Secularization, Evolution, and Politics

This article proposes three evolutionary games to study secularization. The games assume that there is a severe competition for a resource defined as the material wealth a society produces. Successful strategies emerge out of the process, become the authority, capture and allocate the resource. Individuals who prefer a heavier or lighter weight of religion within the organization of the polity respectively named as religious and secular types can become wealthier and be emulated in the population depending on their initial proportions in the population. The society can evolve into a stable division of secular and religious types or can evolve opposite directions toward secularization. Impostors who misrepresent their religious preferences can invade a population that is equally halved into religious and secular types. No evolutionary stability is reached if impostors make no mistake in misrepresenting their beliefs; otherwise secular or religious strategies become evolutionarily stable.