Social Group Identity--Survival value.
Bernt made an excellent point. I will add to it. This is not an original idea as I have read it elsewhere and do not remember the source.
Males who encumber themselves with the most ridiculous and utterly defenseless beliefs and who also manages to succeed well in society despite the encumbrance will be proven very fit by women seeking a mate, such as the encumbrance of a male peacock's wild display of feathers.
Being that females flock around a successor (minister? Religious Business man?), other males will show up in that crowd to show their 'belief' feathers. Notice how often men switch their faith to attract a woman! Notice how churches are attended more by women than men, and men come because the women are there.
So men are like the male birds who decorate their turf with adornments, do a fancy dance, and sing a tune much too close to successful males around them.
Natural selection obviously culled out women who were attracted to qualities in males that did not increase the fitness of their children (The Red Queen--Matt Ridley), so the question is what fitness does religion provide? Bernt suggest it is a security code to keep the group from mixing and to identify outsiders. This may work since the modern human groups are too large to identify by face, so, a cultural 'secret code' may work.
So the survival value of women who are sensitive to the dominant belief systems and cultural norms of their society to judge their potential mate by may be in allowing their group to grow in size. Larger groups overpower smaller groups. First comes the tribe, then religious affiliation (much larger tribe less related to each other), then communities, and finally nation-states. It is very beneficial for a women to be associated with the most powerful state of all, the United States, and to acquire wealth from another nation-state, Iraq. It is no surprise that the current president is so popular with women today who in the past were liberal.
So the survival quality of 'religion' and 'patriotism' is the ability to unite ever larger groups together against other groups. The stories that unite (myths) do not need to be true or rational to be effective.
But now for the tension: Nation-states recognize that the most powerful of them have the most advanced technologies. Technologies are developed by science. Science is lead by people who challenge the status quo of beliefs. So societies that learn to tolerate 'quacks' and 'nerds' and differing opinions succeed over those that do not. So we will experience eternal tension from the need for one group or nation to differentiate itself from other nation-groups, and resisting the unifying effects of science that finds us all very similar and living in a coherent universe while at the same time harvesting the results of this science for lethal and beneficial technologies for nation-group superiority. So women recognize the powerful contribution of science and may be attracted to successful ones, but also commit themselves to culturalize or 'save' their irreverent husbands.
Have I said it all?
Sincerely,
Monty Vonn
montyquest@aol.com
PO Box Q
Bellingham, WA 98227-0599
The Questarian Society
hometown.aol.com/questarians/tqs.html 
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