Adaptive Axioms: Group-Selective Religion and the Axial Hack

We treat religion as a compiled injunctive program optimized over deep time for group- level performance, not for literal truth. Injunctions that are easy to learn, align incentives, and produce favorable extended phenotypes can be selected because they work at the group level, even when they mismatch world-model accuracy at the individual level. We formalize the factorization of injunctive efficacy into uptake and effect, model multi-group competition under resource constraints, and analyze a transformation we call the Axial Hack: universalizing injunctions that extend moral obligations beyond in-group boundaries. The framework predicts the ecological conditions where universalizing may be fitness-enhancing (high external enforcement symmetry, low adversarial load) and where it induces a measurable convergence tax. The point is not theology; it is selection. We present falsifiable observables and avoid normative claims.