Some Thoughts on Dark Religion in Fiction
By "Dark Religion" I am referring to a whole cluster of tropes, including the Evil Church of Evil or Evil Religion (exactly what it says on the tin), the Corrupt Church (which started out good and got taken over by tyrants or crooks), and the various kinds of Fake Church, including the Synthetic Church or Path of Inspiration (made up to control the lower classes, but not believed by the ruling classes and often known by them to be fraud), and the Scam Religion (deliberate fraud created to fleece the sheep).
First, let's make a clear distinction between a Fake Church and a Fictional Religion. A Fake Church is an in-'verse fabrication, and its having been created out of whole cloth is often an important element of the storyline (the protagonists have to discover and reveal the fraud, etc). A Fictional Religion is one created by the author for the purpose of storytelling.
Authors may choose to create a Fictional Religion for a number of reasons. They may want to avoid the potential for offense that comes with fictional portrayal of a Primary World religion. In the speculative genres, the worldbuilding may require it, given that all Primary World religions are grounded in the history of the cultures in which they arose, which a Secondary World won't have. A Fictional Religion may be a Fake Religion, or it may be (in-'verse) the authentic spirituality of the fictional communities that follow it.
The Evil Church of Evil or Evil Religion is the easiest to do badly, as in wildly implausible. One might point at the various Satanist churches as a real-life example of the Evil Church of Evil, but by and large, most of their followers are either wanting a license for complete self-indulgence or are attention whores who get their kicks out of tweaking the noses of the squares. Yes, there are a few deeply disturbed individuals out there who seem to be actually worshiping Satan as personification of Evil, but it's unlikely that one could actually see a huge organization that's All Evil, All The Time, doing things For The Sake Of Evil, unless it's a farce where Villains Chewing The Scenery is part of the fun and they're going to end up falling on their behinds when their Grand Evil Scheme crashes down around them.
In a Secondary World fantasy, it can make sense to have the Dark Lord's minions worshiping him as their Evil God, whether out of fear or genuine belief that he will triumph and reward them. But many of these Dark Lords are effectively supernatural beings acting in the material world -- and if the religion of worshiping them is part of the organizing principles of their society, it is going to have to inculcate certain virtues, particularly obedience and faithfulness, or their whole society dissolves into a war of the all against the all, or is too selfish to make the sacrifices necessary for victory.
An author who wants to treat such a Villain Religion as All Evil All The Time will probably do best by giving readers just a few little glimpses of its rites and its various machinations, and let imagination fill in the rest. Too many details are apt to lead to fridge logic, as readers ponder how this detail or that detail could actually work, only to find the entire edifice unraveling like a sweater upon which one tugs a loose thread.
The Corrupt Church and the Scam Religion are in many ways far easier to do believably because we have so many historical examples, from the Pornocracy in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Church (the Borgias, et al.) to the various televangelist scandals of the past several decades (Jim and Tammy were the first big one, and genuinely shocked a lot of their True Believers, but there have been a lot of them since, with sins ranging from sexual misdeeds to financial misappropriation) and various Destructive Mind-Control Cults (Sc**nt*l*gy, anyone?). So we have a wide variety of models we can draw upon to keep a fictional Corrupt Church or Scam Religion plausible (assuming that the author wants drama rather than farce).
The defining point of a Corrupt Church is that it started as an authentic religious institution, but something went wrong. The leadership became too enamored of worldly pleasures. The Opposition infiltrated the leadership and slowly shifted it away from its proper course. An egotistical leader created a Cult of Personality. There are probably as many ways for a good faith community to go bad as there are plots involving religion.
It's important to understand that how a faith community is structured will be critical in how it drifts into Corrupt Church territory -- and how good people can stop it, if the story is the fight against the process of corruption, rather than against the Corrupt Church in its end stage. A faith community with a top-down hierarchy has a relatively small number of critical failure points -- compromise them, and it's easy for the corruptocrats to take over and leave the truly faithful as a scattered minority of outsiders in their own church. However, a good Patriarch or Pope or other senior leader can take a firm stand against the rot, speaking with the voice of authority against bad doctrine or bad behavior.
By contrast, a faith community that is a network of self-governing congregations is much more difficult to take over, for the simple reason that there is no one guy at the top to be compromised. Corruption has to take over the leadership of each congregation, one by one, until one reaches a critical mass and can marginalize the remaining congregations. On the other hand, there is no one religious figure who can speak with the voice of authority against this process for the entire faith community, anathemizing bad doctrine or condemning crooked behavior as a Pope or Patriarch. Also, during the process of congregation capture, people who don't like the new local leader are more likely to simply move to a different congregation than to resist the crooked leader to the face.
