Are there people in your world that just don’t get it, and keep spouting opinions that make no sense given the context of your world or would be disastrous if actually implemented? What are some of the most common bad takes in your world and what makes them so bad?
Oh this is great!
The Bright Way is dedicated to finding extraterrestrial intelligence, or as they say bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh. They start out benign, but once they start sending out interstellar missions they realize they can’t fund their work on donations alone. They start monetizing the vast array of tech they’ve invented in order to get to that point, at first to fund mission work, but they gradually lose sight of why they’re making money and concentrate on just making more money.
Slavery in this context is a form of debt servitude one is consigned to if they can’t pay their tithes. Treatment of slaves varied greatly. On the yinrih’s homeworld of Yih, slaves were de facto treated as property. On the planet Hearthside, which was a hotbed of traditionalist movements opposed to the Bright Way’s pecuniary interests, serfdom was treated more like an assistance program to help the disadvantaged gain technical skills. Institutions on Hearthside would even “buy” slaves from Yih (really taking on their debt) in order to save them from harsh treatment on the homeworld, as can be seen in this story.
Regarding the Partisans, they got your typical cult of personality surrounding Firefly the Apostate (their leader), but there’s also a literal cult, which emerged more or less organically without the government’s input, that worships the Great Leader a la the Emperor of Mankind from 40K. The Partisan government goes back and forth between persecuting them as they do religion in general, and cynically promoting the cult as a means of control.
Very interesting!
Are there more “pure” Bright Way believers in the sense that they denounce the slavery/exploitation industrial complex and preach more grassroots exploration and extraterrestrial contact? Like Christians who spend their lives in relative poverty helping the poor around them preaching the gospel through their own actions toward others, compared to a group like the Conquistadors trying colonise far away lands and force their religion on them all while enriching themselves?
The Pious Dissolutionists are what you’re looking for. The Bright Way started monetizing the tech they invented in order to fund the missionaries, but that little side hustle turned into all they cared about. The Pious Dissolutionists wanted to purge the organization of its corporate interests. (Incidentally, my avatar is their symbol. The red arch represents an element of Claravian sacred art whereby a golden arch would be drawn behind a saint’s head, analogous to a halo. The usual Bright Way symbol is the bare “star and gear” without the arch.)
Interesting! How powerful are the Pious Dissolutionists? Does the Bright Way declare them as apostates or anything or otherwise try to suppress them?
Initially not very powerful. The movement was most popular among the missionaries (naturally) as well as on the planet Hearthside. The tide turned when a dissolutionist preacher on Hearthside managed to convince half of the Bright Way’s private army (an order of warrior monks called the Knights of the Sun) to join the dissolutionists.
As for how the PD’s were treated by the wider clergy, a lot of them were sent to the Outer Belt to get them out of the way. The Outer Belt was the home of the missionaries (as it’s close to interstellar space) as well as former ecclesiastical slaves both manumitted and runaways, who formed the nucleus of the radical secularists that would become the Partisans.
I summarize things better here, here, and here.
I really like your technical style of worldbuilding. I’m fond of the little details that grand sweeping stories gloss over.