On the empire topic, one might consider Utah. It was originally desired for the name to be Deseret and one of the two primary competing news organizations locally is called Deseret News[0]. In practice it's not really an empire (for all of the obvious reasons) but it's also kinda hard to ignore the influence that the church has on most of the population.
[0] https://www.deseret.com/ I didn't know this was the domain until now. There you go, I guess.
On the empire topic, one might consider Utah. It was originally desired for the name to be Deseret and one of the two primary competing news organizations locally is called Deseret News[0]. In practice it's not really an empire (for all of the obvious reasons) but it's also kinda hard to ignore the influence that the church has on most of the population.
[0] https://www.deseret.com/ I didn't know this was the domain until now. There you go, I guess.