be the actual cause. One of the important points made in this section is that
ritualization does not require explicit goals or even explicitly perceived threats
(or other transparent causes) to occur. In that framework, the treatment of the
topic in the Sermon of the Mount can be understood as a conscious reflection
on an unconsciously developed behavior.
5.3 RITUAL AS THE FOUNDATION OF SOCIETYThe connection between religion and moral behavior was already examined in
classical antiquity (e.g., Plato,Symposium210A–212B;Laws716b; Epictetus,
Discourses2.20; cf. Nilsson, 1967, pp. 647–53, 1974, pp. 302–8; Burkert, 1985,
pp. 246–8) and Chinese philosophy (Campany, 1996; Tavor, 2013), discussed
repeatedly in the history of Western thought (Hare, 2007, 2014), and recently
addressed in the framework of evolutionary theories of religion (Broom, 2003;
Wilson, 2003; Norenzayan, 2013; Johnson, 2015). In Chapter 8 we will scru-
tinize the link between religion and morality from a cognitive perspective. At
this place, we will concentrate on the notion that religious rituals enable
cooperation in society. This idea has been formulated most influentially by
Émile Durkheim (1915). The central notion of Durkheim’s theory of religion
(which he based on his interpretation of ethnographic data from Australian
aboriginal societies) is the totem, which represents the clan; thus, according to
Durkheim, the clan worshipping the totem in fact worships society
(Durkheim, 1915, p. 206). In communal, ecstatic rituals, the individual loses
itself to the crowd (pp. 218–19). Further, in the special meal ceremonies (but
only then) people eat the totem (animal or plant) and thus participate in the
god’s power (pp. 338–9, 347). There is no need to review Durkheim’s theory in
more detail at this point (which was immediately criticized especially on
account of the inaccuracies contained in and the misinterpretations of the
ethnographic material), since the body of cognitive research that we will
introduce in this section makes little direct use of his concepts, except for
the general idea that the function of religion is to maintain social coherence,
or, as often expressed more colloquially, serve as a“social glue.”^4
A broadly used framework to study problems of social cooperation is
Game Theory, a branch of mathematics initiated by Hungarian polymath
John von Neumann (1928; von Neumann & Morgenstern, 2007 [1944]).
Game Theory was further elaborated after the Second World War, often
influenced by the strategic problems of the emerging Cold War. Game Theory
(^4) See Uro (2016, pp. 128–53) for a detailed discussion of Durkheim’s theory in light of recent
scholarship in ritual studies.
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