For me, the most obvious candidate for X is literacy and mathematics education, so that's what I was thinking about. However, you're right that religion fits CJ's pattern a lot better.

The important difference may be that religion is usually proposed as a method of increasing a society's morality, rather than its level of comfort or wealth. Perhaps that's what makes it more apt to be seen as imperialist: Compared to metrics for safety or prosperity, morality metrics are easier to see as a relativistic thing that societies ought to define internally. The resistance against IQ as a metric to focus on internationally may be similarly explained.