Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
Congratulations: we’ve gotten through the poisonous thicket of race as it pertains to time travel. On to a topic much less likely to spur angry intransigence and mistrust: religion.
Yes, I am kidding, and no, don’t run away screaming. We’ll get through this one too.
This chapter is not going to take any stands on the One True Faith, or make any assumptions about your own personal mix of convictions, opinions, and uncertainties. This isn’t about what you believe, or about what the people in the place and era you’re visiting believe, but how you can fit, adjust, or conceal your attitudes so that you don’t clash disastrously with what you’ll find at your destination.
And you do have to plan for that. There is much room in current global society to be soft or disinterested toward religion, but that won’t be true in many of the eras and places you could visit1. They will take religion terribly seriously, as a matter even greater than life or death -- though they’ll be comfortable with punishments working at that level. Social penalties for nonconformity will also exist, but they’ll be slower to take effect, less heavily punitive, and not as certain, at least in some circles.
This won’t apply only to what we conventionally think of as religions. Our times have seen political cults of personality that approach the absolutist intensity of religious fervor. The current apex of that is probably the Kim regime of North Korea, which we mostly think of as an isolated aberration. There are many times when the Kims wouldn’t have stood out much, except maybe in the power of the state apparatus enforcing the ruler worship. This won’t even necessarily be an appropriation of religious forms, but an actual melding of religion with temporal power that goes well beyond, for example, the theocracy of turn-of-the-millennium Iran.
This might persuade you to limit your journeys to places and times that nominally have the same religion you do, so you can blend in naturally. This is as much a mistake as going back to Shakespeare’s England confident in your ability to speak the language. Religious practice evolves the same way other cultural customs or schools of philosophy do. You may find a religion you thought familiar will have different rites, strictures, and attitudes. You need to do the same advance study for its expression in that time and place as for social hierarchies or modes of dress.
Historically, religion is a tremendously important part of the human experience, arguably the most important one that we choose for ourselves. Recognize that fact, keep your eyes open to it at whichever site you visit, and you will be able to navigate the hazards it produces. You might even learn a few things.
The example eras are very fortunately chosen for this topic, with highly diverse situations to teach you mental flexibility. The lone overlap between all three, or even any two of the three, is Christianity, but in circumstances so widely different that it’s almost like three distinct religions.
Sengoku Japan, despite being a ferment of competing religious interests, will probably not pose serious problems. General attitudes were not doctrinaire: people would take elements from one thing, and elements of another, as served them pragmatically. If you don’t sail toward trouble -- meaning toward power politics -- you should be able to avoid it.
Japan of this time was mainly Buddhist, but with various strains in contention. The ascetic strain was unpopular with common Japanese, except for its ideas of karma and reincarnation. The Zen sect, emphasizing austerity and discipline, became popular with military rulers, who bent it away from its roots in Buddhist pacifism. Another offshoot, the Hokke or Lotus, outdid them in patriotic militarism and in rejecting other beliefs. They launched some uprisings in the 16th century, and their enduring sect had strong influence in Japan until about 1945.
The leading sect was Amidist Buddhism, although other Buddhists were working to suppress them. Followers of the accreted god Amida preached salvation by faith, and that humans by their sinful nature would need the compassion of Amida to be granted forgiveness and win admittance to the Pure Land after death. To people who know their Christianity, that sounds awfully familiar.
When European explorers and merchants arrived, the missionaries coming in their wake thus found some fertile ground. A religion with a redeemer figure who suffered and died almost like a true Japanese hero was no foreign concept. Some Japanese converts to Christianity may have believed they were entering a new branch of Buddhism. The missionaries may just have taken their gains and not explained too deeply.
Some missionaries went to extremes, with forced conversions and burning of Buddhist monasteries. In the political confusion of the time, this was sometimes useful to local lords in getting rid of a corrupt sect. Other times it led to revolts and invasions against Christianized lords. Keep a weather eye out for this if you’re visiting the latter Sengoku era.
In this mix was also Shinto, the home-grown animist belief. In the a la carte environment of Japanese religion, it didn’t have much strong exclusivity, but it was growing more systematized in this time. It’s still a far cry from the State Shinto that would be imposed after the Meiji Restoration for nationalist and militarist conformism. Visitors may find it restful, compared to the surrounding turmoil.
If you visit past this era, be aware that Christianity was soon suppressed quite severely. Most people have heard of how European visitors would have to trample Christian iconography to be permitted into Japan. Another indicator is that by 1640, Japanese had to register at Buddhist temples to prove they weren’t Christian. And if they didn’t donate well enough to the temples, rumors could get started …
The Country at War had its troubles, but it didn’t have that.
Religion in Rome of the late Republic and early Empire is a study in contrasts. There is a gulf between private devotions and public ones. Official attitudes can be ecumenical, but highly demanding of specific worship. The blatant political machinations of public religion impose a mindset disturbingly close to Orwellian doublethink. You can navigate these tides and currents, but it requires knowledge.
Roman religion is effectively two-tiered. There are the modest deities of household and family, and the mighty gods openly copied from the Greeks. Those humbler gods, the lares et penates, derived from primitive pre-Roman beliefs, which endured even as something thought more potent and civilized was imported to reflect rising Roman power. There’s something of a parallel with Japan’s Shinto being washed over by imports of Buddhism and Christianity.
