D&D and Religion

Image by Marko Djurdjevic

I have been documenting a process of deconstruction that has been happening in the Twitter TTRPG space lately. Every aspect of the game is being questioned. This is NOT a new thing, every aspect of the game has been questioned in the past as well, both at individual tables and in the broader TTRPG community. 

However, this current wave of deconstruction is happening during the high tide of the culture wars, and so it is marred by a lot of oversimplification and tribalization. In short, it gets a lot wrong and very little right. 

I saw the current wave of objections coming a while ago, and I thought I should try to get out in front of them a bit if I can. Religion is a topic ripe for deconstruction in TTRPGS like D&D, indeed almost everyone I’ve played with over the last 35 years has played around with how religion works in their games, and included it in some way.

Getting Started

The most natural place to start with this is the cleric. Modeled on the Knights Templar, a holy order of warrior priests, the D&D cleric appears to be a perfect example of the sort of colonialist, patriarchal sort of thing that modern players chafe at. Armored like a knight, they look like crusaders, and it isn’t necessary to remind anyone of how the crusades were morally objectionable. 

It is pretty clear that clerics were modeled after Christian knights, so if you do a first pass light reading of the PHB you would come away with the idea that D&D was modelling Christianity in the cleric.

This would be a mistake, for a number of reasons.

It is important to keep context in mind when analyzing texts for meaning. Gygax was primarily a game designer, and his experience before D&D was primarily with wargames. When he branched out into fantasy gaming he grabbed archetypes from pulp literature and from mythology to fill out the character classes in the game. 

Wizards, thieves, rangers, these classes had precedents in the literature. But looking at it strictly in terms of literary precedents ignores the gaming aspects of Gygax’s thinking. In essence, wargames had one kind of class: warrior. When branching out the game Gygax added classes to this base. So wizards were added to represent firepower, they were weak but deadly. Thieves were added for stealth and skills, so there would be a class to deal with traps, locks, that sort of thing. 

There was a desire for a class that was somewhere in between a fighter and a magic-user, a spell user that was good in combat as well. However, the spell user couldn’t be better than a magic-user, or better in combat than a fighter. The cleric was intended as a middle ground between these two options. 

However, unlike many of the other classes, like rangers, magic-users and thieves, clerics had no immediate fantasy precedents. What fantasy characters from pulp literature were armored fighters with moderately powerful magic? Everyone can think of fantasy fighters (Conan, Fafhrd), thieves (the Grey Mouser), wizards (Gandalf, Elric), but clerics? 

Pulp literature did not provide a lot of clerical models.

But the real world did, the real world provided a holy man with a mace and armor. Gygax, with his wargaming sensibilities and historical interests would have thought of this immediately, a spell casting warrior would be a perfect fit for a medieval cleric. 

In short, history provided Gygax with a perfect match for his gaming needs, a class that was somewhere between a fighter and a magic-user. Choosing the medieval knight templar as the model for the class was a gamist decision, not a simulationist or proselytizing decision. 

Now, with that in mind, let’s take another look at the cleric. Was Gygax pushing Christian ideals on players by including the cleric? Is the presence of the cleric in the game some sort of validation or promotion of colonialist, hegemonic Christian ideals? 

This is where the “surface reading” problem comes through. It could certainly APPEAR to be the case that this is what Gygax intended, but a bit of deeper reading of the game shows that it is clearly not the case.

Reconstructing the Game

Let’s start with iconography.

There is definitely iconography in the game that shows clerics as typical medieval style knights.

This sort of thing leads to a “aha” moment for some, and leads them to assume that it’s a closed case. But here’s another pic from the 1e PHB:

 At least 4 of the “clerics” pictured here are not Medieval Christian knights. 

So iconography does not support this view.

What about spells? 

There are certainly some spells that make you think of Christianity when you see them. Part water for example, that certainly has an old testament feel to it.

