Fictional religions often lack the depth and complexity of real-world faiths because they overlook key characteristics like syncretism, ritualization, materiality, and lived practice, which are crucial for creating believable and immersive worlds.
Mind Map
Click to expand
Click to explore the full interactive mind map • Zoom, pan, and navigate
Religion is a big part of the world
building and storytelling in a lot of
fictional universes. Think the Fman's
prophetic religion in Dune, the complex
pantheon in the Elder Scrolls series, or
the goddess worship in The Legend of
Zelda. But in a lot of these stories,
the religions feel more like set
dressings than something people actually
live and breathe. For example, let's
look at the religions in the Game of
Thrones series, which has always left me
wishing for a bit more depth. George RR
Martin wrote a bunch of competing
religions into his story. the nameless
old gods of the north, the fiery lord of
light from across the sea, and of course
the faith of the seven, the dominant
religion in much of Westeros. The faith
of the seven is presented like a copy
and paste of the medieval Catholic
church in Europe. You have a unified
hierarchical clergy, the high septin
sitting at the top like the pope, and a
network of septs across the continent
like a network of dascese. And that's
not a coincidence. Martin himself has
said in interviews that he modeled the
faith of the seven after the Catholic
Church. And in both the books and the
show, this creates a religion that feels
coherent and grounded, which works for
the kind of political storytelling that
Martin wants to tell. But religion in
the series also feels a little too tidy.
Each culture basically has one god or
pantheon neatly mapped onto their
geographical region. Now, that makes it
easy for us to follow as viewers and
readers, but compared to the chaotic
reality of real world religions, it
feels thin. Real world religions
fracture. They absorb bits and pieces
for their neighbors. Beliefs and
practices shift from one culture to the
next. They can shift from one village to
the next. And the official rules,
doctrines, and mythologies often have
little to do with what ordinary people
actually do with their religion on the
ground. Just look at the Catholic
Church, which is a lot more complex in
reality than its fictional counterpart.
You not only have variations across
cultures like the differences between
Catholicism in Ireland versus the
Philippines versus Mexico, but you also
have political disputes like
conservative and progressive Catholics
debating climate action or women's
ordination. There's also folk Catholic
movements like the devotion to Santa
Muerte in Mexico, which official
Catholic authorities have outright
rejected. And in other cases, Catholic
symbols and saints have been woven into
entirely new religions like Haitian
vodu. And these are just examples that
exist within one global religion. Now, I
get it. Most authors and showrunners are
not trying to perfectly recreate the
messy reality of religion in the world
building. They have other priorities.
You know, move the plot forward, flesh
out the characters, evoke a certain
design language. But here's the thing.
Even in the more elaborate fictional
religions, the ones with rich histories,
multiple factions, and detailed rituals,
these still tend to miss some of the
core characteristics of real world
religions. And those missing pieces are
a gold mine for making a fictional
universe feel alive, complex, and
grounded. So, in this video, I want you
to imagine that you're building a
religion for your fantasy or sci-fi
world. And I'm going to give you four
things that every single real world
religion does, but most fictional world
religions miss. Number one, synratism,
which can mean something like religious
mixing, assimilation, or hybridity. If
you want your fictional religion to feel
real, show how it absorbs and adapts the
cultures around it. In the past,
synratism was often imagined as two
discrete religious systems merging and
creating something new, almost like two
plants crossbreeding into a hybrid. But
more recent scholarship sees it as an
ongoing process of people negotiating
with the cultures around them. In late
Roman Egypt, for example, when
Christianity first started making its
way into the region, indigenous
Egyptians shaped it, reshaped it, and
made it their own. Egyptian Christian
villagers might have kept an ancestral
altar in their home while at the same
time displaying a cross over their
doorway. On Sunday they might have
participated in church liturgy, while on
Monday they might have visited a local
oracle for divination and guidance or
maybe even celebrate a traditional
festival that used to honor an Egyptian
god but now honors a Christian saint.
