Christian themes and other old lore in writing.

[Jemini]

Long post alert

Introduction

There are several significant advantages to pulling from old lore and mythologies from the ancient world (Greek, Christian, Chinese, Japanese, and Babylonian) or the classical world (Norse, Icelandic, Slavic) to implement in your writing.

The advantages are that these are common stories that, even if the reader does not know this specific story, they have usually heard something like it and are able to recognize the themes. This allows a writer to use short-cuts to get the same feeling of deep history and gravitas into their story that would usually require very in-depth world building to create, and even people who do go into deep world-building can use some of these themes to either inform their own world building or even borrow some pieces for their own use.

In my own stories, I have borrowed heavily from Chinese and Slavic lore, and VERY heavily from Jewish and Babylonian while playing up the strange link Jewish and Babylonian lore have to each other by linking the two.

Specific disadvantages

The disadvantages are interspersed, but necessary to be aware of. One of the biggest disadvantages is that if you use the lore of a religion still in practice today, such as Christianity, Judaism, Shinto, Bhudism, or Hinduism, you will be placed under a special level of scrutiny in which you have to tread carefully and represent the religious figures in a way that is not too disrespectful or deviating too greatly from their portrayal in the source material. In some ways, this disadvantage can even be turned to an advantage if you do a good enough job, and a very faithful representation that respects the source will gain you a lot of attention from the groups in question, but a single misstep will bring down a populous wrath the likes of which you want no part of.

There is also a great deal of baggage with some of these religions. Christianity, in particular, is regarded as synonymous with western culture and critics of western culture therefore are also highly critical of anything that brings up Christianity without bashing and lampooning it.

There is also another kind of baggage specifically with Norse and Greek mythology, as these are two mythologies that are very popular to adapt in fiction. Neither of these are living religions today, but they have baggage regardless due to all the poor adaptation others have done with it as they've used the names of Norse or Greek gods as set dressing for their story, just blatantly using the name, to a point that several people these days will roll their eyes if they see a Norse or Greek hero or god name come up in your story.

It is understandable as Norse and Greek mythologies are in that sweet spot where neither are living religions and thus avoid all the pit-falls of using a living religion, but at the same time they also each have a large amount of the lore preserved (unlike Babylonian lore) which allows for a lot of material for the writer to pull from. But, much like the Isekai genre, this understandable popularity has made for a large amount of trash-tier material in the category that sours readers' tastes to it. Those who adapt it well are still appreciated. To continue using the Isekai example, there is a firm differentiation between trash Isekai and the real stand-outs of the genre such as Overlord, Re:Zero, and Mushoku Tensei. In this same manner, a really faithful leveraging of Greek and Norse mythology can still be well appreciated by readers, but a bad adaptation will get a lot of readers loosing interest fast.

Specific advantages to living religions

This does bring up two more advantages of the living religions to counter-balance the HUGE pit-falls if writing with them. 1st. The lore is more complete in living religions. Not only is there more material to work from, but in the case of religions that have survived into the modern day that information is often a lot more personable and easier to relate to, more meaningful to the common man and more useful for the small-level world building in a story.

The 2nd major advantage of living religions is that these religions have greatly informed the culture of an entire people, and thus the themes are literally baked into the society itself. This means that adaptations of these religions will greatly increase the appeal of your story to the particular group that practices this religion. Even someone who is an atheist or a practitioner of a religion that is a minority in that region of the world will have been heavily influenced by the majority religion of that region and thus will feel the same form of resonance with the themes.

This has long been an advantage Japanese writing has had over Western writing. Japanese writing often heavily applies aspects of Shinto and Bhudism in most of their writings. Even the standard Shonen anime have their origins in Journey to the West, a text written by Bhudist monks using these characters to explore aspects of a person's inner psyche and the battle with the self to gain enlightenment. Japanese writers also make heavy use of Christianity, as Christianity is the 3rd largest religion practiced in Japan, making it a very significant minority religion there.

Meanwhile, the afore mentioned anti-western sentiment in the western world has bashed on Christianity so hard as to make writing with Christian themes unpopular, thus stripping writers of a valuable tool for gaining mass appeal among western audiences.

Conclusion

In conclusion, despite all the pit-falls involved, there are also so many advantages to using the lore from current and past religions in your writings. So long as you remain conscious of the pit-falls and put in the work and research necessary to use and leverage this old lore well, it can be a short-cut to greatly improving the quality of your work.

