by Tony Hoffart
One of our talented writers, Matthew Meyer just finished a couple very interesting posts on Alignments and the Divine in D&D, and like all good discussions about Politics and Religion, there are lots of opinions, and in the spirit of converse, I wanted to weigh in as well.
I want to discuss some aspects of organized religions and how and why they function. Divine influence is a common theme in Role Playing, because myths make great treasure maps and gods hand out the best loot, but one thing often overlooked is what makes religions work. A god doesn’t necessarily have to have a religion just as a religion doesn’t necessarily have to have a god.
To understand what makes a religion work you have to look at the basic transaction that occurs when a player joins a religion. What are the PCs (or NPCs) getting out of religion? Guidance? Morals? Healing Potions?
It’s sort-of elusive, but it’s usually all about death. See, death is a inevitability and a mystery. We can’t control it, we can’t stop it, and without it life would mean nothing. Death is a threshold to a great mystery that the living cannot understand. It’s incomprehensible because (barring resurrection spells) we can’t come back from it to tell our friends what it’s like. So since the dawn of self awareness we’ve looked for some way to explain what this death-thing was about, because in doing so we can give some meaning to our lives.
Gods are the answer to that question. They’re ethereal beings that can shepherd our wayward spirits off to virgins reincarnating at pearly heaven… or whatever. The definition of what the god likes and prefers us to live-like defines what we need to do to achieve a favorable post-life retirement package.
That’s the root of the transaction, we obey whatever rules the religion wants to apply, and in exchange we get an insurance policy. This is what gives religions power that transcends nations and governments – because to challenge the authority of the church is tantamount to putting grandma’s chances of going to heaven into “roulette-odds” territory. We don’t mess with our grandmothers… we just don’t, and that’s why when King Henry VIII decided to take his whole nation away from Catholicism, the English people had some… misgivings.
There is the question polytheistic deities that have themes that aren’t death. What importance do they have? Just as there is more than one path through life, there are multiple paths to death and gods can help to control those aspects that we can’t. Agriculture, War, the Sea, and the Storm are uncontrollable to many and ensuring the gods of these are happy will hopefully keep them from making life miserable or unlivable.
This isn’t to say that quality-of-life boons have no logical reason to exist, because religions are in competition for followers. When the core product is essentially the same, it’s the small differences that sway people; thus the religion that offers the most enticing cost/benefit ratio can often get the most worshipers. Alternatively the religion can go over the heads of the fickle consumer and simply get their brand of divinity legislated as mandatory by the ruler of the land. The buy-in for such a route is understandably quite high, but yields huge dividends once the populace has gotten used to how it is.
Gods might be as different as peanuts and piranhas but religions all follow the same basic business model. So hopefully when you’re taking that epic-level character through the threshold of becoming a god, some of what I’ve said helps him create the next Scientology.
Edited by Jonathan Jacobs
