South Asia’s Madras Courier offered a novel op-ed this January from multi-hyphenate Tejaswy Nandury, which argues that the next evolution of comic book superheroes is into religion.

This thought may seem absurd to short term thinkers. If you, like me, are a long term strategist, you will instantly grasp this notion. Marvel already has the mythology, and the mass following, required to scale it up as a global religious operation. It just needs to add some necessary elements to give the MCU a religious gravitas.

Nandury seems to be thinking of the global and multicultural reach of Marvel Entertainment’s films, but he does acknowledge that the leap from page to screen was already the first step in this trajectory. More specifically, he feels that this “source material” that prizes science and liberal philosophy, not to mention capitalism, in its main ethos. This “scientific religion” can base its home and rituals in San Diego’s Comic-Con International, “just as Christmas evolved out of a pagan Roman festival.”

As quirky as Nandury’s idea might be, the only part of it that is actually erroneous is his thinking on its soteriology: Marvel’s comics and films already has a mess of options concerning “salvation” (some of which were explored in this episode of the Vox Populorum podcast, incidentally). However outlandish Nandury’s proposal might be, it’s only this element of it that would need of revision, serious or otherwise.