People just use religion to mean a popular idea now I guess. The invisible hand is an abstraction of general observed trends. It's a metaphor. Unlike gods, no one thinks it exists in a literal sense, and to say it doesn't exist figuratively would be absurd. Anyone can acknowledge a society's needs can sometimes be met by someone with a profit incentive. You don't have to think that's a good way to address them to admit that the selfish interest and the collective interest can align. I don't know how society could function at all if this wasn't the case.
And who ever said growth could be infinite? A basic idea of microeconomics is that marginal profit decreases with increased production until it inevitably becomes negative. Capitalism, like all economic models, is a proposed way of managing scarce resources efficiently.
People may be over-enthusiastic about these things I guess, but that doesn't make them religious any more than someone being keenly interested in model trains makes them some sort of zealot. These comparisons are really forced and relies on intentional mischaracterization which serves no one.


Of course they change over time. But that already happens in every other civ game. You gain and lose territory by settling, war, and diplomacy. You build infrastructure and wonders. You develop technologically and culturally. But changing everything in one turn rollover is both unrealistic and disruptive in gameplay.