Revisiting this several years on. I still think Boyer and Atran are largely correct about how to understand religion. The divide between "elite" and "popular" religion, in particular seems more and more salient to me all the time. https://twitter.com/Sturgeons_Law/status/951245236247846913

Roughly, elite religion, which researchers previously considered representative out of their own bias, is the product of sociological & psychological outliers, & gains broader social purchase primarily through coercion, but quickly loses its hold without that. It's where most of

the most salient differences bw religions are at their most pronounced. Popular religion, by contrast, seems more deeply similar everywhere, and includes a lot of beliefs/practices previously dismissed by researchers as not representative of their respective religions, but which

actually represent something like the default mode of human religiosity. Elite Christianity & elite Hinduism are > diff from each other than their respective pop forms. & maybe there's an arg to be made that their pop forms are, in some ways, > similar to each other than they are

to their respective elite forms. You only see this when you're able to get past seeing Augustine as real Catholicism & what the vast majority of avg Catholics believe/do as either just the same as him or as corrupt, incomplete or unrepresentative (both unjustified). Obviously,

most religious people have never, don't & will never care about things like Augustine's Christology or Nagarjuna's view of emptiness. But people persist in trying to grasp religion through these anomalous minority conceptions. Even irreligious ppl are tempted by the elitist bias.