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?
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.