While the Scam Religion has all too many examples in the Primary World, the Synthetic Church is pretty much a staple of speculative fiction, not history. Yes, there are people who claim that Islam was fabricated by a Persian ruler as a religion for his barbarian mercenaries, but the evidence is shaky at best.
The biggest problem with creating fictional a Synthetic Church, whether it's intended to keep the helots in their place or to prevent the colonists from "eating the seed corn," is to make it plausible enough that we can actually believe such a thing could hold together. All too many of them seem to be made out of tissue paper and flour paste, so they not only look flimsy, but also make their victims look stupid. Because they're instruments of control through superstition, they tend to be all carrots and sticks, and very little Contemplating the Meta-Cosmic All.
Aismov's religion of science in the early Foundation stories is particularly flimsy if one really looks at it closely -- but it's also a product of its time, when the focus of sf, especially under John W. Campbell, was on the rigorous development of one central concept (in the case of the Foundation series, the forecastable future, and its consequences on a Fall of the Roman Empire recycled In Space) rather than systematic worldbuilding. However, the Prophecies of Skalmar in Catherine Mintz's Zilbrant the Traitor also has a certain thinness to it -- it's all about hungry ghosts and properly laying them through funerary and memorial rites, and avoiding the vindictive air spirits by right conduct, especially knowing your place and staying in it. Not only is there no sense of the Divine Providence, there's not even any sense of reward awaiting the righteous -- one's best hope is that you will always have descendants to keep your ghost from growing restless and causing trouble for the living.
Again, especially if one wants to avoid simply filing the serial numbers off a Primary World religion (and thus looking like a roman a clef of that religion), it's probably best to give glimpses that suggest a living faith for the believers who do not realize they're following something that was made up to keep their culture and society on a particular track that was useful to its creators. Especially if discovering that their faith is in fact a sham (perhaps supported by judicious use of tech, like the holoprojected "ghosts" in Zilbrant's world) is a major part of the storyline, it really just needs to be able to hold together long enough for the protagonists to discover how they've been manipulated, and have to decide what action to take in response. (Zilbrant comes to realize that bringing it all crashing down at once would cause too much suffering and destruction, and probably destroy what her people need to survive, and that she can't break free of her upbringing and really would be happy as a peasant woman on her family's traditional land, but plants the seeds of discontent so that her descendants can finally outgrow the Prophecies of Skalmar in an organic way, as was supposed to happen).
First, let's make a clear distinction between a Fake Church and a Fictional Religion. A Fake Church is an in-'verse fabrication, and its having been created out of whole cloth is often an important element of the storyline (the protagonists have to discover and reveal the fraud, etc). A Fictional Religion is one created by the author for the purpose of storytelling.
Authors may choose to create a Fictional Religion for a number of reasons. They may want to avoid the potential for offense that comes with fictional portrayal of a Primary World religion. In the speculative genres, the worldbuilding may require it, given that all Primary World religions are grounded in the history of the cultures in which they arose, which a Secondary World won't have. A Fictional Religion may be a Fake Religion, or it may be (in-'verse) the authentic spirituality of the fictional communities that follow it.
The Evil Church of Evil or Evil Religion is the easiest to do badly, as in wildly implausible. One might point at the various Satanist churches as a real-life example of the Evil Church of Evil, but by and large, most of their followers are either wanting a license for complete self-indulgence or are attention whores who get their kicks out of tweaking the noses of the squares. Yes, there are a few deeply disturbed individuals out there who seem to be actually worshiping Satan as personification of Evil, but it's unlikely that one could actually see a huge organization that's All Evil, All The Time, doing things For The Sake Of Evil, unless it's a farce where Villains Chewing The Scenery is part of the fun and they're going to end up falling on their behinds when their Grand Evil Scheme crashes down around them.
In a Secondary World fantasy, it can make sense to have the Dark Lord's minions worshiping him as their Evil God, whether out of fear or genuine belief that he will triumph and reward them. But many of these Dark Lords are effectively supernatural beings acting in the material world -- and if the religion of worshiping them is part of the organizing principles of their society, it is going to have to inculcate certain virtues, particularly obedience and faithfulness, or their whole society dissolves into a war of the all against the all, or is too selfish to make the sacrifices necessary for victory.
An author who wants to treat such a Villain Religion as All Evil All The Time will probably do best by giving readers just a few little glimpses of its rites and its various machinations, and let imagination fill in the rest. Too many details are apt to lead to fridge logic, as readers ponder how this detail or that detail could actually work, only to find the entire edifice unraveling like a sweater upon which one tugs a loose thread.