This amulet here is another example of
synratism from the ancient
Mediterranean. It's a bronze disc dating
from around the 3rd century CE
discovered in Asia Minor or modernday
Turkey. Now, this is the best drawing I
could find, so let me walk you through
it cuz it looks kind of messy. On one
side, you can see the Greek moon goddess
and sun god and a lion trampling a
demonic figure while attacking the evil
eye. The Jewish and Christian
liturggical phrase, "Holy, holy, holy,"
is squeezed above and between the gods.
On the other side, you can see a saint
on a horse spearing the same demon while
an angel stands before him. A Greek
inscription is around the edge. Angel
Arof, flee, O hated one. Solomon pursues
you. So here we see a mix of Grecoman
religion and Jewish and Christian
symbolism. Apparently someone in late
Roman Anatolia saw this particular blend
of divine figures, lurggical phrases,
and protective imagery as an especially
efficacious way to protect themselves
from harm. So what religion did this
person follow? Whoever commissioned or
wore this amulet? Well, pinning down
their exact religious affiliation might
be impossible. And maybe it's beside the
point. Throughout the history of
religion, no one has ever received a
religion fully formed. Scribes,
artisans, holy men, priests, mothers,
shepherds, all people are constantly
tinkering with religious materials,
picking up new symbols, adapting
rituals, and mixing traditions in ways
that make sense in their own homes,
workshops, and local shrines. You see a
similar process in Haitian voodoo, which
I already mentioned. Enslaved Africans
in the Caribbean brought with them a
wide range of West and Central African
religious traditions. Under colonial
rule in Haiti, they were pressured,
sometimes violently, to adopt
Catholicism. But they didn't simply
abandon their traditional beliefs and
practices. They adapted them. For
example, Catholic saints were identified
with voodoo spirits called law like the
Virgin Mary being identified with Azil
donour or St. Patrick being identified
with Dmbala. Catholic feast days also
became occasions for voodoo ceremonies.
These are acts of brickage, a term from
the anthropologist Claude Levy Strauss,
meaning the creative reuse and
recombination of whatever cultural
materials are at hand. Bricklage is
basically the French word for
do-it-yourself. So, synratism can be
seen as DIY religion, an ongoing,
unfinished, and sometimes contested
process in which people make decisions
about which practices to keep, which
practices to adopt, and which ones to
reject, often in dialogue with or in
defiance of religious authorities. Okay,
I know that's a lot to throw at you if
all you wanted was make my fantasy
religion more realistic. But you don't
need to replicate an entire religious
studies PhD seminar to make synretatism
work in your world building. Start
small. Give a village a harvest festival
that began in honor of one god, but is
now dedicated to another god. Show a
sacred symbol that means one thing in
one culture, but has been adopted into a
completely different culture. Let your
characters casually borrow or rework a
prayer from a neighboring city, or carry
an amulet from an old religion while
following a new one. Even a few details
like this can make your fictional
religion feel lived in, layered, and
synchretatized. Next, I'd love to see
more attention paid to ritual or
ritualization, which I'll define
shortly. In a lot of fantasy and sci-fi
series, it's abundantly clear that the
writers have poured enormous effort into
creating grand mythologies in their
fictional religion. The sweeping
creation stories, the rivalries between
different gods in the pantheon, or the
apocalyptic prophecies. Examples would
include the Wheel of Times detailed
cosmology of the creator and the dark
one, or the extremely elaborate god lore
in the Elder Scrolls games. But here's
the thing. In real life, most religious
practitioners are not walking around
thinking about those myths. Okay? Yes,
myths and religious stories are very
important to religion. They explain why
holidays happen, justify certain
practices, and are used for moral
teachings. Just as a quick example,
almost every part of the Hajj pilgrimage
to Mecca is tied to a story from Islamic
tradition. Like how the stoning of the
devil ritual symbolizes Abraham
rejecting the temptations of Satan. But
for most people, lore, mythology, or
stories fade into the background of
daily life. They are far less immediate
than the prayers, offerings, and
routines that actually structure their
religious practice. In other words,
religious practitioners are far more
concerned with what they do than with
the finer points of theology or
mythology. And I get it truly. I love
mythological lore as much as the next
nerd. I still get chills from the
creation myth cutscene in the Ocarine of
Time in all its original N64 glory. But
what I'd really love to see is writers
pouring as much creative energy into
rituals as they do into sweeping
creation stories. Spoilers ahead for
Apple TV's Foundation series, but I was
legitimately impressed by the portrayal
of a pilgrimage in season 1, episode 8.
