Role of Clergy and the concept of Religious Consciousness/piety and Atheism

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The role of the clergy in victoria is a bit wierd, all they do is reduce consciousness by some insane amount for poor Pops (while likewise increasing it for wealthy and middling PoPs), and this applies even to people that do not share their faith, so a Catholic priest can potentially reduce the consciousness of say a Muslim or a Pagan. Anyway the whole consciousness thing is a bit strange.

Religious Consciousness/Piety
The main role of the clergy is that clergy PoPs have an effect on the religious consciousness of the population. Religious Consciousness is seperate stat from normal consciousness, as it reflects how important religion is to the PoP. Generally PoPs of consciousness 0 can be assumed to be agnostic and while not actually opposed to their religion show very little interest in such matters. PoPs of Religious consciousness 10 are fanaticly devoted to their religion and willing to suffer torture and death in it's name. The role of Religious consciousness is two fold, Firstly it effects what stand on religious issues the PoP takes.
PoPs of the state religion become Moralists at high religious consciousness, Pops of minorities become pluralist at high levels of religious consciousness. PoPs of low religious consciousness are generally secularised while pluralism tends to be held by those in the middle of the range. The key here is religiousness should only change quite slowly.
Secondly it affects how vulnrable the PoP is to conversion by priests of other religions and how much affect clergy have on the political consciousness of the PoPs aswell as how much their militancy will increase when the clergy develop revolt risk (not clergy cannot rebel as a class , instead they increase the militancy of all PoPs of their religion+ideology by 1X their religious consciousness).

As mentioned above, the clergy also have the ability to convert low consciousness PoPs of other faiths to their religion. The key here is numbers, the more clergy of a certain religion that are present, the faster they will convert. When the state religious policy is Moralism conversion of minorities to the state religion happens at double speed and conversion of majorities to minorities is halved, however as mentioned below moralism actually increases the religious consciousness of minorities as well as majorities, secularism and pluralism halve the rate of conversion though. The average religious consciousness of all PoPs of that religion in the province also increases the amount of converts gained by the clergy. Clergy do not have religious consciousness statistic themselves. Clergy should probably also have the ability to reduce the religious consciousness of other religion PoPs as a prelude to conversion. Converts have their religious consciousness imediatly set to 5 at point of conversion.

The clergy also increase the normal consciousness of all same religion PoPs that share the clergy's political ideology and reactionary, anarchist and communist clergy increase the militancy of moderates aswell as the consciousness and militancy of all who also share their alignment. However they reduce the consciousness of all PoPs that do not share their political alignment. The key here is religious consciousness, the higher the religious consciousness of a class, the more effect the clergy ideology will have on consciousness. Furthermore the consciousness of the clergy is added to the sum also, so the more concious the clergy is of political matters, the more he'll affect the consciosness of his Pops. The equation is as such...
Clergy Consciousness X religous consciousness of POP =effect on total consciousness. This represents the power of political religion of religious peoples. Naturally PoPs of religious consciousness 0 are immune to political religion either negitavely or positively.

In order to reduce the power of players to interfere endlessly in religious matters, the current system of tying clergy ideology to state ideology should be abolish. Clergy should be more effected by general trends in their congregations.

You cannot create clergy of anything but the state religion, however their should be an event that creates clergy PoPs of minority religion that makes them harder to convert to the majority religion and makes evangelical immigrant minorities a potential threat to religious orthodoxy unless sufficiant clergy are available for counter-conversion activities. Moralist nations that are not democratic should have the choice to forbid the establishment of the PoP with the following event.

Only happens if part ideology is moralist.
Large numbers of a religious minority in the nation are converting to a faith contrary to our own threatening conversion efforts, how should we respond?

a)Tolerate them- No further effect
b)Stop them with force!!!!!- Increases militancy +rel consciousness of PoPs of the religion
c)Create a seditious propoganda campaign against them- Increases Consciousness of PoPs of the religion

I need to go to bed now, I'll leave the stuff about atheism to the morning.

 

[OriginalRafiki]

I'm taking it that this is how you'd like things to be?

 

[King]

Although there are certain problems with how the clergy work in the game. They key thing we are missing here is the role the churches played in supporting many of the old regimes. Especially when faced with the threats from Godless communism and the like.

 

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Adressing Kings point.....

As well as the above I feel that clergy of a certain religion should always act politically as though they are of rel. consciousness 10, that is clergy of state religions are almost always moralists and clergy of minorities are almost always pluralists, this would mean that state religion clergy are likely to tend towards the alignment of parties that are Moralistic rather than those that are pluralisistic secularist or athiest.

This means that the relation of the party ideologies of the state towards religion affect how easily they attract clerical converts to their ideology, parties that promise to support the religious status quo will tend to gain the support of the clergy of dominant religions while parties that promise religious toleration will tend to attract the support of minority religion clergy. The religious policy of the available parties should be the main issue that clergy look to to decide ideology, therefore since conservative parties tend to be moralistic the majority of clergy will support them, unless their are moralistic alternatives to those parties.

Secondly I've decided that clergy of a certain ideology should actually reduce the religious consciousness of other ideologies at the same time as the reduce political consciousness, therefore their influence over those groups will wane and those political ideology groups, unless the drop in consciousness converts them to their political alignment of the clergy will adopt the secularised position and vote for secular and even athiest parties as they become alienated by the clerical establishment which is seen to oppose their ideological world veiw. This will tend to be liberals and expecially socialists but in the hypothetical situation when the clergy are largely seen a radical revolutionaries the conservatives can become anti-clerical too. Anti-clericalism and opposition to religion is seen in this sense as alienation at the clergy's percieved opposition to your ideological world veiw.

