Religion is one of the most reliable ways to give a fictional world texture. Not because gods or rituals automatically make a setting epic, but because belief inevitably touches everything: politics, language, identity, rebellion, survival, and even personal identity and mythos. In the Industrialized series, religion isn’t a backdrop. It’s the cultural engine that drives Tesland’s identity and the emotional engine that shapes its characters. Columbiana, the Goddess of Progress, the trauma-laden Nonnicaean compound from which Captain Asher Murphy hails, Saida’s grounding Kemetic worldview, and Kristina’s complicated, observant narration all combine into a nuanced religious landscape with real narrative weight.
Today, I want to talk not only about how I incorporated religion into a fictional world, but how it can give any book an additional layer of quality and commentary. We’ll do a deep dive into the Industrialized series first, then discuss how other writers can apply these same techniques to really amp up their manuscripts. Ready? Let’s dive deep!
Building Religion to Build a World
Creating a believable religious system isn’t just about naming a deity and tossing a festival or church into the plot. It’s about how that belief infiltrates daily life. In Tesland, Columbiana is so woven into the national consciousness that her name slips into jokes, threats, civic mottos, and even political rhetoric. Characters don’t pause to explain her to readers because they would never need to explain her to each other, and that naturalness is what makes the world feel lived in.
What makes Columbiana particularly effective is the unspoken irony beneath her mythology. Readers who analyze the in-text clues will learn early on that she is simply the repurposed Statue of Liberty, mythologized after the fall of the United States. Tesland’s citizens, however, believe their goddess is ancient, native, and foundational to their identity. That disconnect between who Columbiana really is and who she is believed to be creates an immediate sense of historical drift. It’s exactly the type of cultural retconning societies perform after collapse: grab what endures, give it meaning, and build a national narrative around it.
By contrast, Captain Asher Murphy’s background in the Nonnicaean cult (explored in The Inconvenience of Time, merely hinted at in Part One and Two) shows a very different religious structure at work. The compound he grew up in relied not on national mythmaking but on isolation, obedience, and spiritual fear. Biblical names mark apostates in the general population. Elders wield total authority. The system shapes its children into either disciples or escapees, but rarely free people like Captain. In fact, when Asher sheds his given name and chooses to move through the world simply as “Captain,” it’s not a flourish – it’s an act of spiritual and cultural severance. Religion leaves fingerprints on characters whether they embrace it, flee it, or redefine it. As Kristina moves closer toward belief in something throughout her narration, Captain provides a grounding contrast in his steadfast rejection not just of religion, but of how it shaped the man he used to be.
How the Series Uses Religion as Literary Architecture
On a craft level, the religious choices in Industrialized build personality into the world and pressure into the plot. Columbiana functions as both a cultural comfort and a form of political manipulation. Tesland’s leader, King Robert Sands, weaponizes her imagery to justify progress-at-any-cost policies. He has adopted her silhouette as his emblem despite overseeing a society where few women can even own property. Citizens use her name casually, often without thinking, which reflects how deeply the ideology has settled into everyday life.
In Inconvenience, Captain’s trauma from his Nonnicaean upbringing offers a different literary function: a window into how religious environments form identity. His discomfort with his Biblical name, his instinctive flinch at religious language, and his guilt-laced nostalgia show how belief can haunt a life long after the doctrine itself has been abandoned.
Saida, meanwhile, brings an entirely different religious flavor to the text. Her Kemetic upbringing taught her to “believe in life,” a philosophy centered on presence, gratitude, and the preciousness of each moment. Her faith is less about doctrine and more about grounding, and her conversations with Captain reveal an emotional vocabulary shaped by her culture. She becomes the emotional axis around which questions of faith, hope, and love revolve. Through her, the story gains a spiritual counterbalance to Tesland’s state religion and Captain’s shattered familial upbringing.
These three belief systems – manufactured goddess worship, trauma-born distrust, and life-affirming spirituality – interlock to create a world that feels deeply human. And, ironically, two of them are intertwined more closely than initially meets the eye.
Columbiana and Saida: Parallel Symbols of Progress
One of the most striking literary choices in the series, if I may say so, is the quiet symbolic link between the Goddess of Progress and Saida herself. The real-world Statue of Liberty was originally meant for Port Said in Egypt, and in the lore of the Industrialized series, that symbolic origin still echoes. Columbiana, for all her Teslandian worshippers, is ultimately an Egyptian design repurposed by a country in decline.
Saida, a woman from Kemet (formerly Egypt, just as Tesland was formerly California), enters Tesland not as a deity but as a catalyst. She ultimately becomes the force that changes the course of Teslandian history. She challenges power structures, inspires rebellion, steadies the rebels when cracks begin to form, crosses metaphorical picket lines when she teams up with Kristina’s father, and ultimately… Well, it would be a spoiler if I tell you exactly where things end. I will say that out of all the characters we follow in the series, Saida alone becomes a national hero, a clear echo of the “bringer of progress” symbol she was silently playing all along.
This is the kind of symbolism that doesn’t need to announce itself, and it’s never explicitly stated in the primary story. (Though Saida does somewhat recognize and find inspiration in it in Inconvenience.) It resonates because it’s baked into the narrative architecture. The country worships the wrong woman, venerating the statue while the real embodiment of progress walks beside them, loves them, saves them, and… (devious laughter) Read the dang book and you’ll get what I’m saying about the spoiler thing. The conclusion is poetic without being precious. Saida fulfills the role Columbiana was invented to fill, and readers feel the weight of that truth even if no character ever articulates it.
Kristina’s Relationship to Belief
As the narrator of Part One: Experiment and Part Two: Execution, Kristina stands at the crossroads of these belief systems. She grows up under a government that weaponizes Columbiana’s image, existing in a religious household that excludes her from their church. She works alongside Saida, witnessing a more intimate form of spiritual grounding. She navigates the orbit of Titus and Captain, two men shaped in opposite ways by cultic childhoods. She never fully commits to any religious structure, but she understands their impact on everyone around her and wants to believe in something. Ultimately, “writing” her story becomes something of a religious experience for her, a way to preserve the people she loves and the role she played in one country’s cultural shift.
Kristina’s relationship to religion is observational rather than devotional. She sees how belief becomes a tool in the wrong hands – how Tarm Industries uses belief to justify its motives, how Titus cloaks ambition in moral language, how her mother’s survival depends on navigating sacred and profane spaces to build relationships for bad people. At the same time, she sees the beauty in Saida’s worldview and the vulnerability in Captain’s. Through her perspective, readers grasp the series’ central truth: faith is less about gods and more about the stories people choose to anchor themselves to.
Kristina’s arc ultimately becomes an exploration of agency. She grows up in a world where belief is often used to control, yet she learns to define her own meaning. She’s not rejecting faith; she’s rejecting the ownership of her soul by anyone else.
What Writers Can Learn From This Approach
The religious systems in Industrialized are a great example of how to use belief as a narrative tool. Religion isn’t presented as a monolith, but as a spectrum of experiences – nationalistic, traumatic, cultural, and philosophical. Each one reveals something different about the world, about the characters, and about the systems they’re entangled in.
Most importantly, religion in this series is never static. It evolves. It shifts as the characters do. Its meaning changes as the plot demands. And its symbols – especially Columbiana and Saida – layer the story with emotional resonance that readers feel even before they consciously notice it.
The takeaway for writers is simple: if you treat religion as intrinsic rather than ornamental, as something characters breathe, resist, love, fear, or reinterpret, your world becomes richer. Your story becomes deeper. Grow your characters, shape them, and build their world, but don’t forget to build the beliefs that fuel the intricacies, too.