[1] see Latin dictionary: https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-dictionary-fle... and https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-dictionary-fle...
One of the critically important things to remember about 40k lore is that the game was originally a joke. Their "real" game was Warhammer (the game to be later called "Warhammer Fantasy"). Originally it was just "Let's put space opera tropes onto a game board and have them fight D&D monsters". Then they shoe-horned the chaos stuff in, then had a (presumably drunken) exercise in lore writing where they "invented" "Grimdark" by essentially turning the Despair knob up to 11.
And then it turned out to be popular, and it was time to start trying to write real stories on top of the mess. And... people loved it. Including a lot of people for whom the comically ridiculous Grimdark stuff turned into a kind of authoritarian wish fulfillment, which wasn't great. But you have to remember it was all a joke to begin with.
The "Imperium," which is led by the possibly-dead body of a entombed demi-god, sustains its control over the galaxy with a mix of intense faith, authoritarianism, and a massive space navy with marine shock troops.
That's England! The Imperium is the British Empire. The dead-God Emperor is Jesus and the Imperial Cult is the COE. The Imperial Navy is the British Navy and the Space Marines (who in the older versions were just common criminals, not super-soldiers), are the British Naval Marines.
One of the old slurs against Christians was that they followed a "corpse-god." They say the same thing in 40K.
Plus, all the rampant materialism, corruption, stratification, militarism, promoted and encouraged by the Imperium. All straight out of 1980's society.
Well... while I buy that to some extent, I think the point is oversold. While there are absolutely satirical aspects to the early game[1], they're mostly limited to puns. What (original) 40k is absolutely not is subtle highbrow comedy. It's a bunch of drunk nerds guffawing about whatever they thought was funny in the moment.
[1] Which again, didn't actually include a lot of the later lore. Like, the emperor in the 1e rules was entombed but strongly implied to be actively leading the empire. Likewise the original conception seems a lot closer to dystopian sci fi than "1980's society" to me.
Here's the original from 1987's Rogue Trader:
""It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the vast Imperium of Man for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die."
Definitely a Jesus figure. And a pretty subtly done one.
Also... the 19th century British Empire is... kinda not at all viewed as a theocratic totalitarian autocracy consumed by cult-like worship of a dead god. Like, at all? It was a bourgeois, wealth-focused and extremely secular colonizer power driven by very worldly desires and a vaguely racist idea of How Things Should Be. And there's a lot of valuable source material for fiction there![1] And... GW didn't really do any of it, and almost none of that until much later.
[1] c.f. like 80% of Cyberpunk
40k is not a satire of "Jesus," its a satire of Jesus-obsessed materialist Britain. How can you say that 19th century Britain wasn't obsessed with worshipping a dead god? They worshipped Jesus, put him into every part of everyday life, said that if you didnt worship him you'd end up in hell being tortured forever, etc etc...
There doesn't need to be an entire 1:1 translation of the Bible into 40k for it to be a satire. A carrion-God Emperor of (white) Mankind who is "apparently" watching out for all of us, at all times, and gives us manifest destiny to rule all other races? That's the modern political Euro conception of Jesus, ensconced the same way into an Imperial state.
The British Empire was extremely secular? You might want to brush up on your history. The COE (Britain's State religion) was not friendly to other religions inside the Empire. Especially at home. The British Empire was a devout place. You couldn't own property as a non-Anglican Christian until 1846! And they said their Jesus-God was responsible for everything, everywhere, at all times.
Outside of Egypt and Ethiopia, Christianity exists in Africa why exactly? India they found it was too difficult to break their faith, so it wasn't worth the bother when they could extract resources anyways. But Africa is heavily Christian for no reason other than British missions.
Bourgeois & wealth-focused is exactly how the Imperium is set up. They don't care about anything other than control and wealth being sent back to Terra. That's part of the satire too.
I think the burden of proof goes the other way? Obviously there were christians in England. But the British Empire really just was not a "Christian Empire" in any way that works in fiction. All the archetypes are secular! Tweedy bemonacled professors, Victorian romantics sharing cucumber sandwiches with their love triangles, gritty-but-cultured naval officers sipping tea and exploiting natives, Sherlock Holmes, for Christ's sake! (pun intended).
