Can Fantasy World Religion Have Social Aspects?

To hear a lot of gamers tell it, no, it cannot. In part, this is a position expressed in response to any suggestion that classes (like priests, clerics, etc.) might actually be recognizable social groups, or professions. The idea is, divine spells are only for the truly elect, the pious, who are worthy before the gods. The worst possible imposition, from this perspective, is that access to spells and other priestly powers is actually regulated by members of the priestly establishment. The idea that NPCs can affect your access to certain powers, or impact your untrammeled progress through class levels is anathema to some, despite the fact that these features were fully present in early iterations of fantasy RPGs (clerics and paladins being stripped of powers due to changing alignment, druids, monks, and assassins having to fight for a limited number of spots at the higher levels, etc.).

There is a certain set of players who think that no constraint on player agency - being charmed, being incapacitated or killed, having an idea or proposal turn out to be unworkable - is ever justified. Leaving that aside as an extreme position, there is a fairly widespread feeling that in certain situations, gods may punish recalcitrant followers by stripping them of powers. But that cannot be done by the god's mortal followers. No religious magnate, and certainly, to religious concilium, gets to decide what my character can or cannot do.

The notion of divine powers implicit in this position can ultimately be characterized as either vulgar polytheism, or vulgar Protestantism. Those who incline to the former conceive of gods as being very powerful NPCs with lots of hit points and powers, who can come down and fight your character if they decide they dislike her. According to the latter conception, on the other hand, gods are remote, disembodied crystallizations of ethical positions (or alignments), and they will act against characters who are not living up to, or backsliding from, their religious commitments. In this case, the punishment can be effected by the god who truly does "embody" those commitments, but not by the god's imperfect followers.

There is no room in either position for gods who act in mysterious ways, incomprehensible to most followers most of the time. There is likewise no room for gods that act through communities of worshipers. It's one thing to send down blue bolts from heaven to let a straying cleric know that you don't approve of his actions. It's another thing entirely to cause his superiors cut him off from the body of the faithful for the same offense. NPC priests are obviously doing it for selfish, impious reasons, and it's not fair.

'But how can a good God allow an evil cleric to cast spells in his name?'

Historically, of course, divine beings were seen as acting through organized groups of worshipers all the time. In religions centered on God's interventions in and through history, action through communities of the faithful (and occasionally, even infidels) were taken as the most potent evidence of his existence. In both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, ecclesiastical councils determined theological doctrine, what writings would be included in the scripture, and what roles priests ought to play with respect to laypeople. Translating this into FRPG terms, this meant that the councils, consisting largely of high Church officials, would get to decide what powers priests would possess. And for this reason, Church officers would be fully within their rights if they decided to excommunicate you - since your divine powers would be defined as such by the ecclesiastical community. This ecclesiastical community was no mere collection of self-interested NPCs, but the Bride of Christ - a material and social testament of the promise of eternal life. Naturally, theologically sophisticated attendees at ecclesiastical councils would not have dared claim that they were determining what God could or could not do. They claimed only that the best way available for forming a just community and living a good life was for the best-qualified people to make the best interpretation they could of truths revealed by a mysterious and all-powerful God.

Not everyone agreed with this interpretation. Millenarian sects tended to see the Bride of Christ as those 144,000 properly believing elect who would enter the Kingdom of Heaven during the coming Time of Tribulation. They saw the Church not as the Bride of Christ, but as the Whore of Babylon, run by self-serving prelates. But the point is, this was a decidedly marginal position in most Christian lands until the Reformation (and in many of them, after that as well). Until then, most thinking people would probably have agreed that while prelates could be corrupt and self-serving, on the whole, the ecclesiastical structure reflected divine will.

Much the same can be said about Islam. The key thing was the construction of the Umma - the community of believers, rather than (or on top of) the submission of the individual Muslim to the will of God. Until recently, students of conversion in Muslim lands spoke dismissively of surface conversions in e.g. Mongol khanates, where Sufi missionaries with heterodox beliefs nominally claimed lands for Islam, while allowing shamanistic practices to persist under an Islamic guise. As effectively argued by Devin Deweese, however,  the notion of "Actual Islam" as constituting a change of heart along the lines acceptable to Muslim jurists was a marginal position held by ibn Taimiyyah, who encouraged his followers to rise up against the Mongol overlords, (or an anachronistic, latter day vulgar Protestant position unwittingly internalized by scholars).   At the time, Muslim theologians regarded even nominal conversion by rulers, and the establishment of an Umma in distant lands, as already a proof that a divine miracle had taken place, because a solid basis for the expansion of Islam had been established.

