Most ancient pagan religions, including Hinduism, follow this model. This is why the emperors of Rome were priests of the state cults.
I actually started to go back over not just religious but social structures in general reading about the extent to which Hinduism is a modern construction built through a dialogue between East and West and no small amount of "the projection of Christian practice onto others". I think I pretty much agree with everything you said, and I think I'll find the creedal religion notion to be useful, as I've spent too much time focusing on how community in the past has either absorbed religion or been largely inseparable from it (the point about the different types of intolerance is one I've come upon more than once studying anthropology literature and history, where community dominates even identity, as well as the unfortunate state of affairs of intolerance today thanks to creedal religions). As I've been trying to find ways to look into
1) How Christian villages of the type described in e.g., Cohn's
Pursuit of the Millenium, in which communal bonds are as strong as those which lack any creedal religion seem to somehow at least partially divorce the importance attached to creed or belief itself and attach it to tradition and social functions the way communal religions operate (in sociology circles Tönnies' Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and subsequent models have proved useful but to limited by the typical limitations of social sciences)
2) How the grafting of Christian notions onto other cultures and the dynamics of exchange have created both creedal religions where once we had none yet communal identity, the role of opprobrium rather than religious or even political authority, and other aspects of societies defined by the collective in ways that are difficult to comprehend, coming from an individualistic society.
It so happened that as I was looking into these for social neuroscience reasons I came across a number of studies on the ways in which cognition is so fundamentally shaped by culture, so another tool such as a new classification scheme to try out is always welcome.
He made the interesting point that creedal religions tend to turn into communal religions over time; where belonging to the community starts becoming more important.
"To an extent which can hardly be exaggerated, peasant life was shaped and sustained by custom and communal routine
Social relationships within the village were regulated by norms which, though they varied from village to village, had always the sanction of tradition and were regarded as inviolable
The position of the peasant in the old agricultural society was much strengthened, too, by the fact that...he passed his life firmly embedded in a group of kindred...The network of social relationships into which a peasant was born was so strong and was taken so much for granted that it precluded any very radical disorientation."
(Cohn 55-56)
I would agree that this transition from creedal to communal was standard before, as Christianity initially severed ties, once everyone was Christian the norm returned. The same was true with Islam, with the initial battles between Muhammad and the Quraysh, his people. Of particular interest is the (perhaps historical; it is from Ibn Shaq's
Sirat) story we are told of one Amr who (after 3 battles) made the traditional challenge to settle things by single combat only to find his challenge taken up by his nephew Ali (Muhammad's cousin). He refused to fight his nephew because of familial ties, while Ali had no such qualms and killed his uncle. However, as with Christianity, once everyone was Muslim kinship ties and communities were no longer divided by religious loyalties.
I don't think that holds true today, because there are fewer and fewer places that have the kind of communal structures that dominated human history for so long. It's been ~500 years since Luther, and as societies have become increasingly diverse at all levels (from social stratification to the types of communities that exist), individualistic perceptual-cognitive effects have only increased. This thread, the mythology collections that have existed almost unchanged since the 19th century (at least as far as Greece and Rome are concerned), the adaption of various tribal, Eastern, and (neo)mystic traditions to fit a Westernized and/or modernized lifestyle, are all (IMO) at least partially products of a culturally produced cognitive bias: a new psychology, "religion", spiritual practice, etc., is introduced, which starts a series of complex interchanges and the projection of perceptions rooted in cultural cognition, and as with complexity in general we get emergence, such as that of Westernized esoteric "traditions" that are believed to trace back far into a past that never existed.
This is how you get atheist bishops develop; boys who are "the right sort" but don't actually believe a word of it.
On the other hand, militant activism, political ideology, a plethora of new religions (whether they are believed to be new or not), and other replacements for creed have increasingly set in. There is no community strong enough to replace or render mostly ineffective the way there was for hundreds of years during which time Christianity & Islam (the two largest religions with the capacity to divide cultural/communal and kinship binds) would upset cultures by introducing belief systems only to have (usually) a sort of equilibrium in which once again the fundamental and most basic paradigm re-emerged. After all, our genus has been around a few million years and modern humans ~150,000 years, and all that time closed networks of kin tightly woven together into tribes/clans/etc. completely dominated life. Community is just an extension of this, but the larger and more complex the society, the weaker the kinds of bonds that made the return to equilibrium possible become.
The category of "religion" is, in some ways, not a useful one.
It has proven to be an extremely effective method for setting back the already limited abilities of the social sciences to understand social dynamics. The very people who sought to rid society of it frequently based their understanding of society on it (e.g., Marxian social theory and the quickly perverted forms of Darwinism, particularly social, which simply replaced the teleology of Christianity with that of another). I can't think of another category that has so dominated thought and been so inept that it literally created itself over and over again.
But I've rambled enough for one post. I need to go slaughter a bull for Christ-Attis now.
