The Law of Religion

These structural choices shape real politics and real law, because they define, in advance, what counts as sacred, what is permitted, and who is entitled to command obedience in the name of something larger than themselves.

A universal religion carries particular power precisely because it claims the same truth applies everywhere, for everyone, rather than only for one tribe or one place. That single claim has historically justified conversion campaigns, outright conquest, and moral policing across entire continents. The same claim, Harari notes, has also insisted on compassion, organized charity, and real limits on cruelty that local tribal religions rarely extended beyond their own group.

Harari's example of the Roman Empire's eventual embrace of Christianity shows both sides at once: a universal religious claim that helped unify a sprawling, culturally diverse empire under one moral framework, while also exporting missionary conquest and religious intolerance to regions that had previously tolerated a much wider range of local belief.

The underlying mechanism, though, stays consistent across every religious system Harari examines: an imagined social order becomes far more powerfully enforceable once it is welded to the cosmos itself rather than left as a merely human arrangement. When a society's rules are framed as sacred rather than simply customary, breaking them stops being an ordinary mistake and becomes sin — and the concept of sin, once established, turns out to be an extraordinarily effective way of organizing the behavior of an entire society without needing constant, direct enforcement.

Harari also counts modern ideologies as religions in this functional sense: liberalism, communism, capitalism, and nationalism are systems of norms and values founded on belief in a superhuman order, even when that order is natural law rather than a god. Humanist religions, which worship humanity itself, come in several rival forms, and much of modern politics has been a contest between them.