However, some require more work than others in the case of currently practiced living religions. Using these living religions can be a high-risk high-reward gamble, and require so much work you might as well build your own lore from the ground up, but for those who are passionate enough to put in the effort I would actually encourage you to go for it. (Although writers using Christian themes in the western world really have their work cut out for them.)

 

[TotallyHuman]

I read "Christian memes and other old lore in writing"

 

[TheEldritchGod]

Theft is the motherhood of invention.

 

[vzymmer]

In short you just want to tell idiots to do the obvious. Right?
Gotcha.

Ps. If you're someone who is offended by my comment, that means you see yourself as an idiot.

 

[Jemini]

In short you just want to tell idiots to do the obvious. Right?
Gotcha.

Ps. If you're someone who is offended by my comment, that means you see yourself as an idiot.

You would be quite surprised just how many people royally F-up the implementation end on this stuff.

Also, calling out the anti-western and anti-Christian sentiment and how it's holding western writers back was not a small part of my motivation in writing this up. I'd love to see more people putting in research to the level of "Dogma" (the movie lampooning Christianity in it's plot) in some stories and explore out what can be done with this.

(Dogma, while being very much on the irreverent side of portrayals of Christianity, did still show that they did their research in terms of how it was handled. I'd say it did an extremely good job with it. About the only thing that was actually off in the movie, so far as I could tell (aside from the mental gymnastics they used to take God out of the picture,) was that muses are Greek, not Christian. But, somehow it worked, probably because that was a piece of Greek lore that had also permeated western culture at the time.)

 

[CrownOfLillies]

Interesting post. I'm not sure I agree with all your conclusions, but I certainly think people having a better understanding of the history of religion would help when writing their stories.

For instance, knowing how most religions start with a charismatic preacher (the Buddah, Jesus, Muhammad, Laozi), that many things that person is supposed to have done are backwritten or made up, or that the singular person is completely made up (e.g. Laozi). And that religions schisms over differences in interpretation of theological issues. To use Christian examples: whether an incarnate divinity was separate from the non-material divinity, whether the incarnate divinity is a co-equal source of divinity, whether you require priests to commune with god, or whether the laity should read and interpret the holy scripture. Also on how much you have to stick to the text, verses obey the developed practices.

Of course, most webnovels presume their gods actually exist and interact with the world in far more active ways than any god of Earth does, so perhaps that would clear up how a religion starts and prevent schism. But it would be interesting to read, for example, the story of a Goddess desperately trying to stop her priests from schisming, or the story of a transmigrated somebody starting off a religion as the voice of a God.


I have a different interpretation on why people don't use Christian mythology, though. I think that they do, they just do it with a superficial familiarity with the theology of Christianity, which is sort of understandable. I've read several web-novels which have: devotion to a singular deity, who has priests, who preach in churches; some of these also promise an afterlife to believers, while damming those who don't to some sort of bad afterlife. That's the basic structure of Christianity. Now, what they usually lack: is original sin, incarnation of the deity to material form, suffering and sacrifice of the incarnation, and a promise of redemption from sin because of that sacrifice.

But I think those factors usually would be superflous or even counterproductive to the world the author wants to build, at least for Isekais, which is a lot of what I've read. The generic structure of Isekai divinity seems to be that divinity is either: several gods in a war of influence with each other (usually two, standing in for good and bad, sometimes divinities of particular races, like humans vs. demons or somesuch), a singular god which likes messing with the universe it's in charge of, or a divine bureaucracy which manages reincarnation or heavenly reward.

I note that these structures are picked to allow for the genre defining plot point of an Isekai: transmigration/reincarnation. But once you have this sort of set up, you get an immediate answer to "how does the god interact with the world", which is: transmigrate people. This means you have to have additional reasons if you want your god to incarnate too. All that being said, there's no reason why it can't be done. The best example of this sort of novel is C.S. Lewis' Narnia books; an Isekai before there were Isekais.


On a different point, I recall hearing somewhere that the Prose Edda, one of the main sources we do have on Norse Mythology, was compiled in a Christianised Iceland, by an author mainly with the intent to instruct on how to write good Norse poetry. In this way, (and assuming that my half-remembered source s accurate) we don't actually know how the Norse religion was practiced, only some of the stories that were told, which well could have been made up after the fact. (Aha, I remembered the source:

.)


