Religious Institutional Selection: Social Scale, Political Coupling, and Competing Forms of Ritual Authority

This article develops an institutional-selection framework for examining the relationship between social scale and changing forms of religious authority. It treats animist, polytheist, and monotheist configurations not as successive ranks of theological progress but as historically variable arrangements carried by religious organizations. Its central claim is that increasing population and interaction scale do not select a particular theology. They increase recurrent demands for coordination, specialist transmission, legitimation, and resource administration; durable religious specialization is more likely when political authorities and other patrons channel protected surplus to organizations capable of reproducing offices, personnel, and property. This political– religious coupling also creates vulnerability: organizations dependent on concentrated patronage face heightened risk during regime rupture, whereas locally embedded, resource-diversified, or transregional organizations possess alternative pathways of persistence. The framework distinguishes ecological selection, institutional adaptation, and trait diffusion, and analyzes trait persistence, transmission, and repurposing without assuming wholesale replacement. Actor-level interpretive mediation is introduced as a methodological requirement, while eight theoretical propositions specify observable implications concerning centralization, niche differentiation, surplus access, political rupture, coerced labor, horizontal transfer, organizational complexity, and exaptive reinterpretation. Historical materials from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, the Maya, the Inca, China, India, and early Christianity are used as bounded illustrations and counterexamples. The article offers a theory-generating research program rather than a universal evolutionary law.