in size and in social complexity, religion acquires a moral dimension. Gods become more powerful, interventionist, and demanding of hard-to-fake commitment. Rituals become more frequent, routinized, and in the service of transmitting dogma.

When secular institutions succeed in increasing trust and cooperation in a society, they encroach on religion’s job and precipitate its decline.

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. In turn, 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.