"Sociologist of Religion Robert Bellah's magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution (2011), traces the biological and cultural origins of religion and the interplay between the two.....(wiki)" 
"Chapters six to nine deal successively with the civilizations of Israel, Greece, China and India, around the mid-first millennium B.C.E., in the classical formulations of religion in the ‘axial age.’ While in tribal societies, all were involved in ritual, in archaic societies public rituals focused around the king. The new political configurations had at once direct social consequences and a strong impact upon religious conceptions. This in its turn brought to a religious reaction against kingly aspects of public religion, and to important trends of de-ritualizing and de-mythologizing. In the case of Israel, the great prophets are the classical example of such a movement of religious protest, or revival. For the first time, religion would now incorporate ethics as an essential element. In Greece, the axial age was exemplified not so much with changes within religion as with the appearance of rational thought, speculation and wisdom. The early development of Greek paideia reflects this new attitude to the new intellectual and ethical universalism. Mutatis mutandis, a similar universalism is developed in Chinese aristocratic education, since the time of Confucius’ Analects. Bellah insists that in the China of the warring states, ethical universalism is the measure of successful ‘axial’ transformation. As to Indian civilization, dharma, as the central ethicized term in the Upanishads, meets the criteria of ethicization. While this is true in the traditional Hindu culture, it becomes much more clearly observable with the birth and early growth of Buddhism. In all these cultural traditions, there would be, from now on, an ineluctable tension between the universalist trends in religion and ethics and the political environment."(GG Stroumsa, Revue de la Histoire de la Religion, https://journals.openedition.org/rhr/7976)
"Bellah’s conclusion is that axial societies were the first to develop “universal”ideas about ethics, about human equality, and that in the contemporary world we have to take seriously differing religious views, without (he claims) slipping into relativism. He remains committed to what Thomas McCarthy calls “dialogue across differences” and cautions (following Wilfred Cantwell Smith) that different religions ask and answer different questions, and that it is a serious error to dismiss a religion because “we think the other traditions are answering our questions” (my emphasis), and answering them “less well than our own.” Carole Cusack, J of Rel Hist. "Raised as a Presbyterian, he converted to Episcopalianism[21] in the Anglo-Catholic tradition." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_N._Bellah)
... Bellah’s final Santa Barbara paper begins where his famous essay, “Civil Religion in America,” ends, with the possibility of what Bellah calls “a world civil religion.” Bellah, quoting his own words in “Civil Religion in America,” says that the time has come to consider global society as containing the elements of “a viable and coherent world order.” Moreover, the cultural dimension of such a world order requires “a major new set of symbolic forms.” This sounds like he is anticipating a global religion, though in the earlier essay he did not go into any detail about what these “symbolic forms” might be,and how they would relate to traditional religion. His 2012 reflections in Santa Barbara began to elaborate on these two cryptic statements.
How could a global civil religion be constructed? As we interpret Bellah’s essay, he argued that there are at least three possibilities. One would be a kind of synthesis of some of the moral and spiritual elements of all the religious traditions of humankind such as Christianity, Islam, and the like, or if not a synthesis at least a repository of their shared values. The second would be as an extension of the civil religions of America, Russia, and other national societies. The third would be an expression of an emerging new global culture..... Mark Juergensmeyer at ...
https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/22201/22201/
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