How many temples in a community?

[mr_accipitres]

Thanks everyone for the responses.

HoE - I had looked at the link you provided as well as the DMGII before I posted. I was actually leaning towards the 4-5 max you and wingsandsword had proposed.

Just for the record, Medieval Demographics Made Easy proposes a clergyman for every 40 persons and a priest for every 25-30 clergymen. With these numbers, you would obtain 50 clergymen and 2 priests (thus giving us the number Li Shenron suggested). OTOH, The DMGII states 20 priests in a "typical" city of 10000. So I divided by 5 and came up with 4 priests.

Umbran - I kind of see small towns like this as local trade centers as opposed to primarily agricultural villages, hamlets and thorps. People from outside of town tend to trade agricultural products and some raw materials for more advanced finished goods.

Ogrork - I'm actually looking to include the number of small chapels (i.e. minor faiths) in the count. If it can support a full-time staff, then I'll include it.

I think that I'll probably go with 2 major, 2 minor and a druidic/nature-based faith for the community.

 

[Umbran]

Umbran - I kind of see small towns like this as local trade centers as opposed to primarily agricultural villages, hamlets and thorps. People from outside of town tend to trade agricultural products and some raw materials for more advanced finished goods.

Well, I was giving an example. You can have a wealthy trading town of 2000, where most of the folks actually live in the town proper, or you can have an agricutural community of 2000, where the wide spot in the road with the inn and general store are the "town", and most of the 2000 inhabitants are spread on farmsteads in the surrounding countryside. It depends upon what you're calling the "community". That's why I put the emphasis on the overall wealth available.

 

[Umbran]

(the town nearest my parents' house had 1600 people as of the 2000 census and at least ten churches);

We also have to be careful with modern American examples - we are a society with a whole lot of spare wealth hanging around, and large church organizations often raise funds to send to parishes that don't have enough free money to support their own churches.

Contrast that to a world with much less free wealth. Most of your people are peasants for whom making ends meet is always a big concern. And simply moving money from one place to another can be a major risk.

It also depends upon the religious culture - is the place diverse, or monolithic in belief? Do the various gods require separate places of worship, or are "general use temples" allowed? And so on.

 

[Janx]

I'd say there can be a large number of temples in a community of 2,000.

I grew up in a small, rural agricultural town with a population of about 2,000. We had well over a dozen churches...

AND

In terms of Clergy, the standard demographics rules in the DMG (p 137-139) give a town of 2,000 people "Small Town" status, which means it's perfectly possible to have an 8th level cleric or druid, and around 3 dozen clergy in total (Clerics, Druids, Monks and Adepts), who can easily staff many temples (especially since only one or two are needed for smaller shrines and prayer houses).

I came from a town of 300, they had 5 churches in town. 3 main denominations, and 2 less common ones. The Catholic church took up the length of a city block, and was about a third as wide. People from outside the city limits would come in (it was a rural area). Anyway, estimates of only a few churches are REALLY off when compared to real life.

Granted, now I live in the land of mega-stadium churches, so I imagine how people could think that 1 church can hold the entire population of a town. But even down here, there's a ton of strip-mall churches, small churches, and medium sized churches.

It might be fair to generalize (without disparaging any religion or even opening that can of worms), that most populations will have multiple churches, even when devoted to the same deity, simply because of differences in taste. (the preacher might be favored by one group or another, or there are style reasons).

So while it may be technically possible to build 1 church and stick all 2000 people in it on a weekly basis, odds are good that a realistically modeled population (remember, we're vaguely simulating reality here), will have some variance and choose to attend different churches, thus justifying multiple churches in any town.

Reasons for having only 1 church:
cult
state/city sponsored religion
too small of a population (based on # of Clerics, per DMG)

Reasons for having multiple churches
favorite pastor (same religion, but we like Preacher Tom better)
different gods
different variants on the same religion
population disparity(east side vs. west side, racism, social class division)

Janx

 

[Warbringer]

I built a town building program in excel that calculates building construction based on size and type of society.

In a medieval community, the model suggets that a town with 2,000 would have 4 shrines (upto 5 clerical staff). By contrast in a society dominated by clerical infulence, there would be 8 shrines and 2 churches (upto 20 clerical staff). Note a shrine only costs 5000 gp to build and 500 to maintain, a church costs 50,000 to build and 5000 to maintain.

By comparison, in a Wizard controlled society only 2 shrines may be present.

 

[davidschwartznz]

favorite pastor (same religion, but we like Preacher Tom better)
different variants on the same religion

Remember, clerics of a specific god can still have three different alignments. So your main religion may have mutliple congregations.

For example the largest temple in town might be dedicated to a LG god and balanced between law and goodness. However, in uptown you might have a congregation that is smaller, but more affluent, which focuses more on the benefits of law, as dictated by this god (LN). Meanwhile, in the poorer district there's a mission run by a reformed branch of the church, who teach the love of the god, and are less concerned with the minutiae of his doctrines. (Er, any relation to a real world religion is purely coincidental.)

