Day 14: Church is state

In the City of God, thousands of sects perform millions of miracles -- including running a cosmopolitan city.


The City of God is many things to many people. The nomads that wander far outside its gates speak of it with wonder or with derision, but for its inhabitants, it's the center of the world -- where all that's holy and everything impious swirl and mix.


Thousands of churches line its streets. Some are magnificent structures, all light and iron; others are squat, dismal shacks, the last remnants of a dying faith.

The religious organizations tend to all of the city's functions. Some toil in fields, while other import and export goods; still others attend to the dead, and others direct sewage, and others manage public safety. The one unifying truth for all of these faiths, the one thing they all hold in common, is each believes that it is peforming a duty commanded by God.

That simple truth allows many of the groups with common interests to work together. However, it divides far more. For every harmonious relationship between two groups seeking to manage a city function, there are three acrimonious conflicts. Sometimes two groups have different dogmatic approaches to exactly how trash ought to be disposed of; others simply take affront that their holy duty would be co-opted by another, clearly lesser, group.

The end result is a hectic and chaotic soup of activity. The very forces that have risen up the City of God are the ones that bring dischord to its citizens. When a fire breaks out, monks are as likely to break into fistfights over who gets to extinguish it as they are to attack the blaze; when a riot happens, the public security forces are just as often found among the unruly as among the defenders of order. The Byzantine politics of the city are dominated by dogma and point-counterpoint, tit-for-tat, and none can honestly say when the demands of faith will trump the needs of the city for any given monk or priest.

In the rougher parts of the city, loose street gangs of bead-wearing deacons "convert" passersby and squabble over turf. Sometimes these groups are extensions of more legitimate operations, but far more often they're schisms, led by some charismatic who understands God in a new and powerful way.