Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

Wilson frames religions as cultural systems subject to selection pressures, borrowing Darwinian language to describe how belief traditions spread, persist, and outcompete alternatives. The remark suggests that the large, enduring religions of the modern world are not neutral survivors but “winners” shaped by historical competition—often through exclusivist truth claims, missionary expansion, and the suppression or marginalization of rival cults and sects. In this view, tolerance is not presented as the typical engine of early growth; rather, success tends to correlate with mechanisms that secure loyalty, reproduce adherents, and resist syncretism or defection. The quote is significant for its provocative reduction of religious history to evolutionary competition, inviting debate about whether cultural “fitness” implies moral legitimacy.