Schaubert's Laws of Fantasy Religions
A formalized schema for imagining and understanding religion in fantasy, science fiction, and other speculative works.
Author’s Note: this post on fantasy religions was originally drafted for a handful of local writing friends with a more thorough catalogue. That piece was lost and due to some life circumstances, I rushed out this much less thorough piece for those friends assuming (wrongly) it would not circulate widely. I realize there’s a lot of strong feedback coming in on Blue Sky. I’m reading the feedback, taking it into consideration, and will revise as time permits, likely moving those responses to the end of this piece in order to keep the focus of my original dominant thought at the forefront of this piece. ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.
Today I wanted to create a taxonomy that would work no matter what you run through it, sort of a philosophical grid for making these sorts of systems analogous to Sanderson’s Laws of Magic (which works no matter the kind or scale of magic system). It works for me, that’s sufficient. I put a pretentious title to it just to make it easier for you to bookmark and find (only 300 people in the U.S. have my last name, so slapping it to the front of something guarantees obscurity). If you find it unhelpful, ignore this I suppose. If you find the title too presumptuous, I apologize: suggest a better title in the comments. Or rage in the comments tastefully and kindly and with civility: I’m a happy dialog partner.
This piece is intended as a taxonomy. A writing aid. Take it or leave it, up to you: it’s helpful to me for my writing and helpful for reading, most recently, Christopher Ruocchio’s work. If anything good could come from this, I hope more folks read Sun Eater — I haven’t binged a series this fast since grade school. I certainly haven’t bulk reserved a series from the library like this since Katherine Applegate’s Animorphs.
One last note on tone because sometimes it’s difficult to parse over text: in case it’s unclear, I have dear friends who believe so, so many different things and practice so, so many different rites. Consider four different funerals close to me: my recent friend and a member of our writer’s group Zoe Kaplan (28) died last year, who was a Jewish editor at Simon and Schuster (the memorial post here), my father Steve (65) who had just retired from union carpentry died of COVID at the tail end of the pandemic (my eulogy here), my buddy Paul Pelkonen (43) who was an opera critic here in NYC and died of a heart attack (and so in memorium was tuckered as a spaceport in Star Wars), my cousin as close as my sister Lexi (21) hung herself during my first year here in NYC (so I performed her eulogy — almost 2,000 people came to the visitation in a town of 8,000, it was incredibly difficult — and wrote a song about her suicide). Those three funeral rites were radically different, even though I had a personal connection to each and had a hand in each. Even Dawkins and Harris, whom I critique as not being immune to their own critiques of religion per se, I respect as having a generally civil voice on this platform and others and see them as neighbors with whom I would love to talk philosophy and politics over coffee (my body won’t process beer much anymore, though they’d be welcome to imbibe).
So whatever else you read in this, let this be a love letter to friends and global neighbors who hold to a great plurality of philosophies and practice a great many rites as we all push one another to seek after truth, beauty, and goodness. As I sign my emails, I will say now: unconditional love, respect, and confidence to all of you.
On Religion.
I here use my broadest conceivable definition of the term “religion” — I mean corporate and individual habits flowing from an all encompassing worldview that may be more true or more false or even neutral according to actuality and reality when compared to other such worldview-habits. Materially, we might observe different worldview-habits from the devout. This definition captures both the true examples of religion and the false examples, sincere and insincere, veridical and non… etc. No “true religion,” whatever that means, can be recognized by everyone as 100% social (that’s simply culture), or 100% false (that’s foolishness), or recognized as 100% insincere (that’s an absurdity). A true example of religion, while it will almost certainly contain falsehoods, insincerities and manipulation, must also have the sincerely devout—both at the very top and very bottom. There’s a reason we distinguish between religions and cults. I will continue thinking through this with friends to see I can provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for either, but for now this ballpark estimation is where I’m resting. Our posture towards the worldview, therefore, must operate with more nuance than these polarizing views. This worldview-habit defines what it means to think, feel, act, and experience life and therefore governs and defines the group and individual choices and habits of those who hold it. These habits are often called “rites” or “rituals” or “religion” or “routine.” These worldviews are often called “theology” or “philosophy.”
