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.
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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.
