Before offering an "X is really about Y" signaling explanation, it's important to falsify the "X is about X" hypothesis first. Once that's done, signaling explanations require, at minimum:

1. An action or decision by the receiver that the sender is trying to motivate.
2. (2.1) An explanation for why the receiver is listening for signals in the first place, and (2.2) why the sender is trying to communicate them.
3. A language that the sender has reason to think the receiver will understand and believe as the sender intended.
4. A physical mechanism for sending and receiving the signal.

(Added numbers for reference.)

I think 1, 2.1, and 3 are all wrong, in that none of them are required for a signaling hypothesis to be plausible. I believe you're assuming that signaling is effective and/or rational, but this is a mistake. Signaling was optimized to be effective in the ancestral environment, so there's no reason why it should still be effective today. As far as I can tell, it generally is not.

As an example, consider men wearing solid shoes in the summer despite finding those uncomfortable. There is no action this is trying to motivate, and there is no reason to expect the receiver is listening -- in fact, there is often good reason to expect that they are not listening (in many contexts, people really don't care about your shoes). Nonetheless, I think conformity signaling is the correct explanation for this behavior.

The pilot example is problematic because in this case, signaling is part of a high-level plan. This is a non-central example. Most of the time, signaling is motivated by evolutionary instincts, like the fear of standing out. In the case of religion, I think this is most of the story. Those instincts can then translate into high-level behavior like going to the church, but it's not the beginning of the causal chain.