P.S. Also a lot of webnovels draw from Japanese webnovels for their structure. These in turn draw from JRPGS, which draw on a fusion of Shinto and Christian traditions to construct their fictional religions. So there's three layers of telephone going on.

 

[TheEldritchGod]

Look. I just combine Keanu Reeves and Jesus Christ to make Keanu Christ. So much easier when you just randomly bastardize everything.

P.S. Also a lot of webnovels draw from Japanese webnovels for their structure. These in turn draw from JRPGS, which draw on a fusion of Shinto and Christian traditions to construct their fictional religions. So there's three layers of telephone going on.

See? This is how you do it. RANDOMLY COMBINE STUFF they try to make it work. For example:

Two hundred years ago an empire existed across most of the continent.


The current kingdom of Lyonesse exists on the southern most edge of that former empire. When the original disaster occurred that created the demon lands in the heart of the old empire, the orbiting kingdoms broke off and balkanized to create the current political structure. However, there was a holdover.

Lyonesse was always blessed with mild weather, so during the winter months, the nobles would migrate down from the heartland of the old Empire and while they were there, food supplies would start to run out, so they would hold a hunt. Excess food would be sent back to the heart land to feed those who stayed behind. When the original disaster turned the heartland into the demon lands, the need for the hunt no longer existed.

However, tradition is a tremendous force. The hunt continued for reasons of tradition. The need no longer existed, but the pattern remained. Over the centuries, the original reason was forgotton and instead it turned into a festival. There was still the hunt, but it was no longer about finding meat, but sport. Animals would be released and the hunt would take place. It was an odd time of year to have a festival, but it had been going on for over two centuries now, they certainly weren't going to stop now.

It also had a bit of an industry built up around it. Tourists would arrive from other kingdoms, as well as delegates. This prompted some rivalry. There would be performative jousting matches. A chance to show off and crow about achievements over the previous year. It also was the one time of year you could count on the royal family to all be at the same place, at the same time.

What's this got to do with religion?

I NEED ALL OF THE ROYAL FAMILY IN THE SAME PLACE AT THE SAME TIME.

The centuries-old tradition exists to forward the plot, but I retroactively created the reason why it exists.

Religion is a lot like that.

In most religions, the really old ones, most of the book is just sensible advice. I mean, take out most of the supernatural aspect of the bible, and it's got some very practical rules to live by. RULES THAT WORKED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Believe in it, or don't you can't fault the success of Christianity.

If you are going to use religion, fine, but nobody cares how accurate it is. Include things that SERVE THE PLOT. Don't just makeup shit, but also don't include shit you don't need.

I could just as easily make the annual festival based on the will of the gods, or celebrate a saintess's victory over great evil. Religion is, at its core, just a way to LIVE YOUR LIFE with rules that everyone agrees on. Those rules, at one point, made sense. They might not NOW, but they had a purpose. Like the annual hunt originally was needed to feed people, now it's a tourist trap.

Tradition binds a culture together. Religion Binds a culture together. When you world-build, just keep that in mind.

And remember: HATS. Everyone needs a hat.

Who would respect the pope if he did not have the tallest and shiniest of hats?

 

[Jemini]

Interesting post. I'm not sure I agree with all your conclusions, but I certainly think people having a better understanding of the history of religion would help when writing their stories.

For instance, knowing how most religions start with a charismatic preacher (the Buddah, Jesus, Muhammad, Laozi), that many things that person is supposed to have done are backwritten or made up, or that the singular person is completely made up (e.g. Laozi). And that religions schisms over differences in interpretation of theological issues. To use Christian examples: whether an incarnate divinity was separate from the non-material divinity, whether the incarnate divinity is a co-equal source of divinity, whether you require priests to commune with god, or whether the laity should read and interpret the holy scripture. Also on how much you have to stick to the text, verses obey the developed practices.

Of course, most webnovels presume their gods actually exist and interact with the world in far more active ways than any god of Earth does, so perhaps that would clear up how a religion starts and prevent schism. But it would be interesting to read, for example, the story of a Goddess desperately trying to stop her priests from schisming, or the story of a transmigrated somebody starting off a religion as the voice of a God.


