"The Shadow of a Dead God" Considered
After writing three essays on fictional portrayals of religion gone bad, I realized that I do have an Evil Religion in one of my stories.
In The Shadow of a Dead God, archeology grad student Liu Shang is on a dig on a distant planet when she's haunted by dreams of an ancient tower, and goes to look for it. In the process, she discovers an artifact that connects her with the mind of a young woman thousands of years earlier.
Far from any anti-Catholic trope, the Evil Religion Liu Shang sees is a barbaric ritual of human sacrifice that echoes various ancient and Mesoamerican rites without actually cribbing any of them -- but as it turns out, the "god" actually is eating the sacrificed hearts of the oblates. As it turns out, the Evil Religion is in fact a Fake Religion created by the aliens that kidnapped early humans and brought them to that world, where they effectively farmed humans, both as food for their reproductive mass (they have a very strange life cycle that involves both motile and sessile forms) and as servants, including fighters against the humans that took some of their technology and fled them to establish independent settlements in the wilds.
By Liu Shang's time, that era is remembered only in myth and legend. And the ending suggests that the revelation of what actually led to the departure of the aliens has the potential to ignite a powderkeg of sectarian violence, between those who rejoice in having won their freedom and those who mourn the loss of their gods.
Of course it's just a short story, and the only other story that might go with it is Vengeance Is Mine, if one assumes that the Prophet's mysterious alien master was of the same species. (The reference to the Energy Wars does suggest that "The Shadow of a Dead God" takes place in the distant future of the Grissom Timeline, after humanity has gained FTL travel and spread out beyond the Solar System). As a result, everything is just suggested, and we know little or nothing about the structure and administration of the Evil Religion established by the aliens to better control their human subjects.
However, it does stand as a counterexample to the idea of an Evil Church of Evil always being portrayed as Catholic, or at least Catholic-ish.
In The Shadow of a Dead God, archeology grad student Liu Shang is on a dig on a distant planet when she's haunted by dreams of an ancient tower, and goes to look for it. In the process, she discovers an artifact that connects her with the mind of a young woman thousands of years earlier.
Far from any anti-Catholic trope, the Evil Religion Liu Shang sees is a barbaric ritual of human sacrifice that echoes various ancient and Mesoamerican rites without actually cribbing any of them -- but as it turns out, the "god" actually is eating the sacrificed hearts of the oblates. As it turns out, the Evil Religion is in fact a Fake Religion created by the aliens that kidnapped early humans and brought them to that world, where they effectively farmed humans, both as food for their reproductive mass (they have a very strange life cycle that involves both motile and sessile forms) and as servants, including fighters against the humans that took some of their technology and fled them to establish independent settlements in the wilds.
By Liu Shang's time, that era is remembered only in myth and legend. And the ending suggests that the revelation of what actually led to the departure of the aliens has the potential to ignite a powderkeg of sectarian violence, between those who rejoice in having won their freedom and those who mourn the loss of their gods.
Of course it's just a short story, and the only other story that might go with it is Vengeance Is Mine, if one assumes that the Prophet's mysterious alien master was of the same species. (The reference to the Energy Wars does suggest that "The Shadow of a Dead God" takes place in the distant future of the Grissom Timeline, after humanity has gained FTL travel and spread out beyond the Solar System). As a result, everything is just suggested, and we know little or nothing about the structure and administration of the Evil Religion established by the aliens to better control their human subjects.
However, it does stand as a counterexample to the idea of an Evil Church of Evil always being portrayed as Catholic, or at least Catholic-ish.