Creating Religion in Your Stories

Let's talk about religion. No, not let's argue about religion or discuss the viability of religious though and action and defense. Let's talk about religion as it relates to your fiction. 

Religion can be a powerful way to say something about your characters and about the world they inhabit. It can be a vital part of your setting culturally. Or it can even be a foil against which your protagonist rebels. 

Ignore It at Your Peril, Writer (Oh Life Is Bigger)

Let's be honest. Religious affections or reactions to religious dogma are a part of life. They are part of what shapes much of the world. They are the very reason for so many of our holidays, for example and any story that revolves around a holiday should have at least a cursory understanding of it. Sadly, so little of that makes its way into a lot of fiction. Granted, this is looked at more in literary fiction than Summer beach reading, but every empty spot is a missed opportunity. 

To be fair, we're not talking about using fiction to evangelize one religion over another (unless that's your character's, well, character -- after all, it worked for Hazel Motes in Wise Blood even if it didn't make him a nice person). 

Nor are we only talking about Western or Christian religious viewpoints. The world is much, much bigger than American and European history, and we should as writers be open to exploring as much of it as we can. 

Additionally, when we talk about religious viewpoints here, let's be sure to include the viewpoint of disbelief. Although atheism or agnosticism would never be considered a religion, they are religious points of view that choose not to believe rather than believe. 

What we're really talking about here is religion as part of a character's background, what goes into the development of that protagonist, antagonist, or bit character as a person (albeit it a fictional person). Religion can be as effective as race, location, education, hobbies and interests, and goals when it comes to creating a three-dimensional character.

Also, we're going to address religion as it relates to world-building. So much of Ursula LeGuin's work couldn't exist at the same level or excellence if she had ignored the religious inclinations of the worlds her researchers visited. The same goes for Dune, and for a lot of the writing of Asimov and Bradbury and Shūsaku Endō and Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston.

But, as said earlier, so many contemporary writers avoid any mention of religion, most likely (just my opinion here) due to the bad taste the merger between religion and politics has left in the mouths of so many folks nowadays and the fear of being labeled a "religious writer" instead of a writer using religion to build characters from words. 

There are several ways to go about this, and we're going to look at each of them. 

• Religions based on real-world faiths
• Dogmatic/theological religions
• Mythological religions
• Human as God religions

 

Building My Religion (I Thought That I Heard You Laughing)

It's far more common for writers of fantasy and sci-fi to create elaborate religions than it is for writers of mystery and romance. Now, that primarily happens because of the differences between a real-world and a not-tied-to-the-real-world (except maybe only tangentally) setting. Fantasy and sci-fi writers have the freedom to explore really out-there ideas or lock their created religions into more established norms. Writers who work in something based on the real world have less freedom (at least without becoming urban fantasy or romantasy). For them, the thousands of faiths across the globe are their base for research. 

However, even if you're starting from scratch, religions tend to have a few things in common in how they are established and how they are maintained, and those are the things astute readers will look for.  

Dogmatic Faiths

Dogmatic faiths are perhaps the most well-known in the Western canon of literature. Catholicism. Protestantism. Islam. They are the historical religions that held sway during the colonization of the planet by European countries, and as such, they are pretty much known all over. What makes them dogmatic? Well, they are based in theological statements. Catholics have their catechism. Protestants have their creeds and statements of faith. Islam has its Shahada and Aqidah. And when it comes time to defend them, all have their books of researched apologetics and teaching. 

Dogmatic faiths usually look to a holy book and how it is parsed, understood, and interpreted by its adherents. This, of course, can lead to various sects without said faith, as Protestants have Presbyterians, Baptists, Orthodox, Church of Christ, Church of God, Mormons, Methodists, and the ironically shared beliefs of so many Non-Denominational churches. Each tends to believe it (and only it) interprets the holy texts correctly, and that it is, while maybe not the only right way, as least the best right way to follow. 

Western Christianity doesn't have a corner on this market of sectarianism. Islam also have a variety of "denominational" understandings. Among them, the Salafi, Deobandi, and Wahabi, Sunni, Sufi, Shia, and Berelvi. 

And these are just the traditions that are most well-known. 

What about other religious texts from world religions? Well, many of those don't meet the other "rules" for dogmatic faith, but we'll get into that in a bit. 

So, if you want to create a dogmatic religion for your story, you're going to need a few things:

• a holy text (doesn't have to be a book, depending on your genre)
• gatekeepers (who determine who is and who isn't part of the group
• a creed or document or historical, oral understanding of the tenets of the faith
• the possibility of dissent leading to similar but different understandings and creating new sects in the faith

Don't scrimp on this stuff. Just call it world-building. (I know you folks out there love to commit pages to that stuff. Hehe.)

