Touchpoints for and thoughts on somewhat nonspecific alternate history?

[tamtrible]

I'm toying with a story idea, and rather than either set it in an entirely fictional world, or set it in the real world and pretend the presence of magic wouldn't alter history in a lot of different ways, I figure I'd kind of aim for "obviously this world, but different"--for example, I was thinking of having the major language and dominant country

Comments

[orange_fell]

In a nutshell, no, I think you're going to have to do more poking to get things the way you want them, but I'll probably have to come back to this question later to say why more explicitly. For one thing, you want Christianity and Islam to have "a plurality to a strong majority" in most areas but NOT have an "overwhelming influence," and I think those two things cancel each other out. For example, in the USA, Protestant Christianity is the majority faith and has been for centuries, and that has an influence over the whole country, whether we acknowledge it or not. Your Christian majority is still going to want to spend a lot of time building churches and combating paganism; your Muslim majority areas ditto but with mosques. There is no current plausible reason in your worldbuilding why these faiths would achieve majority conversion and then stop. If the early Muslims failed at spreading empire along with religion, how did Islam spread out of Arabia? And how and when did the Roman Empire become Christian? If the "barbarian invasions"

[tamtrible]

I'm not trying to say that Christianity doesn't have a major influence, just that they never quite achieved enough dominance that there weren't still a significant fraction of pagans, freely and fully acknowledged. Likewise for Islam. They may still try to spread the faith and so forth, but there would still be a resistant minority (in some places, majority) that... in many cases, it was essentially *dangerous* to try to convert. Something like the situation in the US today is, actually, a good model for what I'm going for. Christianity is seen as the default, and being a "good Christian" makes it easier to get elected or whatever, but you wouldn't be actively *surprised* to learn that your neighbor was a Jew, an atheist, a Buddhist, or whatnot

[tamtrible]

To clarify: I'm making a distinction between a strong influence (most public officials being Christian/Muslim, Christianity/Islam getting you perks and benefits, non-Christians/Muslims occasionally getting bullied or harassed) and an overwhelming influence (you can be killed just for being a non-Christian/Muslim, non-Christians/Muslims have to live in segregated ghettos, people legitimately think non-Christians/Muslims have horns or sacrifice babies or whatnot)

[orange_fell]

So basically you want 18th century Europe/Middle East to resemble an idealized 21st century United States in religious makeup and attitudes, plus magic? It sounds nice, but sorry, my suspension of disbelief would be highly degraded.

Edit: You also didn't really address any of my points re: the historical background.

[tamtrible]

I wouldn't say it resembles an *idealized* 21st century US. But there's a difference between "I wouldn't want my daughter dating one of them pagan types" and "Burn the pagans!". I'm aiming more for the former than the latter

[orange_fell]

The problem is you seem to think the Christianization of the Roman Empire was a story of armed Christians taking over everything, and it wasn't. The spread of Islam was a much different story, but it was also not quite what I think you're envisioning. So I'm really confused about the importance of these magic weapons you keep talking about, and what advantage (in your world) people think they're receiving by converting from a magic-y fantasy religion to an Abrahamic one.

[tamtrible]

The magic is not necessarily strongly associated with any one religion (though I was thinking that there's one non-prosteletizing but fairly common minority religion, probably with beliefs a bit like Shinto, that ... kind of specializes in the magic

[orange_fell]

The point I'm trying to make with questions like these: "Why would [Christianity and Islam] reach semi-majority conversion and then stop? What advantage (in your world) do people think they're receiving by converting from a magic-y fantasy religion to an Abrahamic one?" is that these faiths ARE proselytizing religions. For them, gaining converts (saving souls) is a huge good deed. Reasons an adult might choose to convert do include the threat of violence, but also: to gain access to a wonderful afterlife, to make advantageous political connections (becoming the same religion as the local ruler, for example), to make social connections (like marriages), to have a mystical experience, and many more. In order to set up your world building, you should think about what historical reasons your pagans have for saying "no thanks" to all that for 1800 years, and what reasons do your Christians and Muslims have for going "ok!" As others have pointed out, the threat of warfare just isn't enough to make them back down. And the historical "holdout

[marycatelli]

Also, Christianity had non-trivial demographic advantages. They didn't kill their babies. This was such a contrast to the pagans that Justin Martyr in his Apologia included an explanations of why they did such a strange things.

Besides the straightforward demographic advantage of numbers, it also meant that women were disproportionate Christian, because they were alive to do so. Indeed, Christians started to collect pagans' abandoned babies, predominately female, and raise them, which tilted the women's ratio even farther. And then there were a lot of pagan father/Christian mother marriages, which, it turned out, produced Christian children