So, in this episode, the clone emperor
discards his protective nanotech and
walks a blazing desert pilgrimage known
as the spiral, which ends at a cave
called the mother's womb, where pilgrims
believe they'll receive a vision. Now, I
won't spoil too much, but the
showrunners came up with believable
rules about how you're allowed to finish
the pilgrimage. And when the emperor
finally completes the journey, his
return sparks a political and religious
fallout. What I really liked about this
episode was not only the creativity of
the ritual, but how the showrunners used
ritual to shape the characters and the
politics. It wasn't really a flashy
spectacle, but it was embodied, raw,
symbolic, and it drove the plot forward.
I think part of the reason why we see so
much focus on sweeping mythological lore
and fictional worlds comes from how
western culture has been conditioned to
think about religion in the first place.
We are so conditioned to think of
religion as essentially something
grounded in sacred texts and the myths
and doctrines recorded in those texts.
That assumption runs deep in societies
shaped by Christianity and especially
Protestant Christianity where authority
has long been tied to solos scriptorra.
When that's your starting point, it's
easy to treat a religion's text as the
religion itself and to imagine that if
you can summarize what is written in
that text, you've captured the essence
of that tradition. But in many
traditions, sacred texts are really not
all that central. There's more of a
focus on orthopraxy or correct practices
rather than orthodoxy or correct
teachings. So, what can an author do
with this? The anthropologist Katherine
Bell argued that it's not really useful
to think of ritual as a category of
behavior. After all, that one-term
ritual can apply to everything from
state funerals to Buddhist prayer
wheels, from a Passover seder to a
baseball player's batting stance. It's
an impossibly huge category of behavior.
Instead, she argues it's better to think
of ritual as a process. The process of
ritualization. Ritualization is a
process of transforming ordinary actions
like walking, eating, or pouring water
into something special, which can be
done through repetition, symbolism, or a
formalized structure. You name it.
There's a lot of ways to transform an
ordinary action into something
extraordinary. It's not the bare act
itself that makes something a religious
ritual. It's the way it's framed,
repeated, or set apart. Like a
procession is just a bunch of people
walking together until you walk together
in a certain order on a certain day with
certain objects and words. Like the
processions you see walking through the
old city of Jerusalem around Easter. In
real world religions, this process of
ritualization is everywhere. The
Eucharist ritualizes eating bread and
drinking wine. At a Shinto shrine,
worshippers ritualize handwashing before
entering a shrine. This separates
ordinary space from the sacred space of
the shrine. So, what I'd love to see in
more fictional universes is more
ritualization. Not only creativity in
inventing the rituals, but stories where
ceremonies, initiations, and seasonal
festivals are given the same narrative
weight as a creation myth. Next, your
world building should pay attention to
religious materiality, religious stuff.
Like I said earlier, western frameworks
are often biased to think of religion
fundamentally as a set of beliefs,
stories or moral codes, especially those
written down in texts. But religion also
involves physical materials, temples and
shrines, incense and candles, statues,
figurines and icons, special clothing,
holiday foods, prayer beads, and prayer
wheels. Scholars in recent decades have
been paying a lot of attention to
religious materiality. Studying how
religion is expressed, maintained and
experienced through physical things. And
they've been doing this in part because
people overfocus on texts and beliefs.