This may seem, at first blush, too broad to some. Impossibly broad to others. After this piece went much further than my intended audience of a handful of writer friends, I’m sort of kicking myself for not calling it “fantasy worldviews” in the title. Yet “worldviews” was insufficient: I wanted to make a system for actions and behavior flowing out of worldviews. I’ll remind naysayers that the term religio fundamentally means to bind oneself. Those “bonds” or obligations or reverences or vows imply one joins a set of beliefs, habits, and choices. One writer hinted at this when he said that everyone wants to tell me about free love, but no one asks me if I’m free to bind myself. He was redefining his marital vows in terms of French libertarianism: a choice to bind to a set of restricted habits. Because of this he said a vow is a future appointment with myself saying this is the kind of person I want to be by X date. Such a vow exists in many, if not most all, of the mainline religions our planet has developed.
Of course it could go the other way. As David Bentley Hart and others have argued over and over again, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are high priests of a scientism religion. Not science, scientism. Their religion is not the same thing as the mere worldview of Darwinian evolution (nor of that earlier evolution posited by Augustine), nor even of science in general when you consider that Rev. John Polkinghorne was the Cambridge chair of physics or that Father Georges Lemaître formulated the Big Bang hypothesis. Or just the flowering of the scientific method in scholasticism. “Occam’s razor,” after all, is named after a scholastic Franciscan friar (1287-1347). The list goes on.
Rather what Dawkins and Harris and their ilk have done is to take a rather mean version of atheism (atheism is, I’ll remind you, an entire genre of worldviews in both the modern and ancient eras with many, many different variants held by many happy and moral folk whom I still call friends) and turn that mean version of atheism into a stock set of memes, habits, rites, and bindings. In their vatic role, they and some others safeguard observances that according to and against which others — both inside and outside their community — are judged. They adjudicate relative orthodoxy from their roles as arbiters and excommunicate their heretics. Consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an apostate twice over, who converted most recently to Christianity and was lambasted at this conference for leaving the New Atheists, whom she originally joined after leaving Islam. Dawkins and Harris within their vatic roles and from atop their arbiter thrones come complete with their own recent atheist conference here in Brooklyn — “Dissident Dialogues” — that’s indistinguishable from Evangelical religious conferences and therefore suffers under the weight of identical twentieth-century British critiques of American hotels and conference centers leveled in (picking almost at random here) books like What I Saw in America.
If anyone wishes to dispute the similarity of Dawkins and Harris to priests on grounds of argumentative rigor, I’d direct them to the ecumenical councils and their supporting documents. And if someone wishes to dispute the similarity on grounds of veracity of sources, I’d direct them to the fact that all research programs — including that of these New Atheists — determine from the outset what they choose to accept as evidence and not as a logical conclusion of… well… anything. Any argument intending to undermine or support reliability of a source will have to provide evidence, whether a priori or a posteriori, and hence has already made at least one decision about what kind evidence it will accept/exclude.
Like them or loathe them or see them as happy dialog partners and neighbors as I do, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are religious leaders precisely in the way that John Polkinghorne wasn’t prior to his ordination. So I’m being careful when I say by religion I mean corporate and individual habits oriented around an all encompassing worldview that may be true or false. This worldview defines what it means to experience life and therefore governs and defines group and individual choices and habits. This is, of course, a much wider and inclusive and historically accurate articulation of the word “religion” than in the way that Dawkins and Harris themselves define religion, particularly when they say something so silly as being against Religion or as if they don’t follow Religion. No one follows capital-R Religion per se in the same way that no one speaks capital-L Language per se: we follow a religion (in the case of Dawkins, scientistic atheism, with its requisite rights and responsibilities) and speak a Language (in the case of Dawkins, English). Creating philosophical rites to advocate for the destruction of Religion is as silly as using English to advocate for the destruction of Language: it cannot be done. This is Aristotelian genre 101.
Again, my definition could apply to formalized institutional religions or to private beliefs with a congregation or a coven of one. After all, L. Ron Hubbard started with himself, though I’ll remind you he had neither his great grandsonnor Harlan Ellison convinced. In fact, the Harlan link is a direct testimony from Harlan witnessing the moment Hubbard decided to found a religion. In final defense of Dawkins and Harris, it is precisely these kinds of cults of personality that are worthy of deconstruction. But in the case of Hubbard, they would be deconstructing a religion, not Religion per se.
Whatever you do when you make a fantasy or science fiction religion, just make sure you don’t install yourself as its figurehead. Pretty please?