However, for a small town, I'd only do this for the major religion(s). Towns tend to have multiple churches of the primary religion (with slightly different doctrine), but at most one temple dedicated to less popular religions.

 

[Samnell]

It might be fair to generalize (without disparaging any religion or even opening that can of worms), that most populations will have multiple churches, even when devoted to the same deity, simply because of differences in taste. (the preacher might be favored by one group or another, or there are style reasons).

Amen to that. I live in a town small enough to have three separate Catholic churches, all of which I've been inside at one time or another. St. Mary's is for Polish people. St. Bernard's is Irish. St. Anne's is German and French. This isn't as true as it used to be, but at least among the Catholics in town ancestry is still a pretty good predictor of which church they frequent.

That said, my town has about 15k people, but enough churches for each congregation to be only 30 or so people if spread evenly. It's not possible to fill all of them, and more outlying areas have yet more churches. I suspect there's not a one in town that can seat less than 100, but those out in the country probably get built for congregations in the area of fifty. So the point made about free wealth being an issue certainly applies to our situation in a way it might not to a fantasy world.

 

[antman120]

Don't forget to add 1-2 for evil Gods whose followers are mainly secret and or persecuted.
These temples' existence would not be common knowledge

 

[Turjan]

I suspect there's not a one in town that can seat less than 100, but those out in the country probably get built for congregations in the area of fifty. So the point made about free wealth being an issue certainly applies to our situation in a way it might not to a fantasy world.

Also, keep in mind that seats in a church are a relatively modern commodity. In former times, only the clergy had seats. Most other religions than Christianity don't know seats, anyway. Quite a few religions don't have priests in our sense, either. Temples are the space of individual worship in this case. The number of shrines can be very high, like one per family or even one per adult.

Edit: I just want to add that I come from a town of 16,000 inhabitants with 2 major denominations and one minor. Altogether, they had 6 churches and 7 priests.

 

[wingsandsword]

Actually, I'll have disagree with the idea that these churches pop up because of wealth. The place I came from that had all these churches was poor, dirt poor. These churches weren't branches of large centralized religions (well, one was, but it's branches are pretty spread out). These churches were independent of each other, and generally only loosely affiliated with any larger group, if any. You mentioned multiple Catholic churches, my hometown didn't have a single one, the nearest one was in the next town over.

Many of these churches were congregations founded by two or three dozen people who pooled some money, donated their time and labor to built a small sanctuary on a small parcel of land, and over a few years built a small church. They collectively hire a pastor who shares their general sentiments on faith, and is paid a very modest salary from their donations, and all other labor is donated (it's cleaned and maintained by people volunteering to in on Saturday to sweep and polish, and the pastor does a lot of the work himself since he's the only full-time employee). I know because I used to belong to just such a church, and few of the members were anything other than poor (or lower-middle-class), but 30 or 40 people like that can make a church happen.

To put this in D&D terms, in a typical fantasy world, where people build their own houses and most everyday items are locally hand made, one lone Cleric and a few dozen followers could easily start a church in a rural area. Plenty of labor donated by followers, a collection taken up to buy a small parcel of land, a year or two of construction and making the furniture, and you can have a very modest temple with a small congregation.

Yes, there are also the giant "stadium churches" the size of shopping malls, but one thing the modern world has also taught us is that there is a huge variety with regard to peoples tastes in religion. Also, the "megachurches" crop up in places that are already huge themselves, and you don't notice the dozens or hundreds of more modest houses of worship in the area that plenty of other people attend but they don't get the media attention and don't have the flashy buildings. If you want a D&D analog of this, in a major city you could have a giant cathedral of a powerful religion that is a wonder of the world, with room for thousands of worshippers and high priests, and the grounds of the place take up a significant portion of the city, while people quietly ignore the dozens of smaller shrines, prayer houses, and temples scattered around the city, sometimes in nondescript buildings only marked by a holy symbol on the door, sometimes in backrooms or upstairs rooms of other places. The other faiths certainly exist, but a traveller passing through town might only notice the huge cathedral and marvel at how the town really only follows one religion if they weren't attentive or didn't spend long in town.

So, if you really want one giant temple in town that everybody goes to, with maybe a few small shrines on the edges for special purposes you can do that, but human nature has shown us that in a town of 2,000 you can divide the population up into many distinct religious bodies. In a society with a polytheistic faith like the typical D&D world, this seems almost inevitable.

To me, trying to assume that a population that large will only have one or two temples seems weird, assuming that (in any society where there is any freedom of Religion, like is assumed in a typical D&D setting, where people are more-or-less free to follow any nonevil god) such a large body of people would be so common in beliefs that they could all get together to support one temple. If the town was founded by one religion as a colony or something I could understand it, or if the pantheon existed in such a format that all gods could be worshipped together or they shared worship space (like the Ancient Greece example) it could make sense. In a typical Greyhawk/Realms polytheistic model though I'd expect a significant variety of religions, with one or two popular ones (like Pelor & St. Cuthbert or Chauntea & Lathander) being most prominent, but several others having their own followings.