Some world-buildy thoughts on the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh.
My PC gang has managed to get on the bad side of the Church, so I thought I should know a bit more about them.
tl;dr: yoga, some drugs, no orgies, big on big families.
They’re a mystery cult, which implies lots of small groups led by individual holy people. On the other hand, it’s a large scale organised state religion, which implies something much more formal and regimented. It also needs to support the “standard social goods” that keep societies ticking over, such as supporting long-term stable (monogamous?) relationships, care of children, and obeying the established power structures.
What springs to mind is something like Tantric practice, where the emphasis is on bringing the “godhead” into the human and personal. As this life is the only one people have, the Church will encourage people to live healthily, exercise, eat well, and all that. I can see people finding enlightenment through meditation and yoga-like practices, or ecstasy through intense physical activity like the whirling dervishes or even ravers.
Church services will probably involve short-acting narcotics or hallucinogens, because that’s the first thing I thought of when describing a service. It needs to be something that most people can do without huge amounts of effort, which keeps the ecstasy-through-exercise limited to a small number of devotees. The idea of huge hedonistic orgies is superficially fitting, but I think too much of that would undermine the social cohesion function of the default church (but it’s definitely something that happens in some of the non-denominational churches).
The Cataclysm means people can’t achieve immortality through mystical means. That means the old saying that “you achieve immortality through your children” is just about the only way people can live after their death. I think the Church will encourage large families and people caring well for their children.
I’m not sure what the Church will think about the undead. On the one hand, it’s a very obvious form of immortality. On the other, it’s against all the teachings of living your one life well.
Anyway, that’s my first few thoughts. What does anyone else think?