Don Cupitt used to be some kind of Anglican minister at Oxford. When he retired, he started writing books. Those books were so radical (by Anglican standards) that many Anglicans don’t even consider him a Christian any more.

One of those books is called After God: The Future of Religion. In that book Cupitt shows how as societies change, so too do their gods. In the beginning you had animism, because each tribe depended for its existence on certain source of food. Each of those source became its own spirit or god.

Eventually, you get to kingdoms and empires, where there is One Ruler. According to Cupitt, when you get to One Ruler, you’re better with One God. This is become then you have heaven modelling politics. You don’t want polytheism in an empire, because it’s a short hop, skip and a jump from many gods to many rulers. Not good.

The implication: empires and their rulers adopt certain religions because it suits the political order of their time.

We can extrapolate further: Protestantism rose with the rise of the individual, because in Protestantism every individual stands alone before god (i.e. alone before society). Atheism is rising because secularism is proving to have difficulties with monotheism. Secular societies have tried compartmentalising monotheism by saying: it’s fine, but private. But as monotheism pushes back, a struggle emerges. Atheism is part of that struggle. .)

Years ago I sat in a classroom in a tropical country, listening to a talk by a professor visiting from Université catholique de Louvain. (I was there for intellectual reasons: the guy was smart.)

One line has stayed in memory:

“Isn’t it odd,” he said, with heavy irony, “that in every society, the order of heaven mirrors the order of society.”

Tom Wolfe said that a cult is just a religion without political power.

Most religions start as small, sometimes reviled, sometimes persecuted cults.

And at some time in their history these small cults became adopted (or turned into) empires.

Islam becomes its own empire.

Buddhism had Ashoka.

Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire.

Judaism was never adopted by empire, and I like that: it’s a good sign.

In the mythology of these imperial religions, the subtext is always that the imperial leader saw some truth in the religion, and therefore converted. But more likely is that there is something in these religions that suits empire well. (More on that later.)

So when I hear the phrase “great religions”, I realise that just means populous, and I think it’s more accurate to just call them big religions. Why are they big? Because once adopted by an empire, everyone converts as a matter of loyalty to the emperor.

So as well as being big religions, they are also imperial religions.