WIP Update – 30 Mar 25
What little time I had for any story-related work was devoted to continuing in the peripheral materials from yesterday. You see, with the formula I was using, the religiously unaffiliated are calculated by subtracting the total population from the sum of those with some religious affiliation. The way I had distributed the numbers didn’t quite work out in some places and trying to move stuff around proved to be more of a hassle than it was worth, so I ended up adding to the total population to make the formula work and get the final number to the original figure of 0.32% of the population. Why such a low percentage, you ask? Well, in the Kiennar Federal Republic, the Holy Catholic Church (known elsewhere as the Church of Kien or the Church of St. Crispin) is the state religion and all citizens are registered as members of the Church by default. It’s a bit difficult, but certainly not impossible, to change your registration later in life, but few do because there’s nothing much to gain by it and only the most dedicated atheists bother. You do have some activist groups like the Freethinkers Society that have agitated to eliminate the automatic registration (and more ambitious goals such as the abolition of a state religion and the Cabinet-level Ministry of Religious Affairs basically being the Church’s direct hand in the government), but they haven’t found much success.
While Crispinism is the predominant religion in the KFR at 62.29% of the population, Ahorazedism and Sabaotism have significant shares at 11.57% and 10.43% respectively. Ahorazedism is most represented in the coastal states, where there’s a strong influence from the Midland Magrebi states in northern Kartia, and Sabaotism is strong in the eastern states bordering the Principality of Velian (where Sabaotism is the state religion). The northern state of Elwyn, which was originally part of neighboring Glamwyg, has a plurality of Tairists, and if you combine the Fordists, the “heathens” have a majority. In the case of Elwyn, and also Grenik to the south, maintaining traditional religious affiliation is more a matter of ethnic identity than actual faith for the most part. (Consider it similar to the Quebecois retaining their Catholicism in a mostly Anglican Canada.) Another case worth noting is the agrarian Brodnar with its significant minority classified as “other religions” (28.07%) is mostly traditional Mennonites. (And before you start wondering how so many Mennonites poofed into existence, we’re talking about less than 28K people. Brodnar only has a population of about 98K.)
This may or may not be of particular interest to the average reader, but I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that I love the worldbuilding process and so much story potential comes out of this stuff. However, we’re at the point where I need to switch gears to RttW and actually work on the story and not be figuring out the habitat range of stag beetles (which does need to happen at some point). Stay tuned.
Tags: Child of Promise, CoP, Cross Arc, Post-Apocalyptic, WIP Update
Child of Promise, Cross Arc, Post-Apocalyptic, WIP Update | James Carmack | 31 March 2025 |