The Corrupt Church and the Scam Religion are in many ways far easier to do believably because we have so many historical examples, from the Pornocracy in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Church (the Borgias, et al.) to the various televangelist scandals of the past several decades (Jim and Tammy were the first big one, and genuinely shocked a lot of their True Believers, but there have been a lot of them since, with sins ranging from sexual misdeeds to financial misappropriation) and various Destructive Mind-Control Cults (Sc**nt*l*gy, anyone?). So we have a wide variety of models we can draw upon to keep a fictional Corrupt Church or Scam Religion plausible (assuming that the author wants drama rather than farce).
The defining point of a Corrupt Church is that it started as an authentic religious institution, but something went wrong. The leadership became too enamored of worldly pleasures. The Opposition infiltrated the leadership and slowly shifted it away from its proper course. An egotistical leader created a Cult of Personality. There are probably as many ways for a good faith community to go bad as there are plots involving religion.
It's important to understand that how a faith community is structured will be critical in how it drifts into Corrupt Church territory -- and how good people can stop it, if the story is the fight against the process of corruption, rather than against the Corrupt Church in its end stage. A faith community with a top-down hierarchy has a relatively small number of critical failure points -- compromise them, and it's easy for the corruptocrats to take over and leave the truly faithful as a scattered minority of outsiders in their own church. However, a good Patriarch or Pope or other senior leader can take a firm stand against the rot, speaking with the voice of authority against bad doctrine or bad behavior.
By contrast, a faith community that is a network of self-governing congregations is much more difficult to take over, for the simple reason that there is no one guy at the top to be compromised. Corruption has to take over the leadership of each congregation, one by one, until one reaches a critical mass and can marginalize the remaining congregations. On the other hand, there is no one religious figure who can speak with the voice of authority against this process for the entire faith community, anathemizing bad doctrine or condemning crooked behavior as a Pope or Patriarch. Also, during the process of congregation capture, people who don't like the new local leader are more likely to simply move to a different congregation than to resist the crooked leader to the face.
While the Scam Religion has all too many examples in the Primary World, the Synthetic Church is pretty much a staple of speculative fiction, not history. Yes, there are people who claim that Islam was fabricated by a Persian ruler as a religion for his barbarian mercenaries, but the evidence is shaky at best.
The biggest problem with creating fictional a Synthetic Church, whether it's intended to keep the helots in their place or to prevent the colonists from "eating the seed corn," is to make it plausible enough that we can actually believe such a thing could hold together. All too many of them seem to be made out of tissue paper and flour paste, so they not only look flimsy, but also make their victims look stupid. Because they're instruments of control through superstition, they tend to be all carrots and sticks, and very little Contemplating the Meta-Cosmic All.
Aismov's religion of science in the early Foundation stories is particularly flimsy if one really looks at it closely -- but it's also a product of its time, when the focus of sf, especially under John W. Campbell, was on the rigorous development of one central concept (in the case of the Foundation series, the forecastable future, and its consequences on a Fall of the Roman Empire recycled In Space) rather than systematic worldbuilding. However, the Prophecies of Skalmar in Catherine Mintz's Zilbrant the Traitor also has a certain thinness to it -- it's all about hungry ghosts and properly laying them through funerary and memorial rites, and avoiding the vindictive air spirits by right conduct, especially knowing your place and staying in it. Not only is there no sense of the Divine Providence, there's not even any sense of reward awaiting the righteous -- one's best hope is that you will always have descendants to keep your ghost from growing restless and causing trouble for the living.
Again, especially if one wants to avoid simply filing the serial numbers off a Primary World religion (and thus looking like a roman a clef of that religion), it's probably best to give glimpses that suggest a living faith for the believers who do not realize they're following something that was made up to keep their culture and society on a particular track that was useful to its creators. Especially if discovering that their faith is in fact a sham (perhaps supported by judicious use of tech, like the holoprojected "ghosts" in Zilbrant's world) is a major part of the storyline, it really just needs to be able to hold together long enough for the protagonists to discover how they've been manipulated, and have to decide what action to take in response. (Zilbrant comes to realize that bringing it all crashing down at once would cause too much suffering and destruction, and probably destroy what her people need to survive, and that she can't break free of her upbringing and really would be happy as a peasant woman on her family's traditional land, but plants the seeds of discontent so that her descendants can finally outgrow the Prophecies of Skalmar in an organic way, as was supposed to happen).