World building is the one element that sets speculative fiction apart from every other category of writing. When designing a secondary world, it’s crucial to establish a foundation of internally consistent principles to help readers suspend their disbelief.
With the Easter season upon us, let’s zoom in on an often-underdeveloped aspect of world building: secondary world religions.
Religion in general has been a constant of human existence. Writing a secondary world where there are no and never have been any religions will automatically cause tension between the setting and known history, straining credibility (though it could make for an interesting story hook if handled properly).
The advice in this post will mainly apply to fantasy authors building a secondary world separate from our own. But it should help science fiction writers whose stories are set in speculative primary world handle the subject of religion, to the extent that it comes up, with proper respect and depth.
How do you avoid clichés like Crystal Dragon Jesus, the Evil Church of Evil, and smarmy secularist characters who know the Bible better than lifelong churchgoers? You build from the ground up—or in this case, the sky down.
The Three Qualities of Religion
First, let’s start with three qualities possessed by all religions: cult, code, and creed.
Cult: every religion practices some form of organized worship, with formularized rituals and fixed times for liturgical celebrations.
Code: all faiths promote a particular set of morals derived from their beliefs.
Creed: all religions profess belief in a body of theological knowledge. A faith’s creed is how it defines itself.
When designing your world’s religious landscape, consider what form the qualities above take in each religion. A particular faith’s cult, code, and creed should be intertwined. Ask yourself how they’re interrelated in each religion and how those interrelationships affect the beliefs and behavior of the faithful.
The Three Sources of Revelation
Having discussed three elements common to all religions, let’s examine an area where many faiths fundamentally differ: their sources of revelation.
Historically, the major religions have drawn upon three sources of knowledge about the divine: myth, mystical experience, and prophecy.
Myth: attempts to explain natural phenomena by relating them to the supernatural realm. This is where you get prototypical shamanic religions.
Note that “myth” is not synonymous with “falsehood”. Myths are primitive people’s efforts to make sense of basic truths they find operating in the world.
Mysticism: individual believers’ powerful personal experiences of the divine. Mystics pass on their wisdom to disciples who are encouraged to seek enlightenment for themselves.
Prophecy: unlike the mystic who receives truths meant for him alone, the prophet bridges the gulf between creature and creator as an authentic mediator between humanity and the divine. As such, the prophet’s word is morally binding.
When you get down to designing each particular faith, you’ll want to decide where that religion’s beliefs come from: myth, mysticism, prophecy, or a mixture of two or more sources. The choices you make here will have a major impact on each faith’s cult, code, and creed.
Let’s look at three examples of religions from my Soul Cycle universe to see how all of this hangs together.
The Cult of Midras is based on myth and prophecy. They profess faith in two gods, one good and one bad, to get around the problem of evil. Because of a prophecy stating that humans will decide the war between good and evil, they’re big into moral law and have priests who are basically Judge Dredd.
The Nesshin faith is based on prophecy. They believe that their tribe’s founder was the only real prophet. He taught them that God was put to sleep at the moment of creation and will arise at the end of time to judge all things. This makes them fatalistic, and they’re not too concerned with converting outsiders. Their priests hold liturgies to strengthen and sanctify the people.
Atavism is Nesshin religion infused with mysticism. Atavists believe that everyone is a fragment of God and that separation from the cosmic soul is the cause of all evil and pain. Atavists have monasticism but no priesthood. They value living things as aspects of the divine, but they see death as reunion with God.
That should be plenty to get you started. Play around with these concepts and see what you can come up with. Just remember that each religion’s origins should influence its beliefs, practices, and morality in consistent ways. Even if actual religious history is quite a bit messier, as spec fic authors our world building, like our dialogue, should be the “best of” the real world version.
Above all else, when in doubt, write what’s awesome.
And don’t give money to people who hate you!
NGL, I really struggle when it comes to making fantasy religions. When it comes world-building a non/pre-Christian world, I tend to imagine two types of religion: proto-Judaism where people worship one God albeit led by a non-Levitical priesthood (think Jethro or Melchizedek), or satanic paganism who sacrificed their kids and/or throw them off a cliff like the Spartans.
