In The Faith Instinct, Wade investigates humanity’s transforming propensity for religion, showing how our innate piety has adapted to changing needs and conditions. Beginning as hunter-gatherers, humans were able to experience independent and personal access to the divine. But with the rise of organized agriculture and the growth of cities, religion became hierarchical: Unwritten rules and intimate gods were turned into opaque instruments of power by religious bureaucracies that shaped social institutions but also suppressed more ecstatic forms of worship. Wade, seeking the answer to religion’s ubiquity, posits that faith, acting as a catalyst of social cohesion, became effectively written into our genetic code – along with a periodic urge to rebel against the institutionalization of worship.