On Worldview.
A worldview in the broadest sense is a κοσμοθεωρία — a theory of everything.
I’m using “world” in the old philosophical sense not to indicate Earth, but the universe or multiverse or omniverse of omnivores or whatever. Everything that is — creation, existence, universe — these big words indicate the cosmos / κοσμος.
Theoria, then, is speculation. And this is where speculative fiction is actually fun. It’s doing the work of philosophy and ethics by means of not only meditations on our own cosmos, but on those cosmous we invent. Plato, it could be argued, wrote one of the first speculative utopias in The Republic and that fantasy land Kallipolis (Καλλίπολις), as Tolkien would argue millennia later, had real effects on political policy. Therefore in the philosophical sense there is only one true vision of a given cosmos we invent, the true history of that cosmou that we may or may not reveal. (One that, if we’re being honest about the nature of authorial intent, is predicated upon our own cosmological history, which is the purview of philosophers and is therefore why philosophy often predicates art and sciences, the “syllogisms” and “realities” that ground and uphold and perhaps even enhypostasize both ends of the made thing, ars, or discovered knowledge, scientia). The characters have beliefs and habits that correspond to, cohere with, and pragmatically work alongside that actual reality of the world.
That is to say first we speculate the cosmos.
Then we speculate what characters believe about the cosmos.
Then we speculate how that governs their feelings and behavior and words (though feelings often come first).
These worldviews interact very differently, depending.
Be clearly defined institutionally in exact proportion to the age of the institution and in context of other institutions in which it is culturally born(someone mentioned early Pagan cults that aren’t clearly defined, but then being young in history, we ought not expect them to be — so it’s in proportion).
Have different sects and schools that continue to branch as the worldview ages to varying degrees of orthodoxy
Be defined, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the mind of the individual who adheres to varying degrees to the given sect she has joined or been born inside.
Come with requisite rights, responsibilities, rites, and habits
Conflict with other ideas and habits within the individual. Why? Because we’re all hypocrites and I’m the worst hypocrite here, so I’m even conflicted writing this piece.
And therefore the institution (consider prophets, martyrs, populists, etc.)
And therefore among and in dialog and even conflict with rival or neutral worldviews in a given space and time
This should scale based on the size and isolation of the given society, as well as to the degree that said worldview is fundamentalist (read: cult-like) in nature. Its willingness to engage in rational discourse will determine its rate of adaptability and, in some cases, longevity. Incest after a certain number of generations becomes literally self defeating.
On Truth.
Every worldview makes truth claims, but some are closer to the truth than others for the same reason that a statement in a court room may be truer or falser, an action for a dying man may be more or less good, a symphony might make more or less people experience beauty. Even the postmodern claim that “truth is relative” is an absolutist self-defeating statement that is weighed against other truth claims.
What happened (or didn’t) in history
What it means (or doesn’t) for a group
What it means (or doesn’t) the local manifestation to that group
What it means (or doesn’t) in contrast to others
What it means (or doesn’t) for me — or character in question
All five of these may be logically consistent or full of radical inconsistencies and cognitive dissonances as we often see with all of our political parties in the modern environment.
On habits (or rites).
The Latin word for habit simply means something I have. I have faithfulness or I have lust or I have fortitude. I have a morning routine of working out twice a week or I have a morning routine of hitting my alarm eighteen times because I’m depressed. Or lazy. Or both.
Show me a man’s week and I’ll show you his life. Individual habits define individuals.
Show me a group’s month and I’ll show you their century. Small group habits define the group: culture runs laps around vision. Consider the Inklings or the Algonquin writers. Consider the differences between the Benedictine Rule of Life and the Franciscan Rule of Life. Compare both to Buddhist monks. Compare all three to a Silicon Valley singularity cult.
Show me a religion’s yearly liturgy and I’ll show you their millennium.
Habits can change, but it involves changing triggers for a person, a group, a religion. The bigger they are the harder they are to change course.
Examples:
I want to speak to a couple of rights and beliefs in fantasy to show how this ends up being helpful in the narrative.
Schaubert’s Laws of Fantasy Religions:
A fantasy religion features corporate and individual habits oriented around an all encompassing worldview that may be true or false within its given cosmos. This worldview defines what it means to experience life and therefore governs and defines group and individual choices and habits.