I have the same struggle. It’s not easy, and it seems somehow unsatisfying and a bit too close to home to build a world where all religions are kind of right and kind of wrong, but essentially all are good and respectable, since that idea is so pervasive in modern western society, right up there with the cynica trope that “all religions are scams runs by con artists and followed by fools.”
The solution to difficulties with writing secondary world religions is the same as for writing anything: research.
Get some (non-woke) books on the history of religion. Watch some videos on archaeology. Even Wikipedia still has decent information on most topics, if you can stomach the dumb BCE/CE notation.
I’m curious what your take on Tolkien’s method of deliberately excising explicit religiosity from secondary worlds, and instead relaying religious truth through the symbolism and themes of the myth itself (while also avoiding allegory). In particular, how does one go about creating a secondary world, without explicit Christianity or obvious allegory, that still conveys those fundamental “superversive” virtues and themes that are fulfilled in Christ, while including explicit religious elements that, if they existed in reality, would be inherrently false and possibly evil?
It’s become popular to rag on Tolkien lately. I’ve even seen tradCaths accuse his works of Gnosticism.
Those judgments might not be so rash if we didn’t have volumes of the man’s unpublished works, notes, and letters explaining his methods and purpose.
The idea that all themes in fiction must be explicit comes from the same mind virus that leads Conservatives to think that Leftists can be turned from their Death Cult with enough logical syllogisms and quotes from the Constitution.
Tolkien wasn’t writing to convince anyone. He told stories to tell stories.
And he understood that he was telling stories to a Modernist audience.
Sad but true, the overt Christian imagery of a Poul Anderson or even a Robert E. Howard is alien to a large plurality of modern readers.
And we got here because the Death Cult knew better than to beat normal people over the head with sodomy, crossdressing, and atheism right off the bat. Instead they delivered their twisted themes through symbols.
In fact, the Death Cult relies on symbolism. Each of their stated positions is a symbol. That’s why they can switch them out as quickly as Benny from The Mummy (1999). Conservatives never did figure that out.
But the Church understood the power of symbols better than anyone. After all, stained glass windows don’t have subtitles.
So Tolkien’s use of symbols to convey Christian themes remains unequaled, and dissident creators striving to make inroads in the culture war need to study it.
I agree, and I didn’t intend to rag on the great man. The question was more geared toward weather the best way to achieve the full effect of good symbolism is to omit express/obvious religions from works of fantasy, as he did, or if there’s a good way to utilize fictitious religions as symbols themselves, or to convey real truths.
I’d like to recommend two books, if I may:
The Gospel According to Tolkien by Ralph Wood
The Christian Mythmakers, 2d edition by Rolland Hein
I just read the first for a paper I’m writing about The Return of the King movie and the Letter to the Philippians. The second my household owns twice because it was a textbook for a Christian fantasy course my beloved and I both took in college yea these many moons ago, though not in the same semester.
Another addendum that I’d like to add is that it’s perfectly acceptable for your fantasy religion to fail or imperfectly succeed at one or more of the three aspects mentioned – but that ought to be a big deal, a significant problem that creates weakness and tension. If a religion’s explanations of reality become inadequate, that should bother people, at least the more philosophically inclined among them. These people should either abandon the religion or attempt to “reform” it in a way that reconciles it with a better understanding of reality. (For a real-world example, see Greek/Roman paganism and the Neoplatonists). Similarly, if a religion focusses too heavily on the ritual and moral aspects of the faith without uniting it with a proper mysticism to complement them, it risks becoming extremely rigid, which might lead those who seek God (following their natural desire for union with Him) to abandon it in favour of a more personal connection with the Divine (this is basically what happened to Old Vedic Paganism in India, which started heavily losing ground to the more spiritual Sramana traditions of Eastern India, until they started to incorporate many of those same beliefs, leading to Hinduism as we understand it.)
Excellent point. It’s fine if a secondary world religion doesn’t have satisfying answers to all of the big questions. In fact, it shouldn’t. Because no other real-world religion answers them as well as Christianity, which is a silver bullet argument in favor of the Church’s truth claims.
