◉ Epistemic Games of Religion: Rule-Bound Rationality, Insulated Victory Conditions, and the Performance of Inquiry

Religious traditions can display serious reasoning. They distinguish trained from untrained interpretation, rank sources, answer objections, preserve doctrinal relationships, and revise secondary claims. The resulting activity may be coherent and rational by the standards of the practice. A public inference nevertheless remains: why should an internal victory count as evidence that the practice's central claims accurately describe a shared world? This paper develops the metaphor of an epistemic game to isolate that question without treating all rule-governed inquiry as defective. It distinguishes internal entitlement, practical value, and public warrant; then it identifies referee capture as a structural dependence in which the challenged claim or authorities whose standing depends on it control admission, negative scoring, or the consequence of apparent loss. The proposed independent-loss condition requires at least one feasible challenge that can be admitted, counted against the central claim, and made to reduce confidence under procedures not fully controlled by those dependent authorities. The condition does not demand neutrality, scientific experiment, or the abandonment of all prior commitments. It demands a route by which resistance can survive the framework's own interpretive machinery. Cross-tradition disagreement makes the requirement especially important because incompatible communities can each award sincere internal victories. A five-part accountability protocol shows how religious inquiry can improve public answerability through claim-specific exposure, independent admission, reciprocal scoring, revision consequences, and cross-community audit. The conclusion is conditional and jurisdictional. Internal authorities may settle what is orthodox or faithful within a tradition; they cannot, solely by ruling in its favor, settle whether its contested account of reality is publicly warranted. An annotated formal appendix states the inference and separates its valid logical form from the contestable premise that public warrant requires an independent loss condition.