Have a Bit of Faith

Humans, as a group, are believers. There's even a part of our brain which seems to be all about spiritual experiences.
But you wouldn't know it from most urban fantasy. Although it's ostensibly set in the world as we know it, only with the addition of supernatural creatures, it seems to be overwhelmingly populated with athiests and agnostics*. Now, if your story is set in a secular future, or in an alternate history timeline without religion, or the like, you can skip the rest of this rant. Honestly, I'd be interested to read a story which fully explored the implications of an alternate history scenario where monotheism never caught on-- it could be a fascinating setting.

Unfortunately, a large swath of urban fantasy authors seem to operate under the following two conventions:

Religions besides Christianity do not exist, except as the mysterious folk-magic rituals of the 'magical minority' character;Christianity is not a religion but rather a subsidiary branch of the Evil League of Evil
Seriously, guys. There are 1.6 billion Muslims out there, or about one in every five people. Another 15% of the world is Hindu, and about 10% are Buddhist. That's not counting pockets of less populous religions-- Shinto, Judiasm, and various folk religions around the world-- which mean a geographic area may have an usually high concentration of people who adhere to these belief systems. There's a big world out there, and we need more people writing urban fantasy set in Bamako or Tokyo or Izmir or Galilee.

But even if you're compelled to set your story in Wisconson, there's not much of an excuse. Given the amount of global travel, a character who is a white, middle-class American hanging out in the Midwest, should have met people of different religions who aren't the helpful 'magical minority' magician. That said, since urban fantasy seems to love the default Anglo-American protagonist, it might be realistic that they primarily interact with Christians, which brings me to my second pet peeve.

There are 2.3 billion Christians in the world**, or approximately one in three people. Per the grand tradition of Abrahamic religions, we enthusiastically disagree about a lot of things, the end result of which is a large number of different denominations that are definitely not interchangeable. This can range from using different versions of the Lord's Prayer to having different stances on issues like whether to ordain women or marry same-gender couples. (Although I'm not a fan of Laurell K Hamilton's work in general, the Anita Blake series does handle this well).  In much of Urban Fantasy City, however, the dominant religion appears to be some mashup of Southern Baptist and miscellaneous evangelical denominations, entirely populated by mean-spirited fanatics.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that churches are a jerk-free zone, because there are people attached to any religion, philosophy, or cause who are just there to vent their anger or excuse their antisocial behavior. But simply put, there are enough Christians-- ranging from the intensely pious to the people who amble in to church on Easter morning only-- that the law of averages takes over, and we're a pretty good sample of the general population. Statistically, it's almost impossible that they won't run into some perfectly nice Christians, and even ones who don't fall in line with the official church view on whatever the main character is promoting.

Give people of faith-- many faiths-- a chance to be unique characters in your urban fantasy. Allow yourself to develop a more realistic world, populated by people who aren't just diverse in colour but diverse in their beliefs.


*There is also something odd about the residents of a world which is confirmed to have magic dismissing mythology and religion.
**This number is people who identify as Christian. Whether some of those people, whose jerktastic behaviour indicates they have a very dim grasp on the tenets of their professed faith, actually count is a debate for another time and place.