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Religious freedoms are a subsidy to keep the temperature low. There's the myth that societies will slowly but surely get better, kind of like a gradient descent. If we increase the temperature too high, an entropic force would push us out of a narrow valley, so society could become much worse (e.g. nobody wants the Spanish Inquisition). It's entirely possible that the stable equilibrium we're being attracted to will still have religion.
I want to love this metaphor but don't get it at all. Religious freedom isn't a narrow valley; it's an enormous Shelling hyperplane. 85% of people are religious, but no majority is Christian or Hindu or Kuvah'magh or Kraẞël or Ŧ̈ř̈ȧ̈ӎ͛ṽ̥ŧ̊ħ or Sisters of the Screaming Nightshroud of Ɀ̈ӊ͢Ṩ͎̈Ⱦ̸Ḥ̛͑.. These religions don't agree on many things, but they all pull for freedom of religion over the crazy *#%! the other religions want.
Graph Utilitarianism:
People care about others, so their utility function naturally takes into account utilities of those around them. They may weight others' utilities by familiarity, geographical distance, DNA distance, trust, etc. If every weight is nonnegative, there is a unique global utility function (Perron-Frobenius).
Some issues it solves:
Big issue:
This is a very imprecise use of “utility”. Caring about others does not generally take their utility into account.
It takes one’s model of the utility that one thinks the others should have into account.
And, as you note, even this isn’t consistent across people or time.