Atonement as social repair: religious rituals and the maintenance of group cohesion

This review examines how religious rituals of atonement and appeasement function as mechanisms for maintaining social order and restoring cohesion after moral transgressions. Building on costly signaling theory, I argue that these rituals are best understood as solutions to the one-to-many reconciliation problem : how an individual or subgroup can credibly communicate remorse, reaffirm shared norms, and restore trust when the relevant audience is diffuse (a community, a set of ancestors, or a supernatural authority) rather than a single identifiable victim. Three structural features of this problem distinguish it from dyadic repair: the absence of an identifiable victim who can grant forgiveness, a coordination problem that prevents collective forgiveness from emerging through individual negotiation, and a credibility problem that is amplified when observers lack personal knowledge of the transgressor. Atonement and appeasement rituals address these demands through their public character, structured cost, and authoritative framing, which together transform private remorse into a socially legible and binding signal of moral realignment. Drawing on ethnographic and historical evidence from diverse cultural traditions, I show how these features recur cross-culturally and derive testable predictions. I further discuss implications for moral regulation, cross-cultural variation in atonement practices, and the limits of public apology in contemporary contexts.