You may encounter the lares et penates if you deal somewhat intimately with people in your time journey. A lar, or lar familiaris, was the spirit guarding a household, the physical home as distinct from the persons in it, which on farms also included the fields. It was worshipped at the lararium, a shrine or niche usually near the hearth of a house2. The more devout Romans would pray and sacrifice at it each morning. Penates were the guardians of the master of a household and his immediate family. Penates would follow a family if it moved, but the lares would stay with the house.
Going along with devotions to the lares et penates, or just benignly witnessing them, should not be troublesome. Dealing with the more public gods could be a different matter.
The main Roman pantheon, lifted from Greece and with most names changed, was really an expression of political power. Mighty nations had mighty deities overseeing them, and overpowering the puny gods of natural subject peoples like whoever Rome was currently conquering. Of course these gods existed, and of course Romans could create more when they found some gap in theology they needed to fill, or when they sought to emphasize some once-mortal Roman’s world-bestriding power. They did this early with Romulus; they did it later with Julius and Augustus Caesar.
As I’ve observed before, they tolerated foreign deities, and even raised shrines and temples to them. However, they expected this flexibility to work both ways. They expected you to worship their deities along with yours, especially the ones connected with political power -- meaning the ones raised from mortal ranks. And this wasn’t household stuff. This aspect of Roman religion was public, so you needed to be seen worshipping Roman gods, whether Jove or Augustus.
Many time-travelers, like many others in Rome, will have no problem making this show. Those serious about their own religion, though, could face a hard choice mirroring that of some Roman subjects.
Saying that observant Jews did not fit well within the Empire understates the matter. Their insistent monotheism often put them athwart an authority that didn’t distinguish between the temporal and the religious. The result ranged from friction to a cycle of revolts. As for Christians, those even more obstreperous and baffling monotheists, their cult had it worse still once it came to official notice.
If you have objections to worshiping someone else’s gods, you’ll have to maneuver carefully in Rome. You may need to avoid some events, or hang on their fringes, hopefully unnoticed. Tempting as it may be for time-traveling Christians or Jews to succor their persecuted co-religionists, this is terribly hazardous. A bit of comfort in the interstices of observed history is the best you can hope to provide, at grave risk to yourself. It may be wisest to be only a witness, for that does have its value.
In a less fraught strain, know that there will be religious festivals and holidays strewn about the calendar. This will offer opportunities to attend interesting and exciting events, if only the chariot races. Tracking down specific dates on the calendar may be more of a challenge than you suspect, as a later chapter will tell.
For the worst religious peril, England of the Tudors is the standout. Henry VIII wrenched the country from Catholic to the Church of England, run by himself, to further his dynastic ambitions. The reign of his son, Edward VI, made them officially Protestant where before they had been arguably breakaway Catholic. When he died young, his sister became Queen Mary and wrenched England back into Catholicism. When she died young, her sister became Queen Elizabeth and wrenched them back to Protestantism. Elizabeth did not die young, providing a breather … if you weren’t secretly Catholic.
Whoever was reigning, their church was the Church, the “established” church. It wasn’t merely that belonging to another church was illegal, though it was: not practicing the established religion was itself illegal. The opposing religion was a mortal enemy, a denial of God. To Anglicans, Catholics were considered atheists, the same as, say, Jews were3.
Visiting Elizabethan, and in general Tudor, England, you will need to know the religious tenor of the day, and mesh with it. To pass as a citizen, you’ll need to be a member of the Church, or at least to pass as a member. You’ll need to attend church services on Sundays, since attendance is mandatory. The fine for non-attendance started out low under Elizabeth, as she was a trifle lax and was satisfied with outward obedience more than your state of mind. After some troubles regarding assassination around 1580, she grew harsher, and the fine for non-attendance rose from 12 pence to 20 pounds4. Also, be prepared to pray over your food. Saying grace both before and after a meal was the social norm, and demurring will draw at least some suspicion.
Holy days were carried over from the Catholic era, and pepper the calendar. They begin the previous evening (such as Christmas Eve), and the more holy day eves are observed with a fast -- so be careful when or whether you have your supper. Easter is the main holy day, while Christmas is a twelve-day festival of only moderate religious import. There will be carols and devotions, but also feasting and hospitality, gaming, and general merriment and frivolity5. Oh, and gifts -- but those are given on January 1st, not December 25th.
This is another case where going along may be crucial to getting along. Aiding oppressed Catholics could be extraordinarily bad for your health, and preaching a general tolerance would get you blank stares at best. Few in England actually believed in freedom of worship: they just wanted their kind of worship to be the one mandated. This went for Anglicans, Catholics, and those Protestants who thought the Anglican Church retained far too many trappings of Catholicism. Such dissenters were called Precisians then: we know them better as Puritans.
Footnotes:
Just as it’s true in a number of places in today’s world. Some people pay unexpected prices for their ignorance of this. Don’t follow their example.
The hearth, dedicated to the goddess Vesta, was considered the core of a household. Vesta was a Roman goddess who kept her status even when the interloping Greek transplants came along.
This equivalence didn’t stem from personal knowledge. England had expelled its Jews in 1290, not reversing this decree until Oliver Cromwell in 1655. William Shakespeare likely never met an actual Jew, or at least very likely never knowingly met one.
This was long before the decimalization of English currency, so there were more pence in a pound then, 240 instead of 100. I’ll get around to explaining English currency, and others, later.
Arguably, the neglect of Christmas’s religious nature has been around for centuries, not just since Charlie Brown discovered its commercialization in 1965.
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