Be clearly defined institutionally in exact proportion to the age of the institution and in context of other institutions in which it is culturally born
Have different sects and schools that continue to branch as the worldview ages to varying degrees of orthodoxy
Be defined, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the mind of the individual who adheres to varying degrees to the given sect she has joined or been born inside
Come with requisite rights, responsibilities, rites, and habits
Conflict with other ideas and habits within the individual
And therefore the institution (consider prophets, martyrs, populists, etc.)
And therefore among and in dialog and even conflict with rival or neutral worldviews in a given space and time
This should scale based on the size of the city and the isolation of the given society, as well as to the degree that said worldview is fundamentalist (read: cult-like) in nature. Its willingness to engage in rational discourse will determine its rate of adaptability and, in some cases, longevity. Incest after a certain number of generations becomes literally self defeating.
Its truth claims in respect to the actual history of phenomena and persons must speak to:
What happened (or didn’t) in history
What it means (or doesn’t) for our group
What it means (or doesn’t) locally
What it means (or doesn’t) in contrast to others
What it means (or doesn’t) for me
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These truth claims result in the habits and rites of the individual and group:
Show me a man’s week and I’ll show you his life. Individual habits define individuals.
Show me a group’s month and I’ll show you their century. Small group habits define the group: culture runs laps around vision. Consider the Inklings or the Algonquin writers.
Show me a religion’s yearly liturgy and I’ll show you their millennium
From this, there is a corollary on magic (or tech) extrapolated from VERY old rules passed down from the father of modern fantasy, George MacDonald. I want to make a couple of quick points due to some misconceptions posted elsewhere:
Moral law extrapolates on what is good and bad and is predicated on natural law (i.e. sex within a certain proximity in familial relations will result in certain deformities, humans can drown, etc).
Physical law is based on how objects and persons interact in spacetime.
A religion may define parameters for behaviour, but if an author calls an evil man good (except in parody or satire) readers will revolt.
Physical laws may change, goodness (the idea that some men have higher character than other men) does not.
In changing physical laws, you change the physics and metaphysics of the world in direct relation to our own.
This change in metaphysics changes in-world systematic philosophical and historical and scientific methodology or truths.
As these truths change, so changes what is believable and practicable within the various fantasy religions
Making the context in which goodness and evil, bliss and suffering, truth and lies manifest shift.
Therefore magic (the physics and natural law of the universe) will lead to the metaphysics of the author, from which is predicated various fantasy religions that are more or less true and good in relation to the ultimate reality — the first principles — of that system.
How different are worldviews within extremely similar or monolithic belief systems?
Islam, for instance, works as a sort of Nabokovian parody of Catholicism that includes even a straight borrowing of the rosary in the Misbaha (مِسْبَحَة) beads. Most Muslims do not realize the three beads at the end of the Misbaha (مِسْبَحَة) originally represented the Trinity for they were arguably borrowed from the rosary, whatever hadiths say about counting on the fingers.
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In fact the
How do different groups respond to the same truth claim?
Because of some groups get closer to reality (because reality
The Blue Sky controversy
I’ve thought about religions in fantasy, scifi, and speculative fiction more and more over the past year. It has started to bug me that I’m not finding a more formalized piece on how to make fantasy religions out there — religions in fantasy and science fiction worlds. One author asked me if I did a catalog search on the Cambridge University Press intro to fantasy, the Strange Horizons roundtable, the PhD theses, etc — yes, I’m aware. And yes, I’m aware of the DnD guide on how to make one. None of these are giving me what I want. As is often the rule in all creative acts, when you cannot find it, make it yourself off the scraps of what you find. I humbly offer the collage that follows. Outlines of specific religions of specific worlds exist, but not outlines for how they work in any meta sense. These are the kinds of questions I ask here regularly, so make sure you have shared them with a friend and subscribed:
It’s a tonal shift I’m trying to identify considering the recent increase of those writing lovingly about religion (and I’m using the word here in the more common sense now, not in the way I defined it above) in the genre from, say, the time of Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz or even something like Anathem by Neil Stephenson towards the present. I mean this tonally with the direct subject of “religion” as normally defined in the culture as distinguished against my definition of religion above. To be fair, there may not be a tonal shift across the decades and it may be as simple my own perception of certain older works when compared to newer works, given the order in which I personally read things. However, if that’s the case, someone would need to explain why William Atheling Jr. (James Blish) in his early analysis “Cathedrals in Space” thought the representation of his contemporaries rather thin — James Blish read everything in his day, which is why he could comment so prolifically as Atheling. Take that up with Blish, not me: his article was the inception of this piece. Of course in our plane, Blish is dead, so you’ll need to consult someone who believes in life after life after death in order to debate with Blish, face-to-face. Whatever the case, that idea, though my personal impetus, is not the thesis of this piece at all. I deeply value nuance: one or two negative portrayals of one or two religions within epic fantasy or within a space opera seems radically thin to me, considering even the diversity of pre-Dante Italy or of types of devotion among Alaska Natives. These days, Sanderson has written voluminously about many, many types of invented religions and he seems to understand that religion is fundamentally human. I see this as a very different tonal approach than, say, Heinlein’s Jubal Hershaw in Stranger in a Strange Land. There are others, some listed below, many I didn’t list, others in a series of Wikis that need updated (on fictional religions, fictional deities, fictional clergy). Another comparison might be made between the former beautiful liberal humanism of Speaker for the Deadand the latter Orson Scott Card’s own personal politics — an interesting story prompt may well be how a person can go from former to the latter.