In fact, even in polytheistic religions, which are ostensibly more represented in FRPG settings, a communal expression of the divine is highly evident. The Greek polis, often regarded as a secular community, was in its germ a religious community bound together by the worship of a genius loci (e.g. of Athena, the tutelary deity of Athens). The action of such a community as a community - e.g. an election of an arkhon by the body of citizens - was a quintessentially religious act: vox populi, vox dei, as the Romans recognized. The Chinese notion of tianming - the Mandate of Heaven - was of similar provenance. When All Under Heaven enter into open revolt, the rulers have lost the support of the celestial powers, who are using the popular uprising to reestablish order.

Ultimately, there are simply too many examples of gods acting through an imperfect society to dogmatically reject such a thing from happening in a game setting (as it is commonly done by those who insist that PCs must be socially rootless heroes who are completely insulated from society's actions). The refusal to entertain the notion that gods can act through imperfect vessels, and do so in the name of playing the long game, is rooted in a kind of vulgar Protestantism that mutated into the dominant mindset of modern scientism, suspicious as it was of the social aspects of knowledge-making. The key task for GMs is figuring out how to use these aspects creatively and fairly - which is the same imperative that ought to motivate good GMs in every aspect of world-building anyway.

Here are a few suggestions of ways in which gods can exhibit agency specifically through social groups. Existing game mechanics can make their actions easy to operationalize (and if necessary, to contest):

- When crowds gather, e.g. at public festivals or during crisis periods, they can become literally inspired and gain at least a modicum of magical power. This provides a handy in-game reason for people coming together in mob form, and it also allows GMs to break out of the sterile mentality that envisions commoners as inert fodder for heroes and villains.

- One specific aspect of this crowd magic could be a divine decision to punish mortals by first driving them mad. Call of Cthulhu is especially clever in describing the social impact of an Elder God's sudden appearance in a particular community. There is little reason why FRPGs can't also do this with various sorts of Dionysian cults.

- Campaigns can be organized around themes of pantheon formation. Gods select groups to effect or act through, and as these groups make alliances, gods form durable associations in the form of pantheons. Gods (and their followers) that get shut out of these alliances become defined as demons. The terms of the pantheon alliance define some gods (and followings) as being senior or junior partners. Later, these can be redefined as familial relationships (senior partners are parents, junior partners - children or younger siblings). As an interesting experiment, character classes can be defined as the followings of particular divine patrons. This seems aesthetically preferable to 'racial' gods, who would probably join such pantheons in an actually existing imperial polytheism of the type FRPGs usually assume: how many 'racial' gods were there in the Roman Empire (that did not quickly lose their racial status)?

- Gods can come together in partnership with communities, but these partnerships can also be dissolved. FRPGs often reproduce stories of deicide, but they often take the form of individual PCs slaying gods. What if the process was a truly social one, as whole groups, or at least factions within groups, cooperated in sidelining particular gods? There would be far more intrigue and far greater stakes to a deicide narrative than a simple boss fight on the 573rd level of the Abyss. A quick read through descriptions of ritual drownings, burnings, and demolition of gods in the historical literature demonstrates how evocative they would be for a game.

- As suggested above, gods could experiment with letting communities shape the nature of the divine magic that's accessible to them. Gods test mortals as to how they will make these decisions, whether they would grow ethically over time as a result of being able to make them, and whether they could correct mistakes about who can have access to such magic over the long term. Big debates about including arcane spells into the arsenal of religiously 'approved' magic could color whole campaigns and decisions about multi-classing. 

- A more 'monotheistic' version of the pantheon formation situation could be a case where a single god decides to set two sets of worshipers against one another, to see which one is more worthy. As a variant, a god might abandon worshipers for a group of barbarians seen thenceforth as a scourge. Perhaps it could come to the point where rival religious groups even convince the deity that it is in fact different people, and it develops multiple personality disorder.