Clergy do have the ability to nullify the ability of clergy of different political veiws, meaning that if the clergy of ideologically split they can potentially have no political effect on the consciousness of their congregation whatsoever as their efforts cancel eachother out. Therefore being Moralist and adopting policies friendly to the clergy is a good way to sway the clergy ideology, which is uttely critical to mantaining the political loyalty of a very religious society, however this may create a polarised situation with the potential of elements hostile to the regime simply adopting a hostile veiw of religion aswell.

Athiest PoPs
When PoPs are of religious consciousness 0 and thier religious consciousness has still been falling for a long time, plus they have no been converted to another religion their is a possibility that they will abandon religion altogether and become athiest. Athiesm in this context is seen as the result of ideological alienation by the clergy over an extended period of time. Athiesm behaves exactly like any other religion in game terms and also has a religious consciousness of 5 upon conversion to athiesm same as with any other religion. The only real exception is that athiests veiw in religious terms (per game mechanics), athiesm as moralism, secularism as pluralism and pluralism as secularism. Therefore athiests of very high religious consciousness will adopt athiesm as an issue (God is Dead and others must be made so see this), athiests of consciousness of around five adopt secularism (so long as god is kept out of the public sphere I couldn't care about anything else) and atheists of a low consciousness adopt pluralism (why shouldn't people be free to openly practice any religon they want, it's not like God exists is it?).

Athiests have clergy too.
Athiests can also have 'clergy'. This represents prominant athiest thinkers, ideologues, demogogues and writers that push the athiest agenda and usually that of their political ideology as well. Per game mechanics they behave just like regular clerics, affecting the religious consciousness of athiest PoPs that is their anti-clerical consciousness effectively and making them harder for religious clergy to convert. Given that athiest communities are usually ideologically homogenous due to the fact they spawn from communities alienated by the clergy on basis of political alignment, the indroduction usually by event of athiest 'clergy' tends to alienate those of other ideologies due to the fact their work is usually highly ideological in nature and rendering those not of their alignment easily converted back to some brand of theism by theistic clergy or by the reconversion event (the opposite of the athiesm event, which converts athiest PoPs to the state religion). The athiest clergy try and define the dominant thinking and values of the athiest PoPs. This would tend due to party religious policies to be liberals and socialists, the only feasable situation of conservative athiests is in a situation when the clergy all appear to be raving revolutionaries opposed to the present order and religion is thus seen as dangerous radical nonsense. Athiest 'clergy' almost always have athiesm as a religious policy due to the 'counted as rel. conscisiousness 10 rule), and thus will tend to support parties that are athiest or at the very least secular, rather than pluralist and moralist parties (which would tend to favor socialists and liberals).

 

[OriginalRafiki]

I'm getting the feeling that you are putting quite a lot of emphasis on religion in a game (and a time period) where it really doesn't play that much of a deal?

 

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No religion did play a key influence on society and politics, expecially during the early era of the game and the victorian era saw the birth of political religion with Christian political parties bieng set up and the religious denomination coming down on ideological sides, typically conservative ones but occasionally more left wing veiws aswell. The Catholics and mainline protestants tended to favor conservativism while certain non-conformist protestant sects tended to be somewhat more socialistic and left-wing in their veiws. Indeed some people claim that the British labour party actually owes more to Methodism than it does to Marxism. Religion was a very big deal in the Victorian era, expecially politically, athough this would be reduced towards the end of the era reaching bottom low by the end of world war I. The Italian state's early history was marked by clashes with the Catholic Church and the Church actively worked to undermine the Italian state, by for instance banning Catholics from voting.

 

[OHgamer]

There is no denying the role of clergy in the actual history of the era. The problem is that in game the clergymen POPs play a relatively minor role in how the game is played and for the major GPs could almost be considered superfluous once the various culture techs are discovered that reduce their overall influence in society.

 

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Thing is that religion and the clergy could by no means be considered insignificant in any period covered by the game, their influence declined but it was still significant. I'd favor giving certain inventions, expecially Darwinism and maybe Marxism for socialist PoPs reduce the amount of influence religion has while a few inventions such a 'political relgion' should increase the influence of the clergy. Maybe their should be an entire religious tech tree for religious development throughout the victorian era, starting stuff like evangelican revival (making PoPs earlier to convert for clergy) and finally ending with stuff like post-darwinian thought as like the pinnacle of the religious tech tree, allowing the clergy to ofset some of the harmful effects of Darwinism.

 

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I've just had an idea, maybe some of the religion techs are keyed to ideology, so conservative clergy gain the Darwinian rebuttal invention which brings their influence up to pre-Darwinian levels, but without allowing them to gain research point, and Darwinian intergration for Liberal and Socialist PoPs allowing them to earn research points but without increasing their influence back to how it was. The possibilities are endless but I've got some ideas here (in rough chronalogical order).

1. Evangelical mission (all Christians and Muslims start with this tech)
2. Post-Enlightenment theology (increasing influence possible)
3. Liberal Theology (increases likely-hood of liberal clergy)
4. Socialist Theology (increases likely-hood of socialist clergy)
5. Post Darwinian Theology (effects mentioned above).

 

[OriginalRafiki]

IMHO, more emphasis on religion in the game would make it less fun, unless it was done in an utmost excellent manner.

One of the reasons I like Vicky so much compared to EU2 and *shudder* CK is that religion isn't particularly important compared to other stuff.

 

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The other stuff is still important, expecially since clergy tend to influenced by their congregations. The clergy start off with a tendancy to be conservative political ideology, but the liberal and socialist theology sets things on an equal footing. So a conservative regime actually doesn't want to advance beyond post-enlightenment religiously which makes sense. And anyway religion is more fun than spreadsheets and endless statistics isn't it?