There is an enormous variety of rules among different groups. Jews keep kosher and Muslims halal, each with an elaborate system of permitted and forbidden food. Observant Muslim women cover their hair; observant Jewish men cover their heads; Sikh men keep uncut hair beneath a turban, one of five articles of faith worn on the body. Latter-day Saints wear temple garments beneath ordinary clothes. Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities keep to plain dress—no jewellery, no ornament, prescribed cuts and colours—and among conservative Anabaptists the head covering remains a visible marker of a woman's standing in the community. Ramadan requires a month of daylight fasting; Lent, historically, forty days of abstention; Orthodox Judaism forbids a long list of activities from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall.
Sometimes such practices can be understood as ordinary cultural variations with obscure origins. But often the rules are treated as rigid and imperative, such that veering away from them is not merely unconventional but offensive—against the religious community, the family, or God. At times these restrictions make it difficult to live freely or comfortably.
The Mennonite faith of my childhood did not really require very much in terms of behavioural restrictions, except for one fairly trivial vestige: "dancing" was not allowed. I'm not even sure where this restriction about dancing came from. Perhaps it was associated, in prior generations, with some kind of immodesty or sexual impropriety. But as a result, this fun, wholesome, healthy art form and social skill was unavailable in our household. To this day I have a poor sense of rhythm and movement—and a shyness about it as well—and I often wished that dancing could have been part of my childhood.
These rules make loyalty visible. As William Irons argued in the foundational statement of the idea, a commitment that is expensive and hard to fake is, for that very reason, believable. Recognizable styles of appearance and behaviour mark membership: they make it easier to find fellow members, easier to distinguish outsiders, and easier to notice who might be wavering. Such rules do not merely symbolize belonging; they make unbelonging conspicuous and costly. A person who quietly stops keeping kosher may go unnoticed for a while. A woman who stops wearing the covering is visible from across the room.
Of course, many members experience these rules sincerely as discipline, modesty, reverence, or protection from vanity. Moralizing the rule is part of what gives it strength. But once a custom is linked to purity, holiness, or obedience, noncompliance ceases to look like preference and begins to look like sin.
Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler examined eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes and found that the religious ones far outlasted the secular ones—and that among the religious communes, the number of costly requirements a group imposed predicted how long it survived. The most revealing part of the finding is what did not happen: among the secular communes, costly requirements predicted nothing at all. Demanding sacrifices of a secular utopian community did not make it last longer. The difference, Sosis suggests, is that a religious justification cannot be argued with in the way a secular one can. A member who wonders why the rules must be so hard can be answered, in a secular commune, only by reasons—and reasons invite counter-reasons. In a religious commune the answer is that God requires it, and there the conversation stops. Unfalsifiability, which is an intellectual weakness, turns out in a religious community to be a considerable practical strength.
Over time, people can become deeply attached to these behavioural symbols. They can evoke powerful feelings bound up with the religion, functioning almost like a ring worn every day and night for years, beginning in childhood. The symbol stops feeling external; it becomes part of one's emotional life. A person may then feel uneasy, exposed, or guilty without it, and feel relief when surrounded by others wearing the same symbol. In this way the group's surveillance gradually migrates inward—the watchful outer eye becoming an inner one—until conscience itself begins to speak in the voice of the group. It is the same internalization I described in the chapter on object relations, where an imagined divine observer became a permanent inner companion: here an external discipline is taken so far inside that it is felt as the self.
But if the "ring," so to speak, becomes massive and cumbersome—if it begins to hinder ordinary life—then what once felt meaningful can become a burden. There is a name for this logic in biology. The evolutionary theorist Amotz Zahavi proposed the "handicap principle," using the peacock's tail as his model: a display is a believable signal of quality precisely because it is costly, since only a genuinely fit peacock can afford to drag such a thing through the world. The principle is contested among biologists, though the human evidence is more direct. A costly observance is a believable signal of devotion precisely because it carries a real practical price. The burden is part of the proof.