So for example, consider Hindu
devotional statues of gods. The
anthropologist Fenita Shinha found that
in Singapore, shop owners selling
statues of Hindu gods deliberately avoid
products marked made in China,
preferring ones that are made in India.
For many Singaporean Hindus, India
remains central in their minds as the
most legitimate and preferred site for
all things Hindu. And entrepreneurs in
Singapore respond to this by sourcing
devotional items from India. It's just
good business sense. And from this one
example, we can learn a ton about a
diaspora religious community. In
Singapore, Hindu devotional statues
carry layers of meaning tied to where
and how they're made. In other words, a
single purchase at a shop counter can
reflect centuries of tradition,
contemporary identity politics, and the
economics of religious life at once.
Even for religious traditions that claim
to have less focus on materiality,
there's still a whole lot of material
culture if you know where to look.
American evangelicalism, for example,
isn't usually associated with ornate
cathedrals, incense, or clerical
vestments like Catholic or Orthodox
Christianity. But evangelicalism in the
1990s definitely had its own material
culture. illustrated children's books,
WWJD bracelets, Salty the singing song
book cassette tapes, and yes, Veggie
Tales. For worldbuilders, especially
costume designers, prop makers, and
visual storytellers, thinking in terms
of material religion can develop a
unique and believable design language
for your setting. If your fictional
culture has religious beliefs, what
physical objects embody them? What
fabrics, jewelry, tools, or
architectural details carry religious
significance? When a viewer sees a
character holding prayer beads or
spinning a prayer wheel or putting on a
specific garment, they instantly learn
something about that world's religion
without a single line of exposition.
Another thing I rarely see in fictional
universes is something that scholars
call lived religion. This is how
religion is practiced, experienced, and
expressed by ordinary people rather than
official spokespersons. So, for example,
if I asked you, what do Christians do
and believe? You might think of the
official items on the checklist. Go to
some sort of communal worship or
lurggical experience on Sundays. Read
the Bible. Pray to God, usually
envisioned as a trinity, engage in
rituals like the Eucharist and baptism,
and celebrate holidays like Easter and
Christmas. Of course, there's a lot of
variation across the different branches
of Christianity. But these are some of
the textbook answers, and they're not
wrong. They're just not the whole story.
In real life, people's religious worlds
often don't follow textbook definitions
because people fold all kinds of
everyday habits, folk traditions, and
personal rituals into their religious
lives. You can see this in the rising
popularity of manifesting and essential
oils among American Christians.
Manifesting is the idea that by focusing
your thoughts and visualizing a desired
outcome and maybe even speaking it out
loud, you can attract it into your life.
A concept that has roots in new age
spirituality and the self-help movement.
Essential oils, on the other hand, are
concentrated plant extracts that are
also popular in the New Age movement.