I have a different interpretation on why people don't use Christian mythology, though. I think that they do, they just do it with a superficial familiarity with the theology of Christianity, which is sort of understandable. I've read several web-novels which have: devotion to a singular deity, who has priests, who preach in churches; some of these also promise an afterlife to believers, while damming those who don't to some sort of bad afterlife. That's the basic structure of Christianity. Now, what they usually lack: is original sin, incarnation of the deity to material form, suffering and sacrifice of the incarnation, and a promise of redemption from sin because of that sacrifice.

But I think those factors usually would be superflous or even counterproductive to the world the author wants to build, at least for Isekais, which is a lot of what I've read. The generic structure of Isekai divinity seems to be that divinity is either: several gods in a war of influence with each other (usually two, standing in for good and bad, sometimes divinities of particular races, like humans vs. demons or somesuch), a singular god which likes messing with the universe it's in charge of, or a divine bureaucracy which manages reincarnation or heavenly reward.

I note that these structures are picked to allow for the genre defining plot point of an Isekai: transmigration/reincarnation. But once you have this sort of set up, you get an immediate answer to "how does the god interact with the world", which is: transmigrate people. This means you have to have additional reasons if you want your god to incarnate too. All that being said, there's no reason why it can't be done. The best example of this sort of novel is C.S. Lewis' Narnia books; an Isekai before there were Isekais.


On a different point, I recall hearing somewhere that the Prose Edda, one of the main sources we do have on Norse Mythology, was compiled in a Christianised Iceland, by an author mainly with the intent to instruct on how to write good Norse poetry. In this way, (and assuming that my half-remembered source s accurate) we don't actually know how the Norse religion was practiced, only some of the stories that were told, which well could have been made up after the fact. (Aha, I remembered the source:

.)


P.S. Also a lot of webnovels draw from Japanese webnovels for their structure. These in turn draw from JRPGS, which draw on a fusion of Shinto and Christian traditions to construct their fictional religions. So there's three layers of telephone going on.

Yeah, I wasn't really referring to world-building religions. Rather, I was talking about borrowing from the lore and culture, and realizing how it is that religion influences culture.

In other words, you are looking at the church specifically, I'm looking at everything BUT the church. I'm looking at the gods and the flock while removing the middle-man.

That said, your perspective of looking at the preachers and the mortal leaders of the religion does have it's merits as well which should be considered.

(I actually saw a good world building series on Youtube once that talked about systems of government, and how if you are in a world where gods are real and make their presence known then the most common form of government in that world would be theocracy. It's a very good point that's worth consideration and really points a finger at all these series that, despite these very real gods in the world, somehow they still all wind up with not only monarchies, but also somehow have a separation of church and state.)

 

[melchi]

Long post alert

Introduction

There are several significant advantages to pulling from old lore and mythologies from the ancient world (Greek, Christian, Chinese, Japanese, and Babylonian) or the classical world (Norse, Icelandic, Slavic) to implement in your writing.

The advantages are that these are common stories that, even if the reader does not know this specific story, they have usually heard something like it and are able to recognize the themes. This allows a writer to use short-cuts to get the same feeling of deep history and gravitas into their story that would usually require very in-depth world building to create, and even people who do go into deep world-building can use some of these themes to either inform their own world building or even borrow some pieces for their own use.

In my own stories, I have borrowed heavily from Chinese and Slavic lore, and VERY heavily from Jewish and Babylonian while playing up the strange link Jewish and Babylonian lore have to each other by linking the two.

Specific disadvantages

The disadvantages are interspersed, but necessary to be aware of. One of the biggest disadvantages is that if you use the lore of a religion still in practice today, such as Christianity, Judaism, Shinto, Bhudism, or Hinduism, you will be placed under a special level of scrutiny in which you have to tread carefully and represent the religious figures in a way that is not too disrespectful or deviating too greatly from their portrayal in the source material. In some ways, this disadvantage can even be turned to an advantage if you do a good enough job, and a very faithful representation that respects the source will gain you a lot of attention from the groups in question, but a single misstep will bring down a populous wrath the likes of which you want no part of.

There is also a great deal of baggage with some of these religions. Christianity, in particular, is regarded as synonymous with western culture and critics of western culture therefore are also highly critical of anything that brings up Christianity without bashing and lampooning it.

