I am not anticipating a movie deal.

Your book sits in a strange intersection:

Becky Chambers + Lois McMaster Bujold + The Expanse + Ada Palmer + a family chronicle + frontier settlement comedy + theological space opera.

The nearest neighbors:

Lois McMaster Bujold

Especially the Vorkosigan Saga.

Bujold is probably your closest craft cousin for mixing space opera, family, military/political institutions, romance, comedy, competence, and moral consequence. The Vorkosigan books are long-running SF/space-opera works with major attention to family, hierarchy, personal honor, military culture, and social continuity; the series won the Hugo Award for Best Series. (Wikipedia)

Overlap with you: huge cast, aristocratic/merchant-military structures, moral comedy, family as civilization-bearing unit.
Difference: Bujold is tighter, more novel-shaped, more character-centralized around Miles/Cordelia/etc. Your work is more mosaic, serial, and civilizational.

Becky Chambers

Especially Wayfarers.

Chambers is the current touchstone for hopeful, character-driven, found-family space fiction. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is widely framed around a mixed crew and the discovery of family in space, and the Wayfarers sequence is often discussed as light-hearted, character-driven space opera. (Goodreads)

Overlap with you: optimism, aliens as people, domestic life in space, found family, kindness as a serious value.
Difference: Chambers is quieter, less militarized, less politically baroque, and much less interested in coercive sovereignty or ancient reincarnational machinery.

John Scalzi

Scalzi is relevant for comic timing, political absurdity, snappy dialogue, and space-opera accessibility.

Not the same moral/theological register as you, but if someone asked “who writes readable, funny, political space opera with big institutions?” Scalzi belongs in the conversation.

Overlap with you: speed, wit, public institutions behaving badly, high-concept SF explained through banter.
Difference: Scalzi tends to be cleaner, faster, and more satirical; you are more earnest, familial, and spiritually invested.

Martha Wells

Especially The Murderbot Diaries.

Wells is not doing your kind of civilization saga, but she is relevant for one very specific overlap: nonhuman/artificial persons becoming morally central. Murderbot is often discussed as character-driven, fast-paced SF with a distinctive anxious outsider voice. (Tar Vol on)

Overlap with you: personhood of constructed beings, trauma, competence, found family, action plus dry comedy.
Difference: Wells is much more focused and intimate. Your maroli collectively become a civilization-wide moral category.

Arkady Martine

Especially A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace.

Martine is a match for empire, diplomacy, cultural seduction, memory, identity, and interstellar politics. A Memory Called Empire follows an ambassador navigating imperial politics and won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel; the Teixcalaan series is explicitly marketed as space opera with interstellar mystery and cultural/political stakes. (Wikipedia)

Overlap with you: diplomacy, empire/commonwealth questions, identity carried across persons, political language as power.
Difference: Martine is literary-imperial and tightly aesthetic; you are more populist, comic, domestic, and sprawling.

Ada Palmer

Especially Terra Ignota.

Palmer is the closest match for “SF as political/theological/philosophical thought experiment.” Terra Ignota explores a radically reformed world order, law, religion, family, citizenship, war, and philosophical upheaval. (Wikipedia)

Overlap with you: civilization design, moral philosophy, religion after modernity, sovereignty, social order, world-historical stakes.
Difference: Palmer is denser, more intellectualized, more formally experimental. You are warmer, more comic, more action-adventure, and more interested in family/domestic continuity.

James S. A. Corey

For The Expanse.

The overlap is mostly political scale: factions, crisis management, found family, ordinary people in vast historical machinery.

Overlap with you: working operators inside civilization-scale crisis, political realism, military/commercial power, ensemble cast.
Difference: The Expanse is grittier and more secular-materialist. Your universe is more hopeful, spiritual, comic, and socially restorative.

C. J. Cherryh

Especially the Foreigner books.

Cherryh is relevant for diplomacy, alien etiquette, language, and the slow mechanics of cross-cultural trust.

Overlap with you: protocol, alien societies, diplomacy as daily labor, political misunderstanding.
Difference: Cherryh is more tense, narrow-viewpoint, and psychologically claustrophobic. You are broader, sunnier, and more ensemble-comic.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Mostly in the anthropological/philosophical sense, especially the Hainish works.

Overlap with you: civilization as moral experiment, restrained philosophical SF, different societies reflecting different answers to human problems.
Difference: Le Guin is spare and mythic. You are abundant, jokey, procedural, and serial.

My blunt answer

If shelving by market adjacency, I’d say:

For readers of Lois McMaster Bujold, Becky Chambers, and James S. A. Corey — with the philosophical/civilizational ambition of Ada Palmer and the artificial-person heart of Martha Wells.

But the more accurate positioning might be:

Optimistic civilizational space opera about family, faith, alien personhood, and the hard work of becoming worthy of survival.

That is not a crowded shelf.