But there are multiple cleric spells that are not specific to Christianity. Bless for example, blessing is not a specifically Christian thing. Protection from evil and protection circles, resisting fire (e.g. fire walking), speaking with animals, curing disease, speaking with the dead, animating the dead, removing and giving curses, healing (laying on hands), insect plagues, quests, transforming sticks to snakes, augury and divination, controlling the weather, reincarnation, these are concepts that are either shared with other cultures, or wholly absent in Christian thought. Christianity doesn’t believe in reincarnation, that should be obvious.

So the spell list doesn’t pick out Christian religion any more than the iconography does.

Next up, polytheism!

It may seem too obvious to say, but AD&D has NO monotheistic religions in it. Take a gander at the 1e Deities and Demigods, the go to book about AD&D gods. You will notice there are NO monothesitic religions portrayed in the book. 

The closest you get to this is the Arthurian myths, as we all know that King Arthur and his knights were Christians. But despite their presence in the book, there is no mention of the Judeo-Christian god. 

This is one of the places where players 35 years ago knew better than to reduce the game in such a simplistic fashion. Yes, some clerics of Osiris or Zeus ran around in plate mail with maces, but over the years I’ve seen many players who modeled their cleric PCs on the depictions of the gods shown in the D&DG. Many clerics listed in the D&DG can’t even wear helms! The “tin can” cleric model doesn’t even survive a run in with the back of the D&DG. 

But more to the point, AD&D is aggressively polytheistic. The PHB states that clerics are, “...dedicated to a deity, or deities”, so baked right into the game is the idea that some clerics don’t even worship one god, but instead a pantheon of gods. This is very much a pre-Christian idea that was absorbed into Christianity in various ways, but clearly you can’t have a Christian monotheistic cleric worshipping multiple non-Christian gods. 

Given that ALL of the religions in the D&DG, and ALL of the religions in the published settings (e.g. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, etc.) are non-Christian and non-monotheistic, the odds were pretty close to 100% that a PC cleric in a game of AD&D would not be worshipping a monotheistic religion like Christianity or a stand in for Christianity. 

If you can’t see how an armor wearing mace swinging cleric of a pagan god like say Silvanus or Horus or Apollo is completely non-Christian I can’t help you.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but if you check out the language in the PHB and DMG, and the clerical section in the back of the D&DG you will notice that men and women can be clerics, something that Christianity, and Medieval Knights templar, did not permit.

What we have here is the perfect storm of ignorance, bias and preconceptions, mixed in with the conflation of gamist and simulationist interpretations of the game. Gygax drew on the knight templar as the model for the cleric as the “warrior priest”, the hybrid of fighter and spell caster was an archetype that was not well represented in the pulp literature, indeed, the pulp literature tended to mix wizard and priest archetypes together in many cases. 

But every other aspect of the class, the iconography, the spells, the god(s) that could be worshipped, the lack of monotheism, the presence of both women and men in the priesthood, all of these things count against the idea of the cleric as simply a Medieval Christian knight. 

In short, the only way to read the cleric in this fashion is to ignore the far greater evidence AGAINST this interpretation as it doesn’t fit with your preconceptions. And once you see this, it makes sense of something that many people have been unable to explain, why the game has paladins. If the cleric is based on the Medieval Knights Templar, what is the paladin supposed to be? 

Indeed, paladins are completely unnecessary if clerics represent Medieval crusader knights, as paladins are exactly modelled on Medieval crusader knights. Paladin’s are the closest thing to the Medieval crusader knight that D&D has. They are dedicated to a code of Lawful Good and Gygax very much portrayed them as crusaders for “good” willing to do whatever they felt had to be done to serve the good, whatever they took that to be.

