Religion: Balm, Benign, or Bane

Did you ever spend the night with a friend when you were a kid and that friend's family went to church services every Sunday when yours didn't? Your friend's family just automatically assumed you'd go to church with them. Why not? You got to hang with your bestie a little longer. 

And then you walked into the alien landscape of someone else's beliefs and rituals. This worked, too, if your family went to a Baptist church and your friend was Catholic. The two traditions are vaguely similar, but the details will really catch you unaware. 

Religion is such a great way to convey stranger in a strange land in a story. I love playing with it for that reason. With a single religious scene or reference, my characters can show you that they are wholly invested in a culture, utterly alienated from that culture, or wondering what the heck is up with the culture. In science fiction, there's even more fun to be had. Religions can (and do when left to me) reflect a broad range of sentient beings - not all of which are humanoids. Humans want to look into the face of a human-looking god. Why wouldn't a species of sentient spiders want to focus all of their eyes upon the face of a spider god? I get to bend morality, too. We humans speak of morality as if it's absolute - when it's probably relative based on how your species evolved. Take food, for example. Humans are omnivores. We can, and do, eat just about anything. We attach some morality to food - animals we eat shouldn't suffer. But what if your species evolved from cats? The hunt might be a religious experience. An obligate carnivore eating a kill would probably be a high holy event. How long you could toy with your prey without killing it might be a form of prayer. Yet if your species base evolved from herbivores, predators would be demonized and plants would probably figure in the liturgy.

For most of my books, religion is a backdrop, a way of reinforcing that we're not in Kansas anymore. Most of my characters are only interested in religion from the standpoint that they use a lot of blasphemy when swearing. Edie's from a fundamentalist religious settlement (Enemy Storm) and she offers hints of cultural differences, but the religion doesn't drive the story. It does heighten conflict in that I used it in that book to draw a comparison between who Edie had been and who Edie has become. 

In book four, religion becomes a bigger thing. A much bigger thing. The heroine, Ildri Bynovan is a once in a century religious leader - think of the Pope or the Dali Lama. And while she's lost some of her personal faith, she strongly believes that religion is mostly benign, sometimes a bane, and in rare shining moments, a balm. She's in it to bring more of the balm to the members of the various churches under her care. Of course, the hero wants to use her to assassinate someone, so I'm sure they'll get along well.

The Religion of Character Development

Does religion change/determine the course of a story?

Uh, for the characters? Sure. Assuming religion is defined as devotion to a fixed set of beliefs, then all my stories deal with religion. It could be argued that character development is the discovery, testing, and confirmation or change in said beliefs. Whether there are greater entities involved in those belief systems and whether there are formalized mass followings varies. 

In my Fire Born series, there are five gods who are actively and visibly involved in the lives of their creations. How those gods are worshipped forms the structures of the five different societies. Naturally, the protagonist comes along to shake those beliefs to their core, sometimes shattering them and sometimes reshaping them as her own beliefs and values are tested and changed.

In my Immortal Spy series, gods, fates, angels, and dragons are the ruling class. Jokes abound about pillars of real-world mass religions. 

Now, if you're wondering if my personal beliefs prevent or permit me to write characters, plots, and settings in certain ways, I would say they permit me and never prevent me. As an author, if you can't or won't examine systems of belief through the eye of fiction, then you might need to rethink what kind of stories you're telling. Are your characters being challenged? Are they on a journey? Stuff's bound to happen that makes them question who they are, how they're doing things, why they're doing them--regardless of whether the protag realizes or admits it--it should be obvious to the reader. That's character development. That is the religion of storytelling.

Choose Your Own Religion

Here's a tease of the cover of THE SORCERESS QUEEN AND THE PIRATE ROGUE, out April 19, 2021. This is Book #2 in Heirs of Magic, Book #1 being THE GOLDEN GRYPHON AND THE BEAR PRINCE, with a prequel novella, THE LONG NIGHT OF THE CRYSTALLINE MOON, in the UNDER A WINTER SKY anthology. The cover isn't quite final, so some elements here may change, but it's getting close! Look for a full reveal soon. :-)

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "That Old Tyme RELIGION: Does Religion Change the Course of a Story?"

My answer? It depends!

I'm a big of a mixed bag, religion-wise. I grew up in an Irish Catholic family who were pretty much all lapsed, to the point that my stepdad was a former Catholic priest and my mother flunked theology in (her all-girls, Catholic) college because she stormed out of class after arguing with the nun. Extended family included an ex-Carmelite nun and a lifelong Catholic priest. On the other side we have Missouri Synod Lutherans, which my father left behind to convert to Catholicism, a wedding surprise for my mother, who had hoped to escape by marrying a non-Catholic. There's some kind of inverted Gifts of the Magi shiz going on there.

So, while I grew up well versed in liturgical debates, I mostly considered myself Catholic in the same way I'm Irish - by weight of ancestry. In (my co-ed, liberal arts) college, I majored in Comparative Religious Studies, along with my primary major of Biology. My honors thesis compared Meister Eckhardt's (an excommunicated Catholic priest and scholar) sermon On Detachment with Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. 

For a long time I described myself as spiritual, but not religious - which didn't seem to explain anything to anyone. Now I just say I'm a practicing Taoist. Since almost no one knows exactly what that means (including, arguably, other Taoists), that at least gives me space. 

All of this is by way of saying that, in my books, religion crops up a surprising amount. Or maybe it's not surprising. I find spirituality and the religions that grow from spiritual study fascinating. One of the terrific aspects of creating alternate fantasy worlds is that I can make up my own pantheon of deities - and I can use the worship of those gods and goddesses to explore and comment on religions of our world. The religions I've created have ranged from distant gods (Forgotten Empires) to a trio of goddesses who interfere with fate to the point of taking avatars (The Twelve Kingdoms and the Uncharted Realms). 

In only one series so far have I included absolutely no hint of religion or deities: Bonds of Magic. Those of you who've read DARK WIZARD should feel free to write an essay on why that is. I can promise you that it's a deliberate choice. 

In fact, I'd argue that religion always affects the course of a story. Even in its absence, there is a consequence on the world and how the characters live in it.