Indeed, this is also a confusing game setting. Victoria 3 seems to assume that any culture has a religion bound to it. This is simply offensive, and maybe it would be better to keep this set to certain regions rather than make it a global set.
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No, it is not offensive. It is meant to show how religions impressed their values onto cultures that followed them so long. It is merely a simulation of reality
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If there are cultures that are associated with religions that have historically been deeply tied to them, that's fine. But it would be hard to understand if all the cultures of the entire planet were bound to one religion.
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I agree with that, some cultures should be bound to multiple
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This makes the idea of Chinese pops being Mahayana even more insane. Imagine conflict in nascent south east asia between Chinese "Mahayana" and Malay Muslim pops in singapore or malaysia. ??????????
Just set them to Confucian should make Chinese minorities abroad more reasonable.
Just set them to Confucian should make Chinese minorities abroad more reasonable.
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What would change in your example if Chinese pops are Confucian instead of Mahayana?
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You could make Confucianism the state religion, then give that Confucian religion a trait in common with every religion they historically tolerated. This would make them both non-discriminated and also keep them from converting religions (under freedom of conscience, at least). The only problem is that the easy way to do that is to call Confucianism "Buddhist" which might bother some people.
To build on this it's just this fundamental western, monotheistic conception that you ARE a single religion and that dictates your life, behavior, morals, family structure, etc. That's just not the case in much of the world for much of history, where people see no problem with doing a Confucian ritual in the morning, attending a Buddhist funeral for a loved one in the afternoon and calling a Daoist feng shui expert to lay out their new room next week.
One of the big episodes from the Jesuits in China was when they were horrified to learn that, when they thought they'd made converts by having scholar-officials read the bible and be like "yeah cool interesting" they found that Jesus was just another statue added to a hall of gods, or that even among common folk they insisted on "idolatry" by continuing to participate in ancestor worship even after conversion to Christianity (it was largely their tolerance of the latter that got the Vatican to pull them out of China and replace them with Dominicans.. who promptly got themselves kicked out altogether by refusing to respect Chinese customs in any possible way).
This is not solved by just assigning the pops another religion tag. It's a fundamental problem with religion systems in GSGs that just projects the Western experience of religion on people for whom the entire paradigm makes no sense. I get that some can be offended by the word "offensive," but it really is a system incapable of representing the reality.
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It really doesn't help that Vic3 has an incredibly flat representation of religion and culture, even for GSGs.
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Nothing. It wouldnt be any different than if Protestant Pops in northern Ireland were called "Calvinist."
it would just be really immersion breaking. No Chinese community would self-identify as "Mahayana Buddhists" but they might actually identify as following the doctrines of Confucius.
it would just be really immersion breaking. No Chinese community would self-identify as "Mahayana Buddhists" but they might actually identify as following the doctrines of Confucius.
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The reason why the Qing Dynasty is represented as Mahayana is that there is probably only the religions that were in Victoria 2 and no new ones (do not quote me on this, this is just a general observation). Shintoism was represented in Victoria 2, and so was the three Buddhist religions of Mahayana, Theravada and Gelugpa (even Victoria 1 had Mahayana and Theravada, no Gelugpa however). If anything, Confucianism should be added in and it should be the state religion of the Qing Dynasty. I get this would be a bit of an abstraction, but yet again, we have all of paganism around the world represented as Animist, so this isn't as bad as all of China being Mahayana like Vic2 all over again.
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Confucianism isn't a religion. Buddhism makes the most sense if you need to give China a religion
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I've got a lot of respect for you going back to the Stellaris days and before, but here I'm going to disagree with you a little. Or rather, I'm going to agree but say that the flat representation is okay for the things it's trying to represent.
During the nineteenth century in China, there were a lot of rebellions and a lot of suppressions of these rebellions. Many of the largest and most important of these rebellions were wholly or partially about religion; to give three examples, the Boxer Rebellion, the Heavenly Kingdom, and the Panthay Rebellion.
The Boxer Rebellion featured horrific pogroms against Christian Chinese at the hands of traditional Confucian militias. The suppression of the Panthay Rebellion, especially in its aftermath, featured flat-out massacres of entire Muslim villages but the sparing of their Confucian neighbours. The Heavenly Kingdom was a whole mess, but pogroms were certainly a salient feature, by both Christians and Confucians, and featured a lot of other people getting caught in between.
These are not situations in which the answer to the question "what religion are you?" has an analog answer. If Hong Xiuquan has just conquered your town and you reply "I follow a hybrid model in which Christ is honoured as just one of many deities, including my ancestors", then this answer is not going to help you - and it's not going to help you after he loses and the traditionalists retake the town either. I personally am not a religious person, but many people were religious enough to choose to flee rather than simply lie or assimilate, and I'm not going to say they were wrong to do so.
I won't take a position on whether traditional Chinese beliefs should be called "Mahayana" or not, simply because I don't know enough to have a position. From what I've read in this thread, it sounds like "Confucian" might be a better term. However, I will suggest that the Paradox-style "are you a Christian or a Confucian?" flat representation was actually incredibly important during some events at the time.
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I wonder if this is just a simple oversight since the religion setup seems likely to be something which was carried over from V2 without perhaps a large amount of analysis.
