How Religion and Deities are handled in fiction

So, there are times when I think I've seen too many JRP Gs and it's slanted my judgement, because it seems to me that when gods and religion come up in many stories, the gods are either evil or useless, and the religion is almost always secretly corrupt.

The solution to problems in the verse is always to free mankind from the shackles of the Gods.

It's an interesting story, but it's been done a lot. In fact, it feels like any story with Gods always goes that way.

Corrupt Church is reality, and that shouldn't be ignored. But I don't think that means that's the only story that should be told, nor do I think it's fair to always look at gods and deities from a negative perspective.

Or so I say, but again, my viewpoint may be slanted. I haven't read every story with gods and religion, so I was wondering what the rest of you think. Am I right, or am I just full of shit?

I'd also like to hear how you guys write religion, and what you do when your stories involve Deities as well.

I've very much felt this way, I believe. (Albeit not specifically with regards to JRP Gs, which I seldom play.)

It feels to me that all too often, religious characters—and in particular devout ones—are depicted as one or more of evil, vice-ridden, hypocritical, ineffectual, or anti-intellectual.

(I've also seen cases in which a work has attempted to depict a religious character in a positive light—but nevertheless gotten the experience of religion (at least as I'm familiar with it) quite wrong.)

Mildly religious characters—those who may wear a religious symbol, or speak vaguely of "having faith" (but seldom in any deity specifically), or suchlike, but whose religion doesn't seem to be a significant part of their lives—may fare better.

There have been works that have thus stood out to me for not presenting religious characters this way.

One that comes to mind is Pure Genius, a show set in a cutting edge hospital/clinic, and which thus was very much steeped in science. Neverthless, one of the characters—a surgeon, I think—was revealed to be [[spoiler a Catholic priest]]. And at no point was their religion claimed to be somehow antagonistic to their work (they found the two to support each other, I think), nor were they presented as bigoted, or any such thing.

The only way in which it became a source of drama was in that one of the other characters had feelings for them, which was complicated by their being a Catholic priest, specifically.

(On top of which there were characters of other beliefs, atheist included, as I recall, with no antagonism drawn from it I think.)

(In all fairness, I only saw one season of the show, so I don't know how it treated the character from there.)

I think the reason for this is that a larger than average proportion of speculative fiction writers are secular in their personal orientation, if not outright atheist. Belief Makes You Stupid or Religion Is Wrong is in play, or some variation of those: there are lots of sub-tropes.

Yeah, I was wondering about that. I am aware that a lot of fiction writers are primarily Secular or Atheist.

Plus, I think that it's a little harder to show a more positive portrayal of religion without coming off as preachy.

You have to be really subtle about it. I think there are stories that have done so (the original Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe had a lot of christian allegory if I recall.

What inspired me to make this thread is a comment in Gail Simone's page under What Could Have Been:

It's interesting that someone who is an Atheist thinks that way, and, combined with my constant dissatisfaction with Corrupt Church in JRP Gs inspired me to start asking questions.

As an Athiest I can admit I do have quite a few religious villains, but it's kind of a given since a recurring theme in my works is cults, so it's followers of fictional cult religions I use as villains while real-life religions, like Christianity, I try and portray as respectfully as possible without getting preachy.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 15th 2020 at 7:52:17 AM

Conversely, when works are written from a specifically religious perspective, and with specifically religious content, they tend to fall into the "religious work ghetto"—that perspective that "it's a religious work, it must be cringey".

(Or at the least I've noticed this about Christian works; I honestly don't know about works that so handle other religions.)

And it's a perception that's perhaps not entirely untrue, in my limited experience.

I've wondered a few times whether it stems in part from the "love letter" effect: when something is written from a perspective within a relationship that's characterised by deep love, it tends to come off as a little saccharine and overbearing to those outside the relationship—even those in similar relationships themselves.

I will say, this is good to read. ^_^

For my own work, funnily enough I don't actually touch on religion all that often, I've noticed. I'm not sure of why that might be.

It has come up very briefly in the game that I'm working on—a small abandoned shrine in one place; short pieces of text on local religions; and an off-hand mention by the protagonist of her own religion. It may come up more in future, as the game's story plays out further; we'll see.

The Dresden Files actually portrays the Catholic Church pretty positively, and the series is in no way religious fiction- one of the Church's roles is to aid the Knights of the Cross, three people (who do not have to be Christian to qualify) selected by magical swords that were forged from the nails used to nail Jesus to the cross in order to banish evil and fight fallen angels. The protagonist is very firmly agnostic, but the closest thing he has to a father figure and his moral center is one of the Knights, who is a devout Catholic.

And part of the reason why the gods tend to be either evil or unable to help the protagonists is because it would literally be a Deus ex Machina to have a truly powerful divine being on the heroes' side- make them powerful, and readers wonder why the characters don't get their god buddy to help or why the god always seems to have some shoddy excuse when it would be the most exciting for the characters to be in trouble. A ton of different deities exist in Dresden, including the Abrahamic God, but He refuses to interfere with mortals' free will, and forbids His angels from doing the same outside of very narrow circumstances. There are other beings that are basically godlike that aren't bound by a non-interference clause, like the faerie queens and Mother Summer/Winter that basically control the passing of seasons, but they're also The Fair Folk, and tend to interpret requests in whichever way will benefit or amuse them the most, and will expect repayment in a likely unpleasant form that nonetheless benefits them, and on a timetable that you have no control over.

I, personally, prefer not to have deities play a role in my works because I feel there would be an expectation that they be materially useful somehow, and because I think they overinflate the scale of the story beyond what I'm interested in writing. I have entire pantheons created, but those are more to add richness and context to the settings' religious and cultural practices... and because at least some part of all of them are rooted in a grain of truth, at least for that area or people.