These are not exactly official Christian
practices, and some Christian
authorities have spoken out against
them. Like this recent article from a
Christian magazine saying that
manifesting has infiltrated American
Christian culture. In the early 2000s,
bunches of instructional books were
published aimed at Christian audiences,
praising the biblical significance of
essential oils. Many claim that scenting
one's Bible study with frankincense or
sandalwood could deepen the experience
of the text. And manifesting, often
framed in secular self-help language,
has been reinterpreted by many
Christians as aligning your thoughts
with God's will or praying with
expectation and speaking blessings into
being. None of this shows up in a
catechism or a doctrinal statement, but
for the Christians doing these
practices, they consider them as part of
their Christian life. And these
practices don't need to be logically
consistent with official Christian
teachings. They just need to work. And
by work, I don't mean stand up to
theological scrutiny. I mean, does this
ritual, object, or action make my life
better? Does it help heal my cousin's
illness or get me that promotion at
work? The scholar Robert Orssey gives
another example. American Catholics at
St. Lucy's Church in the Bronx would
sometimes bring home bottles of water
from a neighborhood shrine built to look
like the grotto at Lord in France, even
though they knew perfectly well it was
just New York City tap water. Meredith
Magcguire, a leading scholar in the
field of lived religion, says, "We are
mistaken in our expectation of cognitive
consistency between individuals religion
as institutionally framed and a person's
actual religion as lived. It may be only
intellectuals who care about rational
coherence in religious ways of thinking,
perceiving, and acting." After nearly 40
years of talking to people about their
individual religions, I have the
impression that only a small and
unrepresentative proportion struggle to
achieve tight consistency among their
wide-ranging beliefs, perceptions,
experiences, values, practices, and
actions. I very rarely see examples of
lived religion in fiction. Now, we hear
a lot about what official sources say
about a religion, but I want to see
authors and showrunners deciding what a
world's farmers, merchants, and street
vendors actually do with that religion
on the ground. You know, the little
rituals, the personal priorities, the
things that might make the elites roll
their eyes, but that everybody does
anyway. The difference between a flat
schematic religion and one that feels
real often comes down to these
unofficial, improvised, and deeply
personal ways that people actually do
their religion in their daily lives. So,
those are just a few examples of what I
rarely ever see in religions and
fictional universes. Again, I'm not
expecting an author or showrunner to
replicate a bunch of religious studies,
theory, and method in their stories.
That would be boring. As much as I love
religious studies, theory, and method,
but these are features of religion that
I see all over the world and all
throughout history. And it would be
really cool to see some worldbuilders
step up and do something very different
with their fictional religion. And
honestly, this kind of critical
thinking, asking why things look the way
they do, what's being shown, and what's
being left out, is not just useful when
analyzing religion, it's just as
important when we're looking at the real
world, especially when it comes to the
news. That's why I've been using ground
news. Ground News is the thing that you
wish you had the time and energy to do
every time you scrolled through the
headlines on your social feeds. Having
the ability to compare coverage across
the political spectrum, track who's
reporting what and how they're framing
the story. But instead of spending your
whole day doing that, Ground News does
it for you. Ground News is a website and
app that aggregates a bunch of different
outlets covering a particular story,
then pairs that story with a quick
visual breakdown of the political bias,
factuality, and ownership of the sourc's
reporting. Right now, one of the top
stories is about the US defense
secretary, Pete Hgsth, reposting a video
featuring an evangelical pastor saying
women should not be allowed to vote.
Here, Ground News has aggregated
literally hundreds of outlets covering
the story. Scroll down here and you can
see the bias distribution chart. Most of
the coverage is coming from the center
with about a third coming from
left-leaning sources and a small
minority from right-leaning sources.
Scroll down again and here's the
factuality chart. The overwhelming
majority of these sources have been
rated as highly factual. And here is the
ownership chart showing you who owns
these sources, including wealthy private
owners, private equity, or media
conglomerates. Ground News also enables
you to easily compare headlines. The
right-wing Washington Times reads,
"Heath reposts a video on social media
featuring pastors saying women shouldn't
be allowed to vote, while the
left-leaning New Republic infers
Hegsth's intention. It sure looks like
Pete Hegsth doesn't think women should
vote." One of my favorite features is
their blind spot feed. It highlights
stories that are heavily covered on one
side of the political spectrum, but
ignored on the other side. So, if a
story is blowing up in right- leaning
media, but barely mentioned on the left,
or vice versa, you'll see it right there
in the feed. It's a quick way to check
what you're missing, and it can also
reveal a ton about what each side
considers to be newsworthy. Now, we
can't get rid of bias completely, but
Ground News gives you the tools to see
the bias, see the gaps, and understand
why some stories blow up in one media
bubble and vanish in another. If that
sounds like something you'd like to use,
head on over to ground.news/refor
scan the QR code here on screen to get
40% off their Vantage plan. Again,
that's ground.news/refor.
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
