The Roman’s didn’t really believe in omnipotent gods. They pretended to but really they just used gods to encapsulate complex ideas like fortune and war spirit. Communicating the intracaises of a dynamical system is hard. Expecially to someone who is illiterate and therefore not as comfortable with abstract concepts as a literate person. But if you can anthropomorphise the system into a god and make the quirks of the system into quirks of the gods personality then any man can be made to understand how probability works, or how the weather patterns behave in a certain area.

So when Christianity arrived in Rome it arrived in a vacuum. Judaism was too unapproachable in a largely illiterate society until rabies made it friendlier. Christianity was preached to the common man and offered something new. It put a head on the body of spiritual knowledge. Roman gods were a good answer to specific questions like why was the harvest bad this year and good last. But no roman god answered the question of what's the meaning of life. Epicureanism had tried but it was created by above average men and was incomprehensible to the common man. Stoicism helped us ignore the question. Jesus was based on
Dionysus so it seems the early Christians took more from epicureans and ultimately made Judaism more approachable by packaging it up in the rituals of the Greek Mysteries. They removed the stuff about conquering the world and replaced it with kindness. It was a feminine religion that could only of survived under the shelter of the pax Romana.

Elite Romans had no need for Christianity and cared little about it. It turns out life feels plenty meaningful when you are thriving and have slaves to ease your burdens. On top of that the children of wealthy people naturally question their worlds less than those of struggling families. This behaviour difference is biologically triggered by our environment and makes sense evolutionarily. If your parents are doing well you should probably just focus on copying them exactly. Eventually though most of the people who actually made society tick converted to it since suffering is easier when you have a purpose. The elite degenerated to the point of uselessness when Constantine recognised the lay of the land he said what he had to say to get the useful people to work for him.

Catholicism was essentially communism done right. None the less though it was communism and eventually it suffered from abuse of power. This abuse was probably a good thing though since it sped up the development of protestant like religions which emphasis individual empowerment. Protestants were encouraged to read the bible for themselves rather than trust the preachings of a priest. In some sense it was a throwback to Judaism. But with people primed now to engage with it fully. Catholicism served an important role in history by populating the world with a higher number of people and getting them to trust each other enough that they could trade with each other and resolve disputes without devolving into tribal conflicts. When a society increases trade people trust strangers more and start to think of all objects in terms of their trade value. Including time. When people start to understand the value of their time they tend to work harder and longer. They also value the items in their possession more, take better care of them.

When people become literate the part of their brain that learns to recognise characters on a page is the same part of the brain that is normally used to recognise peoples faces. Not for nothing are they called characters and type faces. This makes them worse at recognising people. All strangers look more similar to a literate person than to an illiterate one. This further enables the trust of strangers. Widespread literacy and demand for the bible created the demand for a printing press which created demand for machinists which created people with the skills to solve other mechanical problems such as time keeping and weaving. Which spurs new industries. The industrial revolution could only of happened in a protestant state. So Henry the 8th contributed more to society by his inability to recognise his own infertility than through any of his other acts as king since it lead him to convert the country to protestism sooner than it would otherwise have done. Without this we would of had to wait for germany or america to get the industrial revolution started. My money would be be on america to of won that race but probably england would still of been first. It just would of happened 100 years later