This paper examines the transformation of the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40,000 from architect of the anti-religious Imperial Truth into the supreme object of the Imperium’s compulsory devotion. Rather than treating this reversal as mere irony, it reads the God-Emperor as a fictional test case for theories of secularization, cognitive naturalness, and political theology. Drawing principally on Robert N. McCauley’s claim that religion is cognitively natural whereas science is comparatively counterintuitive, effortful, and institutionally fragile, the paper argues that the Emperor’s project fails because it misconstrues religion as a set of erroneous propositions rather than as a recurrent assemblage of agency detection, ritual practice, affective solidarity, and socially transmitted memory. In conversation with Boyer, Barrett, and Whitehouse, the Imperial Truth appears not as the overcoming of religion but as an unstable attempt to suppress religious cognition while retaining many of religion’s most generative forms: charisma, catechesis, sacrifice, crusade, and cosmic threat.
The paper then situates this cognitive argument within political theology and memory studies. Through Bellah’s concept of civil religion, Schmitt’s account of sovereignty, Kantorowicz’s doctrine of the ruler’s “two bodies,” and Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, the Emperor’s enthronement after the Horus Heresy can be read as the re-sacralization of political authority. His wounded body on the Golden Throne becomes the material center of an immortal body politic, while the prohibited Lectitio Divinitatus helps convert contested history into canonized memory. The Imperium thus transforms failed disenchantment into a total religious-political order. Warhammer 4K thereby suggests that when a regime abolishes worship while preserving hierarchy, ritual violence, missionary pedagogy, and sacred history, it does not escape religion. It manufactures a more absolute form of it. This reading helps us meditate on religion and religiosity.
Author bio(s)
Kamyab Ghorbanpour and Marianne Kramer are both PhD candidates in Cognitive Science at Tilburg University with different academic backgrounds. Ghorbanpour has a background in Game Studies and currently works on the ethics of games, while Kramer has a background in political science and philosophy and currently works on military ethics.