But even this interpretation is flummoxed by the lack of monothestic religions in the game. Just take a look at this list of Lawful Good dieties, any one of which could be a Paladin’s god:

Amaterasu Omikami (Japanese)

Anubis (Egyptian)

Athena (Greek)

Chung Kuel (Chinese)

Daikoku (Japanese)

Diancecht (Celtic)

Donblas the Justice Maker (Melnibonean)

Ebisu (Japanese)

Forseti (Norse)

Girru (Babylonian)

Heimdall (Norse)

Heng (American Indian)

Ilmatar (Finnish)

Issek of the Jug (Nehwon)

Kuan Yin (Chinese)

Osiris (Egyptian)

Shu (Egyptian)

Surya (Indian)

Tefnut (Egyptian)

Tyr (Norse)

Ukko (Finnish)

Vishnu (Indian)

Most if not all of these would be “pagan” by Christian standards, and NONE of these are from monotheistic religions. So ANY paladin in 1e AD&D will worship a god that is incompatible with the very concept of a supreme Judeo-Christian god. 

Paladins in 1e are holy warriors, that’s it. They are warriors that fight for their gods, the fact that they are Lawful Good simply reflects the nature of Lawful Good as an alignment, concerned with law and order, and doing good deeds, Lawful Good has the potential for extremes that fit the idea of a righteous holy warrior quite well. 

So yes, the paladin was based on the Arthurian ideal of a knight of God, but placed in the polytheistic context of AD&D, the paladin transcends this ideal into something different. 

One of the most important things you learn about culture is that practice changes things. How we think about things theoretically and abstractly is very important, but how ideas and systems of ideas are actually used in practice is important as well. Ideas have to be instantiated and applied, and this means that people will use ideas in ways you can’t predict or control.

AD&D players transcended this idea of the Christian knight cleric decades ago. Indeed, 2e formalized this break by depicting clerics in a much more diverse fashion, opening up weapon choices and treating “clerics” like “priests”. It’s not that you don’t get tank like clerics with maces anymore, you certainly do, but players have pushed past this limitation without any need for outside prodding. The structure of the class belies the simplistic reduction of the cleric to “Knight templar”. 

However, none of this will be appreciated when the deconstruction marches on. People will look at the surface of the class and suggest that Gygax was pushing Christian dogma, that the game has “baked in” Christian ideology and promotes colonialism and genocide by presenting a class based on the crusaders. It’s a giant steaming pile of ignorance and mistaken assumptions, but I would be shocked if that’s not the way the conversation goes, as I have seen too many conversations about my preferred edition go exactly this way.

Two of my favorite PCs from my AD&D home game over the years have been a paladin of Athena, who wore sandals, carried a large round shield and wore Lorica Hamata, and a priest of Rudra who wore leather armor and worshipped a god of death. Neither of which were “medieval knights templar”, but both perfectly modelled their respective classes. Every cleric I have seen in the game in my 35 years worshipped a pagan god who a “Medieval knight templar” would have seen as godless and heathen. 

And I think that this current tendency to argue that clerics don’t have to worship a deity to have spells and powers is linked to this desire to “deconstruct” the game and cleanse it of hegemonic, colonialist ideas. If you think about how priests in the game have a cornucopia of pagan gods to worship, many of which were worshipped by peoples who were colonized by Christian nations, it's particularly ironic that “godless clerics” are being pushed as an option. People want to shear belief in god from clerics as they see it as a vestige of a colonialist, monothestic religion, when in actuality it is representative of a diverse, multi-cultural mythological game world. 

Suggesting that all clerics in the game are based on this Christian model also ironically takes away from the lived experience of non-Christians who play the game. Many of the people who have played D&D at my table have chosen to play priests of gods from their culture, for some it was a way to express their cultural identity at the table. To worship a god from a non-Christian religion and dress them appropriately for their culture was a way to experience their culture in the game. It continues to be this way today.

Limiting the AD&D cleric into a Judeo-Chrisitan model needlessly denies players this opportunity to express aspects of their identities through the game. How the game is actually played matters. Perhaps if people listen to the experiences of real gamers, rather than seeking too clever by half readings of the game to engage in “gotcha” politics, we can have a thoughtful and useful discussion about deconstructing the game.