"Are you ready for a (holy) war?"

Sorry for the header, but I just re-watched "Braveheart" again (yeah, I've seen it enough to use redundancies).  It's a sort of guilty pleasure, considering my love of history, but my Fantasist brain loves Mel for not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.  However, today's post is not about the perils of relying on Historical Fiction for your Trivial Pursuit victories.  Today is about faith and true believers. 

http://historyspaces.blogspot.com/2011/09/pope-urban-ii-first-crusade-kill-them.html

    One of the most common elements of the Fantasy genre is war.  I would guess that most modern Fantasy writers grew up playing D&D or the like, which for many people focuses on the "hack and slash" aspect of the game, with little true "role-playing" in evidence.  I would guess that it tends to color how we view these Medieval style worlds.  It doesn't help, of course, that dates memorized in History Class often related to famous battles.  In truth, fighting with each other has been one of the world's favorite pastimes regardless of species.  Tolerance seems to be a relatively newfangled term, especially when related to religion.  While the genre is much larger than my personal reading, I am surprised to have encountered so few Holy Wars in its pages.

    War is most commonly depicted in Fantasy as a tool of acquisition.  By having more land than the other guy, you are theoretically more powerful, so the bad guys or the good guys go slaughter a few neighbors (though the "good guys" do it because the "bad guys" are such bad guys).  I remember playing Risk on the computer in college and always playing black, so that when I won, the whole planet looked like one solid block .  While most modern fiction is not this simplistic, wars in them tend to be kicked off due to greed or avarice.  Many would suggest that these were the true motivations for the religious wars of the past, that faith was a simple way to control the people.  While I may agree to a certain extent, I think its a gross oversimplification of the situation.   

    Intolerance is an ancient practice (I'm trying to watch D.W. Griffith's film of the same name, but damn it's long), with lines most clearly drawn between faiths.  Uncounted cultures have attacked and repressed each other all over the world for the simple reason that, "they are not us."  European history is pockmarked with purges of the Jews (for a variety of reasons), gypsies, and others.  Yes, faiths usually fall along political and social (racial?) lines as well. Many times it is difficult to untangle faith from politics in terms of motivation.  It is easy to be skeptical of faith as an explanation in these days of space exploration and hand-held computers, but in a time when they thought there might just be an edge to the world, God was the only bulwark you had against the unknown.  Faith built communities.  What would you do to someone who threatened your way of life?

    As I mentioned in an old post about designing your own religions, for a faith to survive, it must offer access to a heaven that non-believers cannot reach.  For a believer, this is significant motivation.  Now, imagine that you have tangible evidence that your God exists; your God has performed miracles or invested you with holy power.  What would that do to your level of fervor?  What would you be willing to do for that God?  In a world of interventionist Gods, Holy War would seem to be an inevitability. 

    While it is a sweeping statement, I feel relatively confident in suggesting that religion is on the decline in the Western World.  Yes, I know I'm going out on a limb here.  The point is that as religion as a whole decreases in importance for the larger population, the less likely the reader is to identify with the protagonist in such a story (or any of the cast).  If you don't really know what it means to "take it on faith," then you might not accept the actions of a true believer.  I know that I can't fathom a suicide bomber, much less what drove someone like George Orwell to volunteer to fight in someone else's civil war.  Perhaps we authors (or it could be the publishers) feel that the wider readership has become too cynical for a character defined by their faith in a God.

    It's possible that authors are afraid of tackling a subject that is too topical, as well as being a significant threat in the modern world.  Much of what I read in the Fantasy genre covers a lot of old ground with women fighting for their rights (literally and figuratively), racial intolerance frowned upon, and alternate sexual preferences being defended (more recently at least).  While these are all important themes (which I use in my own writing), it seems like now would be the perfect time to explore the mind of a believer.  Even Tom Waits, in "The Road to Peace," can only describe what many call fanaticism (though the song is about a lot more than that) from the outside.  Fantasy is one of the best ways we have to explore the mind of the other, the unknown, the unexplainable.  It's what I love about my genre.  Damn, I suppose that means I'll have to write it.  Put it on the list.


Am I completely off base here?   I know GRRM is including some soldiers of faith in upcoming works (or at least he has set them up), but do you know any others?  Let me know.  I'd be interested to read (as if I didn't have enough books in the queue).