We see similar dynamics in many corners of modern culture—uniforms, fraternities, subcultures, luxury brands, corporate logos. Often these are harmless variations. The darker side appears when people do not wish to participate, when the rules become tools of control, or when symbols are used to police appetite, sexuality, courtship, self-presentation, and ordinary freedom. Then noncompliance is no longer treated as a harmless difference in style; it becomes a source of shame, suspicion, rejection, or punishment.
These burdens also tend not to fall evenly. In many settings, women, girls, adolescents, and sexual minorities are scrutinized far more intensely than adult men; their bodies and behaviour become the stage on which the community performs its idea of moral seriousness. It is worth noticing how asymmetrical the enforcement usually is: a rule requiring modest dress falls on a fifteen-year-old girl in a way it does not fall on the middle-aged men who interpret it. At that point the rule is no longer merely symbolic. It has become a way of distributing power—and, as I noted in discussing the abuse of children, the heaviest enforcement tends to fall on those with the least power to resist it.
A related dark side of religious dogma is condemnation of, or discrimination against, people whose lifestyles the group does not endorse. At root this is often not uniquely religious at all. It is an ordinary human tendency—amply present in secular settings too—to exclude or denigrate those who are different, even when they are not harming anyone. Religion did not invent the tendency; but, as we have seen elsewhere, it can sanctify it, organize it, and lend it an air of cosmic authority.
Yet there are also humane strands within the same traditions that pull hard in the opposite direction. Alongside the purity language and the social policing there are scriptural moments that exalt mercy and love toward precisely those whom the surrounding culture despised: the parable in which a despised Samaritan, and not the respectable priest, proves to be the true neighbour; the insistence that in Christ there is "neither Jew nor Greek"; the prophets' impatience with meticulous ritual in the absence of justice—"I desire mercy, and not sacrifice." That tension is the revealing thing. At its best, religion asks people to transcend tribalism. At its worst, it turns tribal markers into sacred obligations.
References
Irons, W. (2001). Religion as a hard-to-fake sign of commitment. In R. M. Nesse (Ed.), Evolution and the capacity for commitment. Russell Sage Foundation.
The foundational statement of the idea that costly, hard-to-fake religious observances function as reliable signals of an individual's commitment to a group, easing the problem of trust among people who must cooperate. Irons argues that the very features of religion that look irrational from outside—expensive rituals, arbitrary restrictions, time-consuming obligations—are what make membership credible from inside. It is the theoretical seed from which the costly-signalling account of religion grew.
Sosis, R., & Alcorta, C. (2003). Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12(6), 264–274. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.10120
A review of the evolutionary "costly signalling" theory of religion, arguing that demanding rituals, taboos, and sacrifices function as hard-to-fake signals of commitment to a group and its moral code. Because such displays are difficult to counterfeit, they promote trust and cooperation among believers while screening out free riders. The review also surveys the ethnographic and experimental evidence bearing on the theory.
Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069397103037002003
An empirical test using historical data on eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes. Religious communes proved far more likely to survive than secular ones, and the number of costly requirements a religious commune imposed predicted its longevity. Crucially, no such association appeared among the secular communes—a result the authors attribute to the capacity of religious justification to place demands beyond the reach of ordinary argument.
Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection—A selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53(1), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3
The original statement of the "handicap principle": costly, fitness-reducing displays such as the peacock's tail are reliable signals precisely because only high-quality individuals can afford them. The biological version remains contested among signalling theorists—Richard Prum's aesthetic account of mate choice is a sustained argument against it—but the underlying logic, that cost guarantees honesty, is the framework on which the costly-signalling account of religion is built.
A note on scriptural references, handled as sources rather than formal citations: the parable of the good Samaritan is Luke 10:25–37; "neither Jew nor Greek" is Galatians 3:28; and "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice" is Hosea 6:6, quoted by Jesus in Matthew 9:13 and 12:7—each an instance of a tradition's own texts pressing against the tribal use of its rules.
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