Mythological Religions

While many writers think first about creating a dogmatic religion in their fiction (probably because that's the world they live in whether their faith or not), the next most common faiths a writer needs to create is the one based in mythology and legends. Now, to be fair, all dogmatic religions still have their stories, their myths, their legends, but the books containing them tend to be treated as fact or at least as somehow immutable and separate from "pure story." When I speak of religions based in mythology and legend, I reference more informal collections of stories, more in line with Greek, Norse, Indigenous American, and African legends. 

They tend to be multitheistic, or have many, or at least more than one god or goddess. 

An important note here: The gods don't have to be benign. Just think of Cthulhu. 

There are two basic approaches to this kind of religion in your fiction. First, a religion may insist the stories (or at least the story behind the story) are true. They really happened. The gods are real and can interact with humanity, whether to help or to hurt. The Greek and Roman pantheons are of this type. The gods and goddesses both bless and curse. They play favorites among humans, though these may change on the basest of whims. In this kind of world, your characters may live in fear of the unseen deities, and that will affect the tone of your story. 

Second, a religion may see its myths and legends as mere stories. In this case, the religion is built up around these stories that nobody really believes as fact, as true. Your characters who inhabit your world still see the stories as important, but more for their moral or civic lessons than as building some sort of dogmatic truths with a capital T. 

How you walk that line and delineate that in your story is going to affect the world that you've created. It's also rife with story ideas. Is there a sect that feels differently and wants to prove the stories (sort of like the Nazi Ahnenerbe sought to confirm mythological tales that proved a master race via archeology and anthropology. Suppose that group is at odds with the "church" at large. Just an idea for some background and world-building. Take or leave it, but it's yours to steal, if you like. 

But there's yet another way to approach religion in world-building

A Human as God

When it comes to humans setting themselves up as God (or a god), the most obvious of these, I think anyway, at least from my reading and study, goes back to the Egyptians where Pharaoh was not just ruler but also God. 

This is a common trope in lots of old adventure stories such as She and in a multitude of jungle adventures (most of them sadly using the white goddess cliche). It has (perhaps because of the overuse of white as the default for the gods/goddesses among indigenous peoples) fallen out of favor with writers. However, let's not be so quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as the saying goes. 

The notion of human beings setting themselves up as god or goddess can still be an effective way to create a fictional religion for your work. In fact, it's rife with story possibilities. 

• The character sets himself/herself/themself up as god/goddess for an ulterior motive.
• The character genuinely believes they're really a god.
• The character doesn't want to be in the position but the people have forced them into the role of god.

Imagine how each of those differences changes the way characters interact in your adventure tale. Are the people oppressed? Is the god/goddess in effect the one being held captive? Is the worship forced or genuine? How do the answers to these questions affect the day-in-day-out interactions of your characters?

See what I mean?

Now, let's go deeper into the character of the mortal gods/goddesses themselves. Is the person weak and supported by others? If so, god's days are numbered depending on the loyalty of the supported. Is the god/goddess utilitarian? Practical? Spiritual? Seeking the best for themselves? Seeking the best for the people? All these things change the world you've created. 

Before we end, there's one more thing we need to know about ALL religions, both in the real world and in the stories we create. 

Stories Matter (I Thought That I Heard You Sing)

I recently read The Stars Within by Stefan Petrucha, and I was astounded at how well he thought out and populated the religions (yes, with an 's') and anti-religion in his sci-fi adventure. (It was reading this book, in fact, that triggered my wanting to write this article.) One of my favorite bits from that novel is this: Ludy explains that humans and gods can not survive without each other, nor can either survive without the stories about them. 

That's a paraphrase, but it's dead on. And I mean dead on. It's the stories that make a religion or a faith work because you have to go back to something more than platitudes, more than axioms, more than rules. They have to go back to something memorable, and what's better for remembering than stories? It's the stories that build up the faith, it's the stories that believer can go back to. mething is that faith. Without the stories, there's no faith.

Christians don't "trust God" because they're told to. They trust because they remember the story of David and Goliath, of the fiery furnace. Muslim's aren't patient and longsuffering because they know they're supposed to be. They're patient because they know the story of the Prophet Ayyub. First peoples had the confidence to stand against invading Europeans because they knew Coyote was more clever than any other. The list goes on. The stories are how the faith is taught, passed on, and remembered.

What kinds of stories? All kinds are important. All kinds are needed. 

• Salvific: the savior story (Jesus, Moses)
• Foundational: creation stories
• Moral lessons: learning the virtues of the given faith
• Theology reinforcement: to help lock in doctrinal beliefs
• Sometimes just stories that ended up in the religious books as apocryphal

It's all something to take into account as you develop a religious point of reference for your written world. 

So, Where Do We Go from Here? (I Think I Thought I Saw You Try)

Now is when you put it into practice. 

Revisit a story that's giving you problems or stalling you out. Reinforce that world with a religion (your pick) and see if that opens up any doors for you. See how you characters fall on the belief-to-nonbelief spectrum and then see how that colors their interactions with other characters. 

Ultimately, it's up to you so see how much or how little religious thought is going to influence your world and your story but never neglect the added benefit it can give to your fiction.