A reader on Reddit recently asked what role religion plays in modern fantasy.
The question stuck with me, because the honest answer is not much, and that’s strange.
Fantasy is full of churches, gods, prophecies, cults, and sacred texts. What it mostly isn’t full of is faith.
Religion in modern fantasy usually functions as worldbuilding, politics, horror, or symbolism. Characters rarely believe in a way that feels sincere and grounded. Genuine belief is often treated as manipulation, fanaticism, or naïveté.
That absence feels odd in a genre perfectly suited to asking religious questions.
This post is about why that absence exists, what writers like Lewis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Sanderson
are doing differently, and how I’ve tried to approach religion in the Ravenglass Universe.
Lewis, Tolkien, and Two Different Christianities
The two writers most often grouped together as the foundational Christians of modern fantasy were actually doing very different things with faith.
C. S. Lewis wrote apologetics through fantasy quite openly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia
is an evangelistic project. Aslan is a Christ figure in plain sight, and the books are designed as theological storytelling. Lewis wasn’t subtle about this and didn’t want to be. He believed fiction could carry the gospel, and the Narnia books came directly out of that belief.
J. R. R. Tolkien approached religion differently. Tolkien was a lifelong Catholic, but he rejected allegory. Rather than writing doctrine into Middle-earth directly, he let faith shape the world’s moral atmosphere.
Mercy matters. Pity matters. Bilbo sparing Gollum ultimately saves the world. The longing for the West, the fall of Númenor, the sudden turn from despair to hope. None of this is Catholic in the obvious way Aslan is Christian. But the worldview underneath it clearly is.
That distinction shaped much of what followed.
Lewis uses fantasy in service of faith. Tolkien lets faith shape the texture of the world itself. Both take belief seriously. Both assume that what people believe about the divine matters.
Modern fantasy often doesn’t.
Four Modes of Religion in Modern Fantasy
Modern fantasy tends to approach religion in four broad ways.
The first is religion as worldbuilding. This is probably the dominant mode in epic fantasy. Steven Erikson fills the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen
books with gods, ascended beings, cults, and ancient powers, but the religious systems mostly explain how the world operates. The focus is cosmology rather than belief.
Brandon Sanderson often does something similar. His magic systems function almost like theology rendered mechanically. The systems are important and deeply tied to the plot, but they’re rarely about ordinary people wrestling with faith itself.
The second mode is religion as political power.
N. K. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._K._Jemisin
uses religion in The Broken Earth Trilogy as part of imperial control. Mark Lawrence does similar things in Book of the Ancestor. In these stories, the institutions matter more than the underlying belief. Religion becomes another mechanism of authority.
The third mode is religion as horror.
A lot of modern fantasy still sits under the shadow of H. P. Lovecraft. Divine knowledge becomes dangerous knowledge. The sacred becomes corrupting or alien. Writers like Tamsyn Muir use religious imagery to create unease, decay, and metaphysical wrongness.
The fourth is religion as symbolic structure.
This is where writers use systems like tarot, alchemy, mythic cycles, or kabbalah as narrative architecture rather than literal faith. Italo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Calvino
The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a classic example, using tarot spreads to organise narrative patterns and meaning.
None of these approaches is wrong. They’ve all produced brilliant books.
But very little of it is about lived belief. That’s the missing piece.
Modern fantasy often treats religion as institution, system, or symbol, while sidestepping the inner experience of faith itself.
Sanderson’s Mormon Themes and Hidden Theology
The biggest modern exception is probably Brandon Sanderson.
Sanderson is openly Mormon and has talked many times about how his faith shapes his fiction. What makes his work interesting is that he rarely writes religion directly into the foreground. Instead, Mormon theology shapes the deep structure of the worlds.
One of the clearest examples is the Mormon idea of eternal progression. In LDS theology, humanity can move toward divinity through growth, trial, discipline, and moral choice.
That idea appears everywhere in Sanderson’s fiction.
Vin ascends in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistborn_series
. Sazed follows. Characters in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stormlight_Archive
gain power through moral development, knowledge, and self-mastery. Human beings move upward rather than being punished for reaching too high.
That creates a very different type of fantasy thanTolkien.
