The Evil Church of Evil is Secretly Evil

Who could have guessed?

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One of the most common modern tropes is also the most predictable, and that is the presence in a story of a church that is actually, or secretly, or even overtly, evil. One of my favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics, contains this cliché, but I forgive it as when I first played the game, the setup hadn’t yet overplayed itself. Even the most recent game I completed, Unicorn Overlord, contains a variation of this.

Most commonly, the trope resembles this:

1. There is a church with a large amount of political, if not temporal, authority. It uses this to control people!

2. It is hiding a dark secret! Examples: the leader is actually undead or a demon, or the religion is totally false and made up so that powerful people can continue controlling or exploiting the populace.

3. The heroes discover the solution to the main conflict by tearing down the false church.

Japanese media uses the evil church often (even in other Final Fantasy games), which, on the surface, is perplexing since their cultural and religious traditions do not include organizations that resemble the Catholic Church. However, I think the presence of a church of evil is the result of a general interest in history, and when we examine history, we find that political machinations often cross into the political and even military. This is particularly true of Renaissance Italy, with such famous families as the Borgias both controlling the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and running a military that was loyal to the pope. A quick trip through Byzantine history will reveal various intersections that are no less interesting, though they are not usually as tantalizing as the time and place that gave rise to Machiavelli.

Japan also, not being particularly Catholic, is likely full of writers who are not catholic while the country is peopled by consumers who are not offended by the trope. When writing medieval fantasy, where there needs to be a degree of political complexity for the protagonists to struggle against, it’s easy to add the church to the list of players. In these sorts of stories (of which Final Fantasy Tactics is one), Machiavellianism is the rule. Many sides are willing to get their hands dirty to achieve their goals and the division between good and evil lies mostly in the heroes and not the world through which they are adventuring.

The West, however, has had an increasing attachment to this now-boring twist in a story. This explanation is a bit more straightforward. Western media corporations are increasingly staffed by people who hate Christianity and, especially, the Catholic Church. They have contempt for believers and, as the society has secularized, feel emboldened to tell stories that deride the Church or propagandistically cast it as a devil in a fictional play. The examples are too numerous to list, but the turning point for this trope was probably Dan Brown’s fast-food novel The DaVinci Code, followed by Ron Howard’s adaptation in 2006. There was plenty of anti-church propaganda before that, but the DaVinci Code was the full trope in play, including a “dark secret” the church wants to hide for…reasons.

This sort of thing spills over into fantasy gaming readily as most fantasy uses the medieval as its starting point. Dragon Age started with a fairly straightforward church called the “Chantry,” but with the first sequel, the writers could not help but make the institution corrupt and run by the wicked. World of Warcraft has the Scarlett Crusade—run by demons (but to be fair, they also have a good church, too). Dungeons and Dragons has slowly turned the Paladin into a non-worshipping good guy of, like, ideals and stuff, because taking the gods seriously is super icky. Diablo IV’s entire plot revolves around an angel and his church being totally really the bad guys and the demons…Well, they’re still bad, but…you know, they have a point… Um, just kill Lilith since we don’t have anything else to say here.

It is not, however, merely the secularization of culture that has allowed this trope to flourish like ragweed. The “evil church” is always a stand-in for the Catholic Church (while protestants find their stand-ins in the form of cult leaders and retarded rednecks). That anti-Catholicism is a defining trait of most Protestantism, so the waters of secular hate were fed by streams of protestant mythologizing regarding European history and the Church. Modern media just takes an old way of viewing history and runs with it. “The reformation happened because the Church had become corrupt” seems sensible unless you view it (all of it, including the radical reformation) in the context of politics at the time. Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) was notorious, but a large part of what we read about him is likely the Renaissance equivalent of the Trump Piss Dosier—obviously salacious fluff designed to discredit a political opponent. One must have a critical eye when reading reports of the Borgia’s delighting over watching stallions mate or forcing disrobed women to pick nuts up off the floor. History is inherently a storytelling medium and yellow journalism is nothing new.

Alexander VI’s complex political machinations, we must remember, were coming after a long period of internal Church conflict in which the papacy itself was more or less held prisoner in France, causing a temporary papal schism. If it weren’t for the Borgias, it is possible the French would have conquered Italy and torn the church apart yet again. This period is certainly inspiring, but one cannot easily come away thinking that the Church was hiding some special dark secret or existed to cage the minds of the people. That idea came much later, in the Enlightenment, and like the abstract mythologies of the reformation, has percolated into general culture mimetically.

I think what restrained prior writers was a general concern for the customer. Many old Christmas songs were written by Jews. Why? Because they were more focused on what clients might like than their own personal beliefs. “Jewish Hollywood” was able to make classics like Ben Hur and The Robe (both directed by Jews). The point was to please, not to harangue, not to demoralize. The transition from a consumer-focused industry to corporate hegemonies repurposed to propaganda machines is detailed more in my series, The Corporate Period in the Arts. In brief, over time, corporations became attractive as a means to gain power over the culture rather than a place to make money.

We are now at a point where the evil church trope is so boring and expected it is a set piece of standard narrative rather than a subversive variation or plot twist. The church being secretly evil is now the default, and it is very rare to see any religious person portrayed as a genuinely kind or intelligent person.

On the Japanese side, there is one portrayal of the church that I find genuinely funny, and that is Hellsing. In it, the church has a dark secret…It’s actually badass and genetically engineers priests to kill monsters. And there is a Protestant Church they are fighting (funny, because there is no such thing, but Kouta Hirano likely didn’t know or care). And they all kill the robot fake vampire nazi army using real vampires and very large guns. At least he had some fun with it!

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