Worldbuilding Blogfest: Religion and Magic

[image error] This is Part 3 of Sharon Bayliss' Worldbuilding Blogfest. Stay tuned all week for more, and check out the other participants!
For the sake of this blogfest, we'll follow the Forgotten Gods series for the first two books, which are set in Scotland and England. The third book (tentatively, out next winter) catches up with the British holdings in the Americas. The series is an 'Alien Space Bats' style alternate history/historical fantasy, so in many ways, it's our world as it was... except that the Book of Invasions (and the Ulster Cycle, etc) is an accurate account of the early history of the islands rather than a compendium of Celtic myth.

After the events of Forgotten Gods, Scotland is a country that's 70% Presbyterian, 25% Catholic, 5% other Protestants, and 100% in theological crisis over the sudden re-appearance of mythological creatures long dismissed as legend by the general population. The daione sidhe, for their part, have insisted they don't have souls in the human sense, and aren't in the least concerned about their status in a Christian worldview. Some of the other supernatural creatures, however, have expressed an interest in human religion, which has opened several major lines of debate among church leaders in all sects on such questions as whether or not such creatures could convert to Christianity, or could even have a concept of good or evil.

England is mostly Anglican, with a number of Catholics, Quakers, and others living in fear of religious persecution. In the hopes of keeping panic to a minimum, the government has denied rumours of supernatural  creatures roaming the countryside, so a theological discussion has been averted for the time being. Several Anglican priests whose parishioners have come to them with stories of monsters lurking in the alleyways of London have had their sightings dismissed as illness or imagination, and been sent away with instructions to visit a doctor. However, this has not put a stop to wild private speculation about the nature of the daione sidhe, most of which is flavoured with Anglican tradition.