That's fair enough. I hear you. You can't have gods swooping in to solve every problem, because then readers expect them to do it every time, or at least at the most appropriate times.

But I often find that, when writers need to find an excuse to keep them out of the way, that excuse is they are evil, they don't care, they're useless more often than not.

You bring up some more positive reasons for why they don't jump in, but it feels like most either don't give enough thought, or default to those reasons.

Ah, it's good to read of another example of a positive depiction!

And indeed, there will likely tend to be a bit of a sample bias here; one's impression will tend to depend heavily on what works one has been exposed to.

In this case, I never did pick up The Dresden Files, and so hadn't seen that particular depiction.

Two other things that I'd like to see more of, I think:

• Prayer as a source of comfort or guidance—or even just of communion with God,
• Providence. (e.g. Tolkien on that last point.)

Bump.

Still want to hear more ideas on the subject.

I admittedly have had religion as a theme of my works for some time, but not exactly all the time. For example, ghosts exist in my world, as well as supernatural totems that store them when a certain phrase in my conlang is chanted. Also, the culture of dragons on the planet in which it takes place does have a religion that worships the Sun, the Moon, and various other planets in its planetary system directly. Eco prays to the Sun (named Letvaf) a couple times when he's looking for guidance and uses the Moon (Maci) as a scapegoat.

Admittedly, that's the extent to which I have built the religion so far, but I will note that the common belief is that the king of the dragons (the Yong^note technically "Jog," but "Yong" is more intuitive) was appointed by Letvaf and Maci to keep the peace over the earth beneath them so that it would not be affected by their battling. One person has usurped the throne without being a part of the royal bloodline, and he outlived the usual Yongs by not undergoing a ritual sacrifice in which his soul is given back to them at the age of 200 (about 38 Earth years).

I have a pantheon I'd say is pretty interesting. Admittedly, it's not really done yet (and WorldAnvil is down, so I can't check the details) but the current version of the main religion worships the creator goddess, her godly children and a few others. There's actually a disagreement within the church on whether these "lesser" gods are actually a case of Clap Your Hands If You Believe and humans just poofed them into existence or if they're "legitimate" children of the creator goddess.

This is just my own opinion, and many other authors have disagreed with me (or just fail to understand) but I think fantasy authors who include a real world religion in their work (esp one with cosmic implications such as any form of theism, like Christianity) have a decision to make. Are the real world cosmic implications correct within the story-verse? You don't have to tell the readers, and keeping it ambiguous can add to the dramatic tension (Alan Moore does this alot), but I think at least the author has to decide: is there a "God", and does he/she/it love humanity? Because if so, then you have to explain, in a universe in which magic is seen to work, why this "God" doesn't become a dues ex machina helping the heroes defeat evil forever.

In Butcher's Dresden series, for example, God doesn't solve everyone's problems out of a respect for free will. In Lord of the Rings, the creator exists but is removed from the world, and has delegated guiding mortals to a set of lessor deities. In other series, God is evil or insane and Mankind is powerful enough collectively to resist him (many of the works of Garth Ennis, for example). And, of course, the followers of an almighty creator God might simply be wrong.

Failure to address this issue can undermine a work, like it did to the Lovecraft Mythos. After Lovecraft himself passed away, other authors continued writing works based on his continuity. Famously, August Derleth introduced the idea of "Good" entities, who were on an approximately equal power footing with the "Bad" ones. Many people feel that this violated the spirit of Lovecraft's original works, but Derleth had a point: if ultimate evil exists, why not ultimate good? And if the universe is ultimately evil, where did humane impulses come from, and how have we survived so long? Note that in a horror story this can be a feature—evil appearing to be more powerful than the protagonists adds dramatic tension (this is why Lovecraft did it that way). But in a fantasy story, where myths and legends of the past play an important part in the plot, it should be addressed somehow, in my opinion.

Whatever the case, it's part of the world-building. If there is real magic, or real supernatural, what are the cosmic implications? Where did the universe come from, and who, if anyone, is in charge of it? How do it's guiding principles affect magic as it's used by the characters? In the best worldbuilding, every spell reflects the underlying structure of the universe somehow (although, again, the readers do not necessarily need to be told that).

Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 11th 2021 at 11:27:29 AM

I'm actually religious, myself, but I generally try to avoid alienating any potential audience or readers, so I don't like coming across as preachy.

A compromise I've made with myself is that I assume most my characters are deists. They believe in God or some other divine being, an afterlife and may even celebrate religious holidays due to their upbringing, but that's about as far as I go. Religion rarely comes up anyway, except as an interesting background detail.

It's kinda hard to write fiction with overtly religious characters without seeming preachy or coming across as an allegory.

That's very true.

Which also incurs a bit of a problem: it somewhat skews the depiction of religion, with representation of devout belief being less common than it might be. As a result, negative portrayals are perhaps left more dominant. And this, in turn, may affect how people perceive religion.

To be clear, I'm not saying that anyone, included, should be changing how they write religious characters. (As I think that I said, it doesn't come up often in my writing either.) It's just an issue that occurs to me on reading the above.

It can be a base breaker that most authors may want to avoid dealing with.

I only write fanfic, so most of the time I have a preset pantheon and religious structure. Sometimes I work within that, and sometimes - especially if the source material is all "Cast off the shackles of the gods!", which, as you say, is often the case - I go in a different direction, because I'm not interested in that. Changing a story about rejecting faith into one about exploring what faith means and how it's important is fun, and I don't really care if I lose readers over it.

My favorite settings are those like Forgotten Realms where every variety of deity and faith is out there and the interactions between them can be explored ad infinitum. A divine rainbow of options!

What i have noticed is that if there is a (especially if made up) religion/mythology in a story, it tends to actually be objectively true in-universe.