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This paragraph confuses natural selection of ideas with natural selection of the hosts those ideas apply to. It is entirely consistent with the idea of religion as a hyper-effective brain parasite / mind virus that spreads more easily in well-connected and organized societies.
It took me awhile to realize what you are saying here. For those who are as dull as me: OP falsely thinks "religion is abundant" implies "religion is a fitness improvement" but it actually implies "religion is fit." For example, religion could actually hurt its hosts, but the idea itself spreads & doesn't kill hosts too quickly.
Indeed, the phrasing, "religion is a fitness improvement" is actually confused, because I don't think it makes sense to talk about a fit organism only a fit gene. Organisms are completely irrelevant to the overall picture of things. A gene that causes an organism to reproduce way more, and also die early and feel pain, is by all accounts bad for the organism but that gene is good for itself. Maybe this is the insight that leads to hot-take phrases like "selfish gene." Can a gene be a parasite?
Back on topic, religion/ideas/memes having evolutionary considerations does not defend the accusation of arbitrary. In this case, "arbitrary" doesn't mean random, since the constructivist will agree that the norm is caused by specific historical circumstances. I think when a social constructivist calls it arbitrary, he just means he doesn't value the cause-and-effect process that generated it. Rejecting social darwinism is good actually, because evolutionary fitness etc. can be at odds with our goals.
"Selfish gene" comes from the eponymous book by Richard Dawkins, and centers on exactly that idea.
Religion is an interesting one, because I've just read a great book called "The Secrets of our Success", which talks about culture and inter-group competition, and religion seems a very effective way to strengthen cultural norms, and also to strengthen inter-group non-family ties, both of which are important for intergroup competition.
I'm personally still not a big fan, but it was interesting, and I do note a slide towards conservatism as I get older (although I think that's also the shift of the left away from liberality (of which I'm a fan) towards identity politics (of which I"m not).
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I've seen quite a bit of suspicion about the idea that religion is pro-social (often substituted for the idea that religion instead is a memetic parasite that spreads by taking advantage of certain human biases without conferring an advantage upon those who adopt it), but I will say there is support for my hypothesis in the literature.
For example: "Converging lines of field and experimental evidence suggest that cultural evolution, building on certain innate cognitive foundations, has favored the emergence of beliefs in powerful moralizing deities concerned with the prosocial behavior of individuals beyond kin- and reciprocity-based networks (Norenzayan and Shariff 2008). Cross-cultural analysis of 186 societies has found that larger and more complex societies were much more likely to subscribe to potent deities directly concerned with morality and willing to punish norm violators (Roes and Raymond 2003; Johnson 2005). Studies conducted across a diverse range of societies including foragers, farmers, and herders, show that professing a world religion predicts greater fairness toward ephemeral interactants (Henrich et al. 2010). Experiments with North Americans show that unconsciously activating religious concepts lead to reduced cheating and greater generosity toward strangers (Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Mazar and Ariely 2006; Shariff and Norenzayan 2007), except among ardent atheists. Together, these cross-cultural, historical, and experimental findings suggest that (1) religion—as a phenomenon with potentially deep roots (Klein 1989)—has not always been about high moralizing gods and (2) modern world religions may have evolved to create a potent linkage between the supernatural and the prosocial. Thus, we hypothesize that cultural evolutionary processes, driven by competition among groups, have exploited aspects of our evolved psychology, including certain cognitive by-products, to gradually assemble packages of supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals that were increasingly effective at instilling deep commitment, galvanizing internal solidarity, and sustaining larger-scale cooperation."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1162/BIOT_a_00018
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