If this is wish-fulfillment, it is a masochistic one. This theory's Sunday school roster of religious characteristics seems hardly the comprehensive and detailed listing that a robust universal theory requires. Guthrie's second group of theorists believe that the key to solving the riddle of religion lay within the social order. Here, religion is a means to social solidarity. The private virtues and public morality fostered by religious sentiment preserve and maintain the public good.
Politicians praise religion for keeping citizens on the straight and narrow.
Theocracies are the ultimate end of the institutionalization of this belief. In a theocracy, religious belief and social order are one. It preserves social order which develops through the ages of cultural evolution. It acts as a cultural ratchet, permitting the development of additional social order while forbidding backsliding. Religion makes concrete to the people that hugely complex abstraction known as society.