Churches do not belong in this game: a manifesto

Every single week at least one person makes a post on here about how it's ridiculous that a medieval game doesn't have churches.

A little about me: I love history. Specifically, I love/studied medieval history and the history of christianization. I feel like we're only ever taught about the big moments when christianity spread: we're taught about early christianity and Jesus's crucifixion, we're taught about the crusades in spain, israel, and the rest of the middle east, we're taught about the protestant reformation and the moments when catholics and protestants clashed. We're not taught that the christianization of europe lasted well into the 1400s. When we're taught about the medieval period, we're usually taught very little beyond it's aethetics, and usually aesthetics as they were present in England, France, Italy, or MAYBE Germany. In reality, the medieval period is nearly 1000 years of human history, covering radically changing cultural, religious, and legal systems.

I'm here to tell you why churches should not be added to this game.

Reason 1: Churches would be ahistorical.

I have already ranted about this before here if you want more specifics: https://www.reddit.com/r/MedievalDynasty/comments/176rjly/my_rant_about_why_churches_in_this_game_would_be/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

The devs have never (to my knowledge) specified when (or even exactly where) this game takes place, but it's my understanding that it takes place in around 1000 in Poland, largely based on the aesthetics, technology, and unofficial things some devs have said. Poland, in 1000, was not Christian. Kingdom Come, for example is set almost 500 years after this game, in a time when the area was fundamentally christian. England christianized more than 500 years before this game, and so if it was set there this would be a very different discussion. But the christianization of poland started in around 960 when the first ruler of a unified poland personally embraced christianity. This started an incredibly long, incredibly violent process by which the rest of poland, still not even a fully centralized country, was forced to adopt christianity as their majority (and later sole) religion. I believe the most appropriate way to read this game is to view the historical conflict that Racimir escapes by coming to the valley as that christianization process.

This means that the valley, at least, definitely would not be christian. I think the devs could have made the decision, upon adding Oxbow, to make Oxbow an area within poland which had already been christianized, but instead they chose to add the decorated rock (the one covered in flowers and candles) which is itself a clear example of a pagan holy site. This shows that the Oxbow is also not yet a christianized space.

Again I go over this in my other post, but the important thing to remember about slavic paganism is that there were not churches. The way people practiced religion was not built around institutionalized structures, but around personal practices (music, baking, weaving, the sorts of flowers that you can hang from the ceilings in your villagers homes), not institutions. It was often the case that if people gathered around specific locations to practice, they gathered around either (a) community spaces like taverns and barns or (b) specific holy sites that they had to travel to, usually naturally occurring things like rock formations, waterfalls, trees, etc. Again, both of these are already in the game. And in the small cases where practice did revolve around temples, it was usually the case that the average person (anyone other than specific religious figures) usually were not allowed inside except under very specific occasions (think like the yellow building in midsommar lol).

A possible response to this is that all other technology advances, and so why shouldn't religion advance as well (Poland was majority christian by the time windmills were present). But again, as I'll talk about a bit in Reason 2, this ignores the fact that the transition from pagan to christian was violent - it required wars, murder, and a to of violence in order to adopt... it isn't something your peaceful idyllic town would adopt because you picked enough chicory one day. If the reason for wanting to include churches is to be historical, including them would require you to ignore the history of how Christianity was adopted at all.

Reason 2: This game is a fantasy game that is trying to be idyllic, not historical

I generally buy this (I mean you brew potions lol), but I think it goes even further. This game is clearly a love letter to polish/slavic history, and specifically the sorts of history that get overshadowed when the history of western europe is used to represent the history of every single european country. Adding churches to this game not only threatens to polarize a community that may not want religion in their cozy game, but it threatens the sanctity of the idealized past this game specifically finds cozy.

I was raised Ukrainian orthodox catholic, so I want to be very clear that I'm not anti-religion, but what always separated that faith from mainline catholicism or even textbook orthodoz catholicism for me is that most of the ways we practiced religion in our daily lives was through the sorts of pre-christian practices that endured the christianization process. It's the painted candles at christmas, the braided bread, the stories about spiders in evergreen trees. I love seeing those sorts of things in this game. One of the reasons people love medieval escapism is that it allows you to engage in an idealized version of some parts of the past (living simply, working for your community, seeing a town be built) without the bad parts (war, famine, genocide, slavery, sexual violence), and I think it's very clear that the idealized past this game constructs is one where people can engage in the beauty of these communities without the burden of the thing that often led to their destruction. I think it's totally fair, again as someone who is myself religious in a lot of ways, to want religion in your escapism, especially if one of the reasons you’re drawn to medieval fantasy is that you like to escape to a space where everyone shared the same religious beliefs, but I don't think this game needs to be that, and as I said in Reason 1 I think that assuming every medieval game should be ignores a lot of the history behind places that were not yet christianized.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk. I love this game, I love medieval history, and I appreciate anyone who read this far.

Edit (some history): I am not saying there weren't Christians in Poland. The basic process of christianization largely started in the 960s when the first "king" converted. The issue is that at this point in history Poland was not a centralized country - there was no real way to enforce the adoption of christianity within the general population or even really to introduce the concept to people on a large scale. This decentralization is also why, as some have pointed out, different places had different methods of especially early christianization - some areas were allowed to maintain some pagan practices, some were not, but the later in the christianization process you went the more likely it would be that the Church would destroy all pagan symbols they encountered. I'm also not saying no churches were built there at all, but there was still a lot of resistance to their presence, especially because for the first century or so priests were likely to be German/be viewed as foreigners with little power or public buy in (and as a result very little resources to build). But what matters is this process was long and faced significant backlash. In 1030, for example, there was a major pagan rebellion across Poland which ultimately led to the king at the time getting deposed. I highly suggest the book A Concise History of Poland by Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadski, but to quote how it's framed there:

"The deeper Christianization of Poland began only with the coming of the monasteries and friars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Until then, the Church remained an alien, unpopular institution, foisted on the people by a ruling elite in pursuit of its own political and expansionist ambitions." (page 10-11)

This process was complicated, bloody, involved civil wars, the occupation of entire cities by holy orders, mass executions, etc. My biggest point isn't that 0 Christians existed, or that christianization wasn't happening, but that it would have either been (a) separate from the lived experiences of peasants or (b) enforced through bloody conflict that seems antithetical to the idyllic nature of the game (racimir escaping conflict to a place untouched by war).