If someone were to ask What is the progress of religion? one might have to answer: Nothing. Other possible answers might be:
1 They no longer use human sacrifices.
2. They exonerated Galileo, finally.
3. They mainly stopped arguing cosmology with science.
4 Religions are slightly more tolerant of other religions, i.e. slightly more tolerant than an outright pogrom.
Answers which are not possible are:
1 Religion has stopped or slowed down warring.
2 People are nicer and more moral than ever before. (The cumulative effect of centuries of religion.)
3 Religion has united people.
4 Greed is waning
There are no such problems when answering the question: What is the progress of science?
Any progress of religion seems well hidden.
Progress defined by Big Religion is often cast more in geopolitical or statistical language than spiritual. There is no way to mathematicize spirituality yet, if ever. So instead we get the number of converts to this or that Christian denomination broken down by country, or a simple map of territory controlled by Moslem extremists as measures of progress, when nothing could be further from the truth. Those political constructs measure nothing about the value of religion, but only its advance across strategic territory.
Big religion abuses personalized religion because it has different goals. The acquisition of territory may be unreligious to people who take relgiojn to heart. The fight and goals of Big religion may not be to their personal tastes. They may see the necessary actions of those goals as contradicting their religious values.
Big religion knows all the tools of mass hyteria and mass hypnosis. It invented some of them.