Come to think of it, a lot of these problems come from not really internalising the fact that religious people believe their religions are really true. I once read a history blogger who criticised Game of Thrones heavily for this – namely, that while nearly everyone in Westeros believes in a fairly-detailed religion, it seems that practically none of them let that religion actually influence or inform their actions. If you believe in a righteous God, or even a kind-of-halfway-decent deity, the idea of burning one of your own churches to the ground with a bunch of people taking shelter inside it should fill you with horror. At the absolute least, you should be *extremely* reluctant to do such a thing – even if you’re a black-hearted scoundrel, you probably believe that the gods curse people for doing stuff like that. Even if YOU don’t, your followers probably do, and will start to seriously question whether working for you isn’t putting their immortal souls in danger. Essentially, almost nobody in Westeros LIVES their faith, which makes it feel fake.
Bingo.
Selling audiences a secondary world in which most people are said to follow one faith or other while giving zero instances of faith affecting characters’ inner or public lives betrays the Modernist disease. It also violates “show, don’t tell.”
Works of wonder rely on wonder to work, as weird as that is to say.
Pre-1940 stories assume the world has a rational reason for existing that is above our full comprehension. Fairy tales, old novels, poetry, penny dreadfuls, even early pulp stories, all took the universe as existing for a concrete reason as part of the drama. They described the people they were writing about as moral people trying to live up to the fact that they had objective meaning to their existence. The problem, villain, or antagonist, was always an opposing force that went against such a thing, usually insisting that the universe was not, in fact, full of meaning or purpose.
That changed with scientism writers injecting hedonism and materialism as the highest good one can imagine out of this life into the industry. The more this went on the more deranged and subverted storytelling became until its current state of up being down and down being up.
The core of all the problems of modern storytelling (aside from basic craft ones that can be fixed with practice) is that most of these writers don’t actually believe in anything concrete. As a consequence, they have nothing to say.
This is doubly a problem when you are trying to write a story in a world of awe and mystery meant to lift the audience to a higher place. If you fundamentally believe such things don’t exist and are impossible, you will either write such things backwards or miss the mark. The audience rejects such things, even if they don’t know why they do. You can see the death of mainstream industries to see that happening right now.
One of my major problems with the Tolkien clones is that they used his work as an excuse to make “Fantasy” worlds divorced from any meaning. Since it isn’t our “universe” we can make up the rules of what good and evil is. The issue comes when most modern people don’t believe in any rules at all, so their works turn out flaccid and dull, colorless, and reliant on aesthetic and pretty lights to get them by. Tolkien, however, didn’t create a “new” world: he was showing a new side of OUR world, which is what wonder stories are supposed to do. This is what he was building on. He didn’t fall out of the sky. Most of these “Fantasy” writers have devolved into using their new worlds as a den of debauchery and self aggrandizement instead of a reflection of truth or beauty.
This is why it is important to both understand where writers of the past came from and what they were trying to achieve. Otherwise you get a mainstream industry of boring materialists selling gimmicks and new religions, which is what we have now and have had for far too long.
I find the same issue tends to plague 40K fiction. While I’m a fan, I find a lot of the fiction hard to stomach due to a variety of reasons, but a lot of it boils down to “grimderp”, the tendency of characters to do the most evil, brutal, and dark thing possible *purely* because it’s as dark as possible, even if that is actively harmful to their own interests. It says something that the most enduringly popular 40K stories are either about heroic attempts to survive and stay sane in a ludicrously brutal universe (Caiaphas Cain, Gaunt’s Ghosts) or attempts at genuine epic tragedy, which are sometimes even successful (the Horus Heresy books).
I think the problem with 40K is its nihilism. The Imperium stayed because of their faith, except that they faith was on a “god” who is dead and is actually an atheist (is Bart Ehrman writing for Games Workshop lol).
Then what’s the point of it all?
At least they take their religion seriously, but the feeling that this was all for nothing is the elephant in the grimdark room.