Another post for another day may survey the entire field, I would expect someone with decades more reading under their belt to do so. However equipped or ill equipped I am, I’m simply not going to have lived long enough to read as far and widely as someone twenty years my senior. Yet other titles come to mind (negatively and positively) from out of William Atheling Jr’s original list like Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children” and Stranger in a Strange Land (though this can be argued as anti-religion), James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience,” Lord of the World by Hugh Benson, M.P. Shiel’s Lord of the Sea, C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, “The Man” by Ray Bradbury, “Fool’s Errand” by Paul L. Payne, Believers’ World by Robert Lowndes, C.L. Moore’s Shambleau (first initial stands for “Catherine” for the uninitiated), etc. Others seem to prefer I explicitly mention the authors from the Strange Horizons roundtable on faith that I mentioned in passing above (FARAH MENDLESOHN, BEN JEAPES, ZEN CHO, ALIETTE DE BODARD, MIMI MONDAL, LIZ WILLIAMS, KEN MACLEOD, MICHAEL A. BURSTEIN, TAJINDER HAYER, DANIEL HEATH JUSTICE who all authored it as well as the authors they mention like Yang, Kuang, Giao, Wolfe, Pratchett, Kurtz, Kennealy Morrison, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula K. Le Guin, R A MacAvoy, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, etc, etc, etc).
Based on my definition above, it’s almost impossible not to write about religion when you’re making a magic system. It is, after all, latent in the very act of world building and how the characters react to that existence as individuals and groups. In that way — in contrast to the tonal approach mentioned above — we’ve really never stopped writing about religion. But in the tonal way, I believe Sanderson’s Jasnah far more easily than Heinlein’s religious characters from Stranger because I believe Sanderson loves Jasnah as he loves his atheist friends. Heinlein, however, seems to have Jubal dripping with venom. I don’t think Heinlein likes me or my Jewish friends or my Muslim friends or my Mormon friends or, frankly, women considering some of his more vile statements. That, to me at least, is the tonal difference I’m after: how is it that some writers write about such radically different perspectives of religion, good and bad, while others either drip with hate or have nothing but good things to say? Or, on the literary side, what is it that separates Dostoevsky from, say, certain Amish romances? That diversity of ideas, nuance, experiences — and the human love that enables a person to write broadly about lived experience — is interesting to me and I’m wondering if there’s a taxonomic way to approach writing in this way.
So this piece is not a catalog like my Brief History of Science Fiction from Antiquity to 2024. Even that piece, though more thorough, isn’t intended to be all-encompassing.
“that they should count them on fingers, for they (the fingers) will be questioned and asked to speak.” Book #8, Hadith #1496
Holy smokes Lancelot. I would love to sit down with you like for 2 days and discuss religion! I'm a retired minister with a background in interfaith,3 Masters and a love of fantasy, sci-fi and history. And I love what you wrote!
I got held up by your description of A Canticle For Liebowitz as Miller "lovingly" depicting religion.
The entire novel is a complete INDICTMENT of religion, demonstrating that it does not work, its precepts and practices TWICE leading to the "Flame Deluge", a textual example of the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.