Finally got around to a little more worldbuilding (yes, I'm behind. It's been a week, a whole new group of students started up face-to-face instruction, I was informed I have 30 additional hours of training needing to be completed by the end of November, meetings, microphone wasn't working on my laptop, which I only discovered after recording my virtual lesson for an over an hour...)

Ahem, anyway!

One thing I always try to figure out in my little world is religion. It's a driving factor for many, many, many things. Even a character that's not necessarily super religious, will have some driving factors based on their religion (assuming they have one) and even the lack of a religion can be defining. What is your character's moral compass? How does religion influence the world around them? Other people they interact with? How has it influenced the world? Has it caused wars? Kept loves apart?

Even in my little fairy tale rewrite, I just figured out the "religion" and how it affects the world, the magic used within the stories and the very characters themselves. Even though there is no regular practice, the way Spirits interact with the world and what happens when a person dies and is born has a great influence on my characters and how they interact with the world. For example, my two main characters have opposite interactions with the Spiritual plane: One is a conduit and can energize the charms she touches, the other is the opposite and consumes the tiny bits of Spirit within charms (as such, he is unable to touch people without making them ill, which is a brand new development, but contributes greatly to his sour disposition). On the plus side, this ability of his does save the heroine's life three times.

So.... how does religion or aspects of it affect your character and your story?