ABSTRACT
This chapter explains slow religious change from how religion facilitates cooperation at large social scales. The cooperation model is so commonplace that it deserves to be called the folk theory of religion. The chapter discusses how teams of historians of religion and life scientists might test, improve, and integrate cognitive and evolutionary models of religion. It finds that historical resources are needed to evaluate the high god model, and the distinction between high god religions and low gods religions attributed to the historical record and the collaboration between historians of religion and life scientists will soon become standard practice in religious studies scholarship. The chapter suggests that religious cultures fit the design specifications of a robust coordination device. The stag hunt is not merely an intellectual curiosity of theoretical economists. Many social dilemmas assume the character of a stag hunt. The ancients held that religion is conserved because religion supports political order.
