The theory that the Earth was the center of the universe dates from at least the time of Ancient Greece and is probably more ancient. There's nothing Christian about it, in fact Christian scholars probably took the idea from Ancient Greeks, whom they revered (particularly the Platonists).

There were certainly heliocentric models of the universe proposed before Copernicus, but Copernicus' one was the more well-developed. In some cases we don't even have a model, as such, just some third-hand accounts mentioning that someone thought the sun must be in the center of the universe.

I suspect the most famous example of that is Aristarchos of Samos, for whose heliocentric theory we only know via a very brief and poorly detailed passage in Archimedes' The Sand Reckoner:

You [King Gelon] are aware that "universe" is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere, the centre of which is the centre of the earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and the centre of the earth. This is the common account (τά γραφόμενα), as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the "universe" just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism#Aristarchus_of_S...

So it's not that there weren't heliocentric models of the universe before Copernicus, just that they didn't really catch on, I guess.