OSR Interesting Replacements for Turn Undead?

[RealAlHazred]

The common thread there is that even laity is expected to have a single patron deity, and mostly forsake all others. Maybe the Helmite will give an offering to Sune when wooing a person to whom they are attracted, and the Gondsman might pray to Helm to help defend their workshop if they're being robbed, but overall they are expected to pray to and sacrifice to one god, and in the end go to that god's afterlife.

It is that connection to the afterlife that makes clerics good at dealing with undead. All gods have an interest in seeing that the afterlife runs properly, and undead interfere with that.

The singular focus is one of the things I really don't like about D&D pantheons. Most of them have this singular focus where a worshipper is meant to focus on one deity to the exclusion of all others. In most real world pantheons and some D&D ones (mostly in Eberron, as far as I know) you are supposed to worship a large number of gods most of the time. During festivals and normal Sunday worship, for example, you can praise all of the gods and saints and demigods and whatever; then, when you have a death in the family, you make a sacrifice to the Raven Queen to guide the soul of the deceased to their proper afterlife. Or, during the harvest, you make a special sacrifice to Merikka and maybe Cyndor. The clerics might or might not be focused (they may be Called to serve as priest by a god or a number of gods) but the rank-and-file worshippers aren't. And in such a case, any particular cleric might not have a strong connection to the afterlife -- that's the purview of the Psychopomp(s) (for example; for the ancient Egyptians, Anubis; for the Hindus, Yama; for the Greeks, the ferryman Charon and the god Hermes; for the Romans, Mercury; and for the Norse, the Valkyries).