Like, this is a very deep well of narrative source material and like none of it is explicitly religious in even the most minimal way. Like, where outside of 40k is anyone trying to construct an explicitly "British" cult warrior along the lines of a Space Marine[1]? I just don't see it. And if this is the only example, maybe it's just a bad example.
Basically: the idea that 40k is based around British ennui about its imperial history is mostly a meme. It just fails as analysis in my eyes. 40k is about drunk nerds laughing too hard about weird stuff, and the analysis was a retcon picked up by atheists like us to flog our own particular culture wars.
[1] And to the extent you can find better analogs, they're to American grunts in the 20th century and certainly not redcoats!
Victorian Britain was heavily Christian, you are missing many archetypes such as the archbishop, vicar, the missionary, the good wife...Victorian Britain was an extremely Christian place.
Why do you bring up redcoats? Those were the land soldiers. I guess you aren't aware that British Imperial Marines wore blue uniforms? And the Imperium's marines serve in its Navy. British Imperial Marines were a ROUGH lot, and some of their finest soldiers.
And FWIW, "redcoats" were a pun on the fact that I'd introduced americans into the argument (to spell it out, since that's seeming more necessary at this point: redcoats are the bad guys in american revolutionary mythology). But that said, if your argument for the British Empire being a christian totalitarian cult hangs on the fact that the infantry and marines wore different uniforms...
We're done, basically. You're wrong, but I won't be able to convince you here.
In "The Adventure of the Empty House": He attributes his survival over Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls to "the blessing of God."
Finally, in "His Last Bow," "There's an east wind coming," he tells Watson. "Such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."
"Basically everyone (except you, I guess) views Holmes as an almost perfect expression of the Victorian secular rennaisance man archetype. I mean, duh."
Like I posted above, Sherlock Holmes is a Christian in the books. Have you read them? He just doesn't belong to a denomination.
"Holmes using christian-derived rhetorical idioms is, needless to say, not evidence that Conan Doyle was describing a religious cult!"
I didn't say it was, I was pointing out to you that all your supposedly irreligious Victorian archetypes were explicitly religious. Your tweedy professors from Oxford were the ones leading the charge against secularization, irl.
Not to mention that you left out a ton of Victorian archetypes that are all directly related to religious professions, probably cause you didn't know they existed. You seem to have a very shallow pop culture view of the actual character archetypes that came out of the British Empire.
" But that said, if your argument for the British Empire being a christian totalitarian cult hangs on the fact that the infantry and marines wore different uniforms..."
This is just stupid. Obviously my point was that British Marines wore blue, just like the original Marines in Rogue Trader did. Im sure thats just a coincidence coming from a UK game maker.
I also never said the British Empire was totalitarian. I said it was a Christian Empire under a Christian God, unfriendly to other religions. That is fact. 40k is a satire, which means they embellish certain aspects in order to show their ridiculous nature. That's what satire is! You obviously don't understand it.
You have no idea what you're talking about. American soldiers did not fight under an Empire that modelled itself after the Roman one. British soldiers did.
You really think British Marines were eating cucumber sandwiches and talking the finer points of philosophy? What on earth makes you think US marines are closer than the British Imperial ones were.
Seriously? Wow. Maybe it's because I'm American, but I can't imagine actually saying that to someone. I'd sorta expect them to throw hands if I talked like that about Jesus.
And I'm an entirely secular, non-Christian atheist living among many other such people!
Why would atheists be offended?
I mean, that's exactly what a "slur" is. They are not coined with the recipient's comfort in mind, and saying them can sometimes provoke exactly the sort of fight you imagine.
But yes, violent consequences ought to be particularly unsurprising to an American, since the US is, by Western standards, an exceptionally violent country. [1]
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9535176/ (table 2)
And you look at their "God" and its literally a dead guy on a cross.
You might not be too impressed.