Crystal Dragon Jesus

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A fantasy-related trope that /tg/ appropriated from it's collective sleep paralysis demon, Crystal Dragon Jesus is a fictional system of belief that boils down to an RL religion (usually Abrahamic one) with serial numbers filed off. Overwhelming majority of them opt for aping Catholicism, with I Can't Believe It's Not Islam being the second most popular flavor.

This is done for plethora of reasons:

  • It creates a healthy distance from an RL religion that inspired it and it's (occasionaly quite rabid and willing to a little book burning) followers;
  • It allows to take only the good ideas and leave the bad ones at the door; as an example, you'd be hard-pressed to find a fantasy setting, D&D or otherwise, that doesn't have a Deity of Light and Justice who's whole shtick is healing the sick, helping the downtrodden and having grand cathedrals, holy men and virtuous knightly orders dedicated to him (almost always him and very occasionaly her or it), but settings that actually feature abuse of power, religious persecution and televangelists are about as common as a Japanese that understands the difference between a nun and a miko;
  • It skips doing actual research into history, tenets and underlying theology of the faith you're copying, like aforementioned Japan-endemic conflation of nuns and shrine maidens, with the most notorious nuance they tend to ignore being that nuns are supposed to be chaste and aren't allowed to be on a prowl for dick like Shinto priestesses.

Examples

  • Ironclaw: The Church of S'Allumer is a Crystal Dragon Jesus-religion to the point it even has heterodoxies and heresies based on actual doctrinal disputes of historical Catholicism.
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Oh, boy... you got an hour?
    • Bahamut and Pelor both have varying levels of Christianity to their basic church.
    • The entire Dragonlance pantheon is based on Mormon theology.
    • Al-Qadim is ruled over by a Crystal Dragon Islam faith.
    • Saint Cuthbert is a Greyhawk deity based on an actual Catholic saint.
    • Eberron has the Church of the Silver Flame, which is strongly based on both positive and negative elements of Christanity.
    • The Church of the Triad in the Forgotten Realms is a faith that worships Tyr, Torm and Ilmater simulanteously, in a way that is reminiscent of Christian doctrine of God as The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit.
    • Ravenloft has the faiths of Ezra (Gothic Christianity with a female God/Jesus) and Hala (neopagans/wiccans disguised as Catholic Nuns).
    • Ptolus has the Church of Lothian, which is quite obviously Catholicism with the serial numbers filed off. The official, if now discredited, dogma that all other gods are false ones and actually demons in disguise, the god being a mortal who became a god after death, said ascension coming as a result of death by crucifixion... the holy symbol of Lothian is basically a Celtic cross (a cross with a circle around the conflux of the arms) with a depiction of Lothian crucified on top, as is the most common depiction of a Christian cross.
    • Brancalonia has the Creed of the Calender, not!Catholicism complete with veneration of saints and a powerful patriarch ruling a holy city, which is just one sect of the New Doctrine that worships the Ternal Father.
  • Pathfinder: Golarion has two major examples. Iomedae, patron goddess of paladins, is more Crystal Dragon Jeanne d'Arc than Jesus, but her church has a distinct flavor of medieval Christian chivalric orders and they refer to their holy wars as crusades. There's also Sarenrae - she herself is closer to a cross between Pelor (Neutral Good deity of healing and the sun) and Eilistraee (beautiful and benevolent goddess with special interests in redemption and graceful swordplay) than she is to any real-world divinity, although she has common areas of concern with Apollo and Mithra. However the aesthetic of her faithful is solidly Crystal Angel Islam, with minarets, dervishes, calls to prayer, a Hashshashin-equivalent, and, at least for the clergy, abstention from alcohol. (Probably because her worship is most popular and influential in Golarion's equivalent of the Middle East.)
  • Warhammer 40,000 has obvious Roman Catholic trappings to both the Ecclesiarchy and the Adeptus Mechanicus.
    • Greater Good is a rare non-Abrahamic example of Crystal Dragon Confucianism.
  • In 7th Sea, the Vaticine Church, Objectionist, and Ussuran Orthodox Churches stand in for Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Russian Orthodoxy in Theah, a swashbuckling, sorcerous version of medieval Europe. The Vaticine Church also subtly incorporates a few elements of Islam as well. Avalon, the local version of England, even has its version of the Anglican church.
  • World of Darkness:
    • Vampire: The Requiem has the Lancea et Sanctum, which is literally the Abrahamic faiths reinterpreted by Vampires, and bitterly opposing the Circle of the Crone, which is vampire neo-paganism.
    • In Mage: The Awakening, the Exarch known as The Father is essentially a dark and twisted version of the Christian God, and his Ministry was founded more or less as an attempt to reconcile Christianity with the reality of the Exarchs. Likewise, the Guardians of the Veil have a Jesus-figure called the Hieromagus, the one mage who will prove immune to Paradox and lead Awakened society to enlightenment.
  • In RuneQuest, Glorantha's Rune of Death, which symbolizes the sword of Humakt, God of Death, and thusly terrifies the undead, is a cross.
  • Anima: Beyond Fantasy has the Church of Abel, complete with a crucifixion (though this guy didn't come back), and purge (which continues to some extent) against anyone who isn't 100% human. The closer to the setting's present day one gets, the more tenuous the parallel becomes but it doesn't disappear completely.
  • In Fading Suns, the Universal Church of the Celestial Sun is very similar to the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Churches, in fact the Prophet Zebulon was a priest of those of those faiths, historians aren't sure which. It even has analogues of the Templars, the Inquisition, and Protestants.
  • In the Iron Kingdoms setting, the Church of Morrow is clear analogue for Christianity, especially Catholicism: It descends from a preexisting religion via a saviour-prophet (Morrow), and still worships that religion's god (or at least claims to), has saints (Ascended), a Vatican-equivalent, an emphasis on charity and generosity, and even Western-style Warrior Monks (the Precursor Knights).
  • Magic: The Gathering has the Church of Serra (which worships a deified female wizard) on one plane, and the Church of Avacyn (which worships a female warrior-Jesus angel) on Innistrad. Meanwhile, Ravnica is home to the Orzhov Syndicate, who are basically Catholic Mafioso Necromancers who worship greed.
  • In GURPS Alchemical Baroque, The Architecturalists and the Horologicalists, the two dominant religions of the “Known Lands,” share a common (vague) root and both believe in "a single, transcendent, vaguely imagined God"; they stand in for Protestant and Catholic Christianity respectively.
    • GURPS Banestorm, on the other hand, completely averts this trope by straight-up teleporting Christianity and Islam to the setting of Yrth.
  • Trudvang has the Tenet of Nid, a religion centered around Gave, the one true, almighty, and all-knowing god who freed the Viranns from slavery and claimed them as his favored people. Since then they've been busy spreading the faith and converting people, through bloody crusades if necessary. They even have a female devil, Smaug Simag.
  • Victoriana has these in spades, being just the Victorian Era but on a fantasy version of Earth. Aluminat is Christianity, Sons of David are Jews, Followers of the Word are Muslims, Brahmanism is Hinduism, and Boddhism is Buddhism.

The Trope

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