(I swear I’m putting this in the fandom tag for a reason, just bear with me as I ramble about a really good semi-academic book about religion for a hot minute. It’s important context for my main point.)
Y’all ever read Stephen Prothero’s “God Is Not One”? It’s basically an argument against perennialism, the idea that all religions are at their core the same, through an exploration of the 8 most prominent religious traditions of the world (Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Confucianism, Yoruba religion, and Daoism), which makes it double as an excellent read if you want to expand your religious literacy.
Of course, being a book about religious studies, it has to tackle the eternal question of “what is religion anyway?”, a notably tricky thing to pin down and which some may argue is overly broad. Your average person living in a majority Christian culture may immediately think about belief in a god or gods, or at the very least the supernatural, to be a defining feature. However, in this list already there are 3 traditions (Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism) which while not strictly atheist or naturalist do have significant strains of thought along atheist and naturalist lines and are generally counted within the ranks of religion anyway .
So, what do? Well, this is my favorite part! Dr. Prothero proposes that the core elements of religion are: a problem, a solution to that problem, a set of techniques to achieve said solution, and figures that exemplify said techniques.
So, for Christianity we have:
The techniques - The sacraments, going to church, prayer, etc.
The exemplary figures - Jesus, the saints and martyrs, your local pastor, etc.
And in contrast Buddhism has:
The problem - Human suffering
The solution - Achieving awakening (or enlightenment, whatever floats your boat)
The techniques - Meditation, the Noble Eightfold Path, joining a monastery, etc.
The exemplary figures - the Buddha, the arahants and bodhisattvas, Buddhist monks, etc.
(Of course all of this comes with a big asterisk where there’s lots of room for nuance and variation. Religions are all internally diverse and embedded into the cultural contexts in which they exist, and all the rest. You can read the book for more.)
So, tying this all to the silly little books about feral cats, I find it fascinating how the Erins as fish swimming in very Christian cultural water have managed to come up with a fictional religion that is very interesting when analyzed under this framework.
The problem - War among the clans
The solution - The warrior code
The techniques - Gatherings, border marking, acting on StarClan-given prophecies, passing down stories, and just following the code in general
The exemplary figures - The cats who’ve gone to StarClan
Presented in this very simplistic list format, the religions of the world do begin to look a bit samey (again, read the book for elaboration on the nuances and how at a closer glance they are very much different), but the religion of the clans immediately stands out. Particularly when laid out like this it stands out by how this-worldly it is, when you’d assume as fish swimming in very Christian cultural water concerns about the afterlife would’ve been at the forefront in the minds of the Erins. It’s still there but not nearly as prominent, I feel.
So, yeah, as someone for whom this stuff is very important, I genuinely adore this. It’s good that kids who grow up reading these books are going to be exposed to an example, albeit fictional, of a religion that breaks the norms of typical cultural assumptions of what religion should be.