There is also another kind of baggage specifically with Norse and Greek mythology, as these are two mythologies that are very popular to adapt in fiction. Neither of these are living religions today, but they have baggage regardless due to all the poor adaptation others have done with it as they've used the names of Norse or Greek gods as set dressing for their story, just blatantly using the name, to a point that several people these days will roll their eyes if they see a Norse or Greek hero or god name come up in your story.

It is understandable as Norse and Greek mythologies are in that sweet spot where neither are living religions and thus avoid all the pit-falls of using a living religion, but at the same time they also each have a large amount of the lore preserved (unlike Babylonian lore) which allows for a lot of material for the writer to pull from. But, much like the Isekai genre, this understandable popularity has made for a large amount of trash-tier material in the category that sours readers' tastes to it. Those who adapt it well are still appreciated. To continue using the Isekai example, there is a firm differentiation between trash Isekai and the real stand-outs of the genre such as Overlord, Re:Zero, and Mushoku Tensei. In this same manner, a really faithful leveraging of Greek and Norse mythology can still be well appreciated by readers, but a bad adaptation will get a lot of readers loosing interest fast.

Specific advantages to living religions

This does bring up two more advantages of the living religions to counter-balance the HUGE pit-falls if writing with them. 1st. The lore is more complete in living religions. Not only is there more material to work from, but in the case of religions that have survived into the modern day that information is often a lot more personable and easier to relate to, more meaningful to the common man and more useful for the small-level world building in a story.

The 2nd major advantage of living religions is that these religions have greatly informed the culture of an entire people, and thus the themes are literally baked into the society itself. This means that adaptations of these religions will greatly increase the appeal of your story to the particular group that practices this religion. Even someone who is an atheist or a practitioner of a religion that is a minority in that region of the world will have been heavily influenced by the majority religion of that region and thus will feel the same form of resonance with the themes.

This has long been an advantage Japanese writing has had over Western writing. Japanese writing often heavily applies aspects of Shinto and Bhudism in most of their writings. Even the standard Shonen anime have their origins in Journey to the West, a text written by Bhudist monks using these characters to explore aspects of a person's inner psyche and the battle with the self to gain enlightenment. Japanese writers also make heavy use of Christianity, as Christianity is the 3rd largest religion practiced in Japan, making it a very significant minority religion there.

Meanwhile, the afore mentioned anti-western sentiment in the western world has bashed on Christianity so hard as to make writing with Christian themes unpopular, thus stripping writers of a valuable tool for gaining mass appeal among western audiences.

Conclusion

In conclusion, despite all the pit-falls involved, there are also so many advantages to using the lore from current and past religions in your writings. So long as you remain conscious of the pit-falls and put in the work and research necessary to use and leverage this old lore well, it can be a short-cut to greatly improving the quality of your work.

However, some require more work than others in the case of currently practiced living religions. Using these living religions can be a high-risk high-reward gamble, and require so much work you might as well build your own lore from the ground up, but for those who are passionate enough to put in the effort I would actually encourage you to go for it. (Although writers using Christian themes in the western world really have their work cut out for them.)

There are some stories that do a good job of pulling on christian themes:
Metaworld Chronicles
Hellsing

I think even some games pull what might have been an old aesthetic (Warhammer 40k?)

Though there are lots stories that build a straw-mac-religious-organization antagonist. Don't do that. Stories like that are not only trite but also come across like a propaganda piece.

 

[Lloyd]

Christian mythology and themes are just history and reality. All good works are inherently Christian.

 

[Jemini]

There are some stories that do a good job of pulling on christian themes:
Metaworld Chronicles
Hellsing

I think even some games pull what might have been an old aesthetic (Warhammer 40k?)

Though there are lots stories that build a straw-mac-religious-organization antagonist. Don't do that. Stories like that are not only trite but also come across like a propaganda piece.

That's the thing about Vampire lore. Thanks to Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, Christian themes are inextricably linked to Vampire lore. I think Japanese writers have gone the farthest with unlinking the two, and even then you often see the echoes of Christian aspects and/or themes still showing through just a bit.

EDIT: Ok, Dungeons and Dragons also does a fairly decent job of unlinking them, but most of that is because they've generalized the Christian aspects to be replaced with "holy water or any good-aligned deity's holy symbol." But even then, holy water and the wearing of holy symbols around one's neck are distinctly Christian practices, so this just means the echoes of Christianity have left their mark on D&D as a whole.