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Notes -
A pretty straight putt modification to @Gdanning's conjecture should be "successful religions (eventually) deliver a message that isn't threatening to (their) elites." Christianity was also extremely threatening the status quo at the start, which is why Diocletion and other Roman emperors tried so hard to stamp it out. But when a revolutionary new Christian elite under Constatine took their place, we get the Council of Niceaea, and all the inconvenient or threatening parts of the religion get sandpapered over. Eventually, the religion that said all rich people are literally going to hell morphs into something telling serfs to stay in their place and the duke gets to live in a palace because God wills it.
Note that even "rich people are going to hell" is not a threat to the status of the rich in the temporal world, but rather the opposite: It tells the poor that the rich will get theirs eventually, so there is no need to try to take them down now.
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