I don’t know if “nihilism” is quite the right word for 40K. It’s certainly excessively dark, but on the other hand good and evil clearly exist. Evil acts very often lead to the corruption of the body as well as the soul, for one thing. I think it’s more correct to call it a good vs evil setting with precious little actual good present. Even in the darkest moments, the setting always portrays things like martial virtue and defending your brothers and family as an unalloyed good. The most clearly and blatantly consequentialist actors in the setting (the Inquisition) are near-universally portrayed unsympathetically, often causing at least as many problems as they solve. I think that this moral core is one of the reasons why the franchise has proven more resistant than usual to Woke corruption. While I have no illusions about it being immune or about the company that manages it being good, it does have the advantage that it’s extremely difficult to construct a believable skinsuit that the fans would accept but which is simultaneously something that the Death Cult can tolerate.
This is exactly the problem I’m trying to resolve in my own world building. As you point out though, the basic assumptions of the general audience has changed now, so how do you incorporate that wonder back into fiction in a manner that a demoralised materialist will be able to sense? How do you work in religion as a force for and symbol of good, or even symbol of something just awe inspiring, without it coming across as a gimmick, preachy allegory (here’s lookin at you, Aslan!) or being misinterpretted as a plug for “return to Odin”? More specifically, what self-critical questions should an author be asking himself when approaching the issues of religion, morality, and good vs. evil?
Because you’re completely right, and the Nietzchean/Moorcock style of “all gods suck, be your own god” is ridiculous, overplayed, and sterile.
You’ve hit upon the quintessential issue. And this time, there’s no pithy back-of-the-cereal-box answer.
We know how to make audiences sympathize with a desired moral framework, and that is, show sympathetic characters following that morality, and make it the winning behavior.
How to do that in a subtle but not too subtle way that still inspires and evokes wonder in the audience?
That just takes skill.
In my extensive experience, there is no substitute for getting good.
A lot of writers working in the Christian counterculture make honest and admirable attempts at the effect you describe. Most think it’s as easy as “I’ll just isekai a knight of the Round Table,” or “Aliens make first contact … to re-evangelize Earth!” or “It’s the zombie apocalypse, but the last Dominican friar fights the undead with the Summa in one hand and a shotgun in the other!”
It turns out that just porting Solomon Kane into the 21st century isn’t enough. That’s what we want to see. The trick is giving sub-pagan bugmen what *they* want to see while kindling the last embers of universal hunger for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in their soy-drenched hearts.
That takes the subject matter expertise of a Tolkien and the delicate hand of a surgeon.
Thank you! This is a valuable insight.
I’m only just beginning my first forays into authorship and I’ve been devouring your older advice articles. I’ve decided to add a plethora of ancient epics and histories to my reading list to help develop my toolbox. Hopefully, God willing, I will someday produce something that has the desired effect.
Getting you off the bench and in the game is part of my mission.
“One of my major problems with the Tolkien clones is that they used his work as an excuse to make “Fantasy” worlds divorced from any meaning. Since it isn’t our “universe” we can make up the rules of what good and evil is. ”
Tolkien was an interesting fellow, but one of the most interesting things about him is he did not see himself as the creator of his secondary world, as I expect most of his imitators have. Rather, he writes as he found it and does not dictate its meaning. Writing about Frodo’s failure to relinquish and destroy the Ring in one of his letters, Tolkien indicated, “at this point the Author of the Story took over (and I do not mean myself)” and brought the quest to completion through Gollum. On another subject, when someone asked why a certain thing happened or what it meant, he replied, “I shall try to find out.” I expect Tolkien’s commitment to “subcreation” lends his worlds a richness others lack because he never forgot the One or imagined himself as more than a discoverer
and recipient of the Legendarium.
One thing I can vouch for, least in terms of a Tabletop storytelling, is that you can also have a screwdriver kind of science man be made as a prophet of a religion, in an albeit less than conventional way. Kind of in a similar way to various myths being but interpretations of a once glorious (from the native culture’s perspective, anyway) past, compared to their kind of dreary present.
Adventure fiction set in the future can get away with the “religion as hobby for jaded materialists” trope. Dune is the prime example.
Brian,
As I’m unskilled in creating secondary religion I just use real religions. But i try to deal with perennial issues of good, evil, as entertainingly as possible
xavier