In Tolkien’s Catholic-influenced cosmology, reaching for divine power usually leads to corruption. Sauron falls through it. Saruman falls through it. The Númenóreans fall through it. Galadriel’s defining moment is refusing ultimate power when it’s offered.
Sanderson’s worlds often move the opposite way. Progress toward the divine is treated as the goal rather than the temptation.
Another recurring pattern is revelation through rediscovery.
Characters constantly recover forgotten truths. Ancient systems become understood again piece by piece. Knowledge unfolds progressively rather than arriving complete. That mirrors the Mormon idea of continuing revelation, where truth remains open rather than closed.
Put together, Sanderson’s fiction becomes deeply religious in structure without becoming apologetic. It’s the Tolkien approach applied to Mormon theology instead of Catholicism.
Building Religion in the Ravenglass Universe
Thinking about how other writers handled religion made me more deliberate about it in my own work.
The ravenglass universe/tag/ravenglass-universe spans multiple eras over roughly a thousand years, and one of the recurring questions underneath the stories is what people believe and what those beliefs cost them.
The dominant religion is the worship of Creation, the force underlying reality itself.
Creation isn’t a god in the traditional fantasy sense. It isn’t a person. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t intervene directly. It’s closer to a metaphysical principle than a deity.
People who worship Creation aren’t praying to a being who answers them directly. They’re orienting themselves toward what they see as the underlying order of existence.
At the centre of the faith stand the Nameless Four. Their lack of names is deliberate. The idea comes partly from apophatic theology and mystical traditions which hold that the divine can’t truly be contained in language.
That idea shaped the Four.
They’re known through symbols, actions, and associations rather than names or fixed identities.
The religion changes dramatically across different eras of the setting.
In the imperial age of the The Ravenglass Chronicles, worship of the Four becomes institutionalised through temples, priesthoods, and political hierarchy.
In Ravenglass Legends, especially in Wiete, belief becomes more localised and practical. Household rites. Seasonal customs. Folk traditions the Empire might consider heretical if it paid attention.
By the time of Guild of Assassins, much of the organised structure has collapsed, but individual faith often becomes more intense because it’s no longer reinforced institutionally.
What mattered to me was allowing belief to feel real to the characters without the books confirming or denying the truth behind it.
When characters pray, they mean it.
Some believe they receive answers. Others lose faith entirely. Some interpret coincidence as divine intervention. Others see silence.
I didn’t want the worldbuilding to settle the argument for the reader. The /uncertainty matters.
Tarot in Fantasy Fiction and the Ravenglass Chronicles
The Ravenglass Chronicles is built around the Major Arcana of the tarot.
Twenty-two novellas. Twenty-two cards. From The Magician to The World.
Kat’s journey loosely follows the Fool’s Journey, moving from innocence through transformation toward integration and self-knowledge.
Part of the appeal was structural.
The Major Arcana creates a shape without forcing the story into a conventional three-act framework. The cards carry archetypal weight even when readers don’t consciously recognise it. A book linked to The Tower naturally carries a sense of upheaval and collapse whether the card itself appears or not.
The tarot also has a long literary history beyond fortune telling.
Calvino is the clearest example, but writers like Charles Williams, Robert Graves, and John Crowley all used esoteric systems as narrative structure.
What interests me most now is that the tarot exists outside the awareness of the characters themselves.
Nobody in the story lays out cards or discusses the Arcana. The structure exists for the reader rather than the world.
That creates an interesting split.
The tarot shapes the narrative.
Why This Matters
Part of this is simply about storytelling.
Religion remains one of the deepest motivators in human history. Characters who genuinely believe in something beyond themselves often make different choices, accept different sacrifices, and carry different fears from characters who treat religion as background decoration.
Fantasy loses something when belief becomes purely aesthetic.
But there’s also a broader reason.
Fantasy is uniquely suited to religious questions because fantasy worlds can negotiate metaphysics directly. Realist fiction has to take a position on whether God exists. Fantasy can create worlds where belief is justified, mistaken, partially true, culturally constructed, or permanently unknowable.
That uncertainty interests me far more than certainty ever could.
In the Ravenglass Universe, some believers are vindicated. Others are crushed. Most exist somewhere in the middle, with faith and doubt running alongside each other.
That isn’t a flaw in the worldbuilding. It’s the point.
Artwork by Covers by Christian.
