'God' is the average opinion of your tribe

Christians (even if in name only) have maintained majority control of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches since inception. They often still publicly swear an oath with a hand on the bible.

I think there might be some interesting analogies to vectors out there, so it annoys me that they’ve basically made a head-fake toward them and then just used the word average.

I think you are going in a better direction. I’d call a person’s opinions a point in a many-dimensional space, a space of issues. Then, to come up with a discourse we project those opinions into a some space of ideals. I think what things like the 1D left/right spectrum and the 2D political compass miss is that there isn’t some objectively correct way of picking the unit vectors for the space you are projecting onto. Probably we’d want to do the PCA, but that’s based on the population.

I’d also place the discussion in terms of political opinions rather than some analogy to a god or some gods, since they bring in a lot of feelings.

In the modern world and in larger societies, we tend to separate the ideas of ethics, values, religious beliefs, understanding of the natural world, education, and civil order (law, etc.) into different spheres of life, but in smaller groups, they can be all mashed together into a singular "this is what the tribe believes and how it works" thing.

So for example, in the US we don't have a state religion and we do have freedom of religion (mostly), which means our government and our church aren't the same cultural institution. But in some societies, they are. European countries have vestiges of this. Some countries in other parts of the world are literal theocracies.

And in most modern societies, the learned members of societies aren't the same group of people as the priests, but in some societies they are and you have a class of clerics who deal with all intellectual matters including religion, the natural world, and maybe other stuff.

So various societies decouple these different areas of life to different degrees. Some societies (and some elements within a given society) demand more uniformity than others.

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So, why is culture such a strong force? Why do people ardently believe in things they were taught, regardless of evidence? Why do some traditions have such importance to people? Personally, I think it's because the human brain is hardwired to promote a common culture. I think we have a basic drive to spread cultural ideas and a drive to accept cultural ideas. We humans are social animals. Along with intelligence, it is what makes us successful as a species. For a group to function, it needs some shared rules and beliefs and agreement about what its goals are. In order to agree on those, I think we're built to promote and accept ideas from our culture. It also helps us preserve useful ideas over long periods of time.

But just like any drive, while it has a purpose, it's important to limit and control it. We also have a drive to eat delicious foods, but that has to be controlled. Culture should serve our needs, not the other way around.

Probably mistakenly based on my own idea that any kind of idealism tends to be lent to younger people and gets balanced over time.

But re-reading your post, I shouldn't leap to conclusions.