Ignoring all of the very proper debate over how religion is represented in Paradox games in general, it simply makes more sense to have Chinese folk beliefs as a "religion" than it does Buddhism. Calling it "Confucianism" is a kludge but it's understandable and works fine in EU, and certainly better than any alternatives which don't require significant changes to the core gameplay.
Ignoring all of the very proper debate over how religion is represented in Paradox games in general, it simply makes more sense to have Chinese folk beliefs as a "religion" than it does Buddhism. Calling it "Confucianism" is a kludge but it's understandable and works fine in EU, and certainly better than any alternatives which don't require significant changes to the core gameplay.
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I agree with this point a lot.
To add onto the argument to represent the religion as Confucianism, pretending as if the Boxer pogroms were done cause the people didn't follow the local religion of Mahayana Buddhism is silly.
Confucianism may not be a religion in a traditional western sense, but a "secular religion" that encourages a particular way of life is a close enough approximation for me. Its not so much as Confucianism or Chinese Folk Religion is a perfect representation, its just that Mahayana is a really weird and ahistorical representation. Its sad for V3 for EU to have a comparably better representation, especially since V3's legal system can allow religious coharmany and existence.
Plus, since pops of the same culture can be split by religion, you could even crudely seperate multireligious cultures. If a culture is like 1/3 christian and 2/3 Confucian, maybe that isnt true at the individual level but if it is true at the aggregate level, splitting up that way isn't too terrible.
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I certainly empathize with the impulse to flatten religion a bit in a game where it's a secondary or even tertiary factor, but this isn't a particularly believable abstraction that fails to capture the complexities of a vitally important actor in the era, albeit one that was a historical loser.
I also definitely hope the Taiping get their own bespoke Christian sect, because Hong Xiuquan was a little crazy, believed himself to be Jesus' little brother, and probably the only Christian texts he had read were garbled, poorly-translated, and otherwise inaccurate, so it very much doesn't fit as any type of Christianity that's already represented in-game.
I also definitely hope the Taiping get their own bespoke Christian sect, because Hong Xiuquan was a little crazy, believed himself to be Jesus' little brother, and probably the only Christian texts he had read were garbled, poorly-translated, and otherwise inaccurate, so it very much doesn't fit as any type of Christianity that's already represented in-game.
I think this is exactly where the flattening causes a problem, though. These pogroms were not enforcing Confucian religious practice qua religious practice, they were a violent reaction to perceived foreign takeover of society as a whole and a percieved threat to the legitimacy and power of elites. You can see this level of violence in pre-modern periods directed against Pure Land or Chan Buddhists when their temples acquire too much wealth or power (c.f. basically any classical wuxia film), and you can see it in the very modern period with the Falun Gong. The problem is never the dogma or practice of the religion itself; the problem is when the religious organization can generate political power and becomes a threat to the state. Nobody would have cared about Hong Xiuquan claiming he was Jesus's younger brother, had he kept that to a weekly prayer meeting and didn't start the single most destructive war of the 19th century over it.
And on the flipside, while the Taiping was ostensibly a religious rebellion, it was really more over the rapidly collapsing taxation structure of the Qing state, ethnic reaction to the conscious Manchu expressinons of domination over southern Chinese ethnic groups (the tonsure, etc). The religion provided a focus point but it was not a rebellion against Confucianism, it was a rebellion against the Qing.
While it is undoubtedly true that this is a distinction without a difference when there is a mob in the process of killing you and your family because you had a crucifix. I do think it matters when you're modeling these systems as a whole, especially when China is such a huge portion of the population and market of the world.
They've made a huge deal about the opium wars, but yeah I really hope they've done the Taiping Rebellion justice. It directly involved more people (and killed more people) than WWI. If they're going to make bespoke arrangements of journal entries and IGs to do the American Civil War, it would feel odd to not do the same here.
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My understanding is that while you are absolutely right on this, it didn't prevent him supporting other Chinese Christians and getting support from them. Hong embraced Arianism at one point, and yet local Chinese Catholic and Protestant communities still fought for him.
It's difficult to know how this should be modelled. Clearly, flattening all forms of Christianity into one isn't useful, but otherwise it might be quite difficult to represent this sort of "eh, close enough"-ness.
I absolutely agree with you about the causes of the rebellions: while religion was a useful source of cohesion around which such things could be organised, the real causes were generally economic and social. (This doesn't mean that people didn't blame religious minorities for it, of course.)
However, the life expectancies of the individuals during and after such events frequently did depend on their religion, and usually in a very flattened way. If you're a Shi'a Muslim in Yunnan after the Panthay Rebellion, you'll still get killed during the massacre of Sunnis. If you're a Chinese person who's adopted a syncretistic mix of Christianity and Buddhism, then in the aftermath of the Heavenly Kingdom you'll still get treated as a potential traitor by the state, as much as if you were 100% Christian.
As such, I think we have to ask "what does in-game religion represent?" To me what it represents is "will this pop get affected by event X / circumstance Y?" In such a case, some flattening is good because it makes scripting easier for the developers and more comprehensible to the players.
By contrast, if what it represents is a more aesthetic side of the game where you just want to look at your population and say, yes, this looks like what I think it should, then having a less flat representation of religion which allows more syncretism and special circumstances would be good.
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Tbh, having the minor benches of religions as something like "Miscellaneous Christian" or "Other Muslim" is quite preferable than having sects represent (or worse, misrepresented as 'Protestant', turning a main 'brench' into basically "Generic non-Orthodox/Catholic")
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