Class Trouble II: Clerics

Here are some more thoughts from reading the Original D&D (white box) set for the first time, and the origins of the more troubling class types.

Clerics -- My trouble with clerics is more subtle than the trouble with thieves (see previous post). It's not a mechanical problem so much as a flavor-setting problem.

Every time I try to design up a D&D campaign setting I run into the following issue. I want to use the core classes as written, and I want to create a medieval-flavored setting, as indicated by D&D's level of technology, armaments, coinage, and political assumptions (smallish kingdoms, rising mercantile class, a history of an older broken-down empire, etc.). But then, I'm confronted with the polytheistic religious structure in D&D, and I come to a stumbling block -- for the life of me I can't imagine what the political situation would look like, to have a medieval Europe lacking the unified Christian Catholic church, and instead overlaid with independent polytheistic temples.

To me, this is a huge contradictory disconnect in standard D&D, in that you've got a medieval world with polytheistic religion. I can't even find any examples to compare to in the real world -- by the early middle ages, all of Europe (including Scandinavian countries at the last) were Christian, all of the Middle East was monotheistic under Islam, etc. Only in the Far East like Japan did you have Shogun culture with polytheistic religion, but the priests of shrines there were (to my understanding) not politically powerful in any way, like we assume a D&D church to be.

And as I think about a polytheistic setting, I'm further blocked by the fact that the D&D Cleric class looks almost uniquely like a Christian crusading priest (or Templar, or what-have-you). Apparently they belong to an influential church, but what church like that was polytheistic? What kind of hierarchical structure could be supported by that? If you think of either shaman-culture (independent wise men) or a polytheistic professional religious class (like Celtic druids or Indian brahmans, who service a unified pantheon of gods together), you think about them in robes, not wandering around in full plate mail. Again, I'd like to reduce Clerics to not use full armor, to look more like polytheistic priests, if that's what they truly are.

In short, the problem is this: D&D claims to have a polytheistic religion, but you've got both the politics and the critical Cleric class set up as in the medieval Christian world, and nowhere else.

Now, if you look at the OD&D set, the reason for this is pretty clear -- Clerics really were assumed to be Christian at the outset of the design. (As usual, it's not explicitly stated *what* the class is, but the standard usage of the terms involved makes it clear). (1) The class-level titles all come out of the Catholic Christian church. (2) The equipment list and turning undead sections mention the Cross and no other type of holy symbol. (3) The cleric spell list is almost uniformly based on famous Biblical miracles. And so forth.

It's only afterwards (I presume Supplement IV: Gods, Demigods, and Heroes, although Supplement II: Blackmoor is the first one to mention non-cross holy items, p. 23) that the designers thought to use polytheistic deities as their mainstays, and glued this on after-the-fact to the existing D&D worldview and Clerical class. It's no wonder that still to this day the polytheism acts as a sort of strange extra appendage to the rest of the D&D ruleset (even contradictory, when I think about it fairly hard), as it truly wasn't there in OD&D. Perhaps the class would have looked different in its spell list and armor usage if polytheist priests had been in mind at the beginning (and perhaps the world setting would be presumed classical instead of medieval, who knows?)

One initial solution I can think of is to directly stipulate a monotheistic, powerful Catholic-like church for my medieval-style D&D world -- the problem there would be some dryness to the options of clerics and the political situation. A second solution would be to use a professional-class-style clerical establishment (like historical druids), where the priests all serve the same pantheon of gods as a single unit and teaching (some of the same drawbacks would apply). A third solution would be to find some historical pantheon of gods which best supports a combative, warlike Clerical class as found in D&D (perhaps Norse, Finnish or some other warrior culture which was Christianized as late as possible historically).