Kivish Hardliner

'Kivish Hardliner' began as a dismissive term intended to distance hyper-conservative anti-materialist Reverent Path Kivish culture warriors from the formal clergy and mainstream religious culture. It has since become a badge of pride for religious communities that see themselves as more devout and traditional than their fellow practitioners.
Hardliners reject what they see as the corruption of a compromised society. Where mainstream Kizen Culture fetishizes modernity, Hardliners fetishize tradition. Hardliners make a show of rejecting all modern consumerism and violently perform their hatred of vice. They drink no alcohol, they spit on mass-printed media, they sneer at sex work, and they reject foreign products and fashions. Hardliners also are a Kobold-only group. Hardliners do not want to expel non-Kobolds from society or even bar them from the faith, but they do wish to see non-Kobolds segregated into their own spaces of worship and life. Similarly, Hardliners see foreign religions as threats to the Kobold youth. While the Hardliners don't particularly want to forcibly convert non-Kobold heathens, they do want foreign evangelism silenced, foreign religious expression relegated to non-public spaces, and for no more money or public effort to be wasted on heathen faiths.
Hardline Reverent-Path Kivish believe in obedience, discipline, and separation. One of the great taboos of Reverent Path Kivishta is for Kobolds and non-Kobolds to intermarry or have children, though hardliners go further. They demand that Kivish communities have large families, and that these many children receive stations in society over the outside masses. In the Holy Uvikov, Verkon is written to have said "Our nation must become the multitude. Let your wombs beget heaven's legions, let us drown the nightmare in holy blood." (translations differ greatly). Translations aside, it is simple arithmetic that if only Kobold bodies can carry souls indiluted by corruption and if unenlightened souls must be reborn after death into new bodies, that to have as many Kobold bodies as possible is the only ethical course of action. What that means differs from community to community. For some, it is that every Kobold is socially expected to have at least one child, for others it means the stigmatization of contraception. The difference between a hardliner and a non-hardliner is how strict these rules are and how intensely they are enforced.
Families and children are not the only areas of concern for Kivish traditionalists. Another is obedience, both to one's superiors and from one's inferiors. Traditionalist communities will try and exclude non-Kivish from guilds and generally try and monopolize access to better jobs. This also means internal hierarchies: traditionalist Kivish communities will often stratify internally into families of higher and lower prestige. Old caste divisions are often preserved within traditionalist communities and the markers of that old caste worn proudly (even lower-caste members, as a sign of Kivishta community membership). The final tenant of the Reverent Path is discipline. Reverent Path communities often value stoicism in the face of pain and emotional control. Traditionalists work to imbue their youngsters with this discipline through rigorous schooling and training.
Hardliners are a loose cultural movement that lack fixed dogma, a centralized organization, or specific unifying beliefs. They are reactionaries who are united in a shared belief in their traditionalism, but they are not necessarily more accurate in their performance of older religious traditions. Some of them actually deviate or create new rituals, rhetoric, or ideas in their rebellion against recent cultural and economic changes.
Hardliners are also capable of appearing kind, benevolent, and welcoming. Part of their rebellion against consumerism is a renewed commitment to mutual support, asceticism, and charity. They can be quite charitable to the poor and quite supportive of even low-status members of society who join them. Hardliners often focus their ire on groups that are already somewhat disliked by mainstream Kivish culture, making their more violent or prejudiced actions more easily stomached by the mainstream. Ironically, some Hardliner communities embrace people or elements of the countercultures they hate. While adopting countercultural elements can provoke some discomfort between communities, the movement has enough momentum and powerful enough symbolic unity to keep them more or less going in the same direction.

Type

Religious, Sect

Parent Organization

Reverent Path

Related Ethnicities

• Kizen Culture