The Pure Flame

Whenever someone accuses the Church of the Silver Flame of intolerant zealotry, they’re inevitably talking about the Pure Flame — a regressive movement ultimately rooted in bigoted colonialism. While the church has always had a diversity of opinions, the Pure Flame movement took off in Aundair at the tail end of the Silver Crusade. Status-seeking ministers preyed on people’s fears, inflaming anger into barbaric acts of butchery in then-western Aundair, all in the name of purging lycanthropes. The scars of this time have largely not yet healed, and many people of the Eldeen Reaches, especially shifters, still hold the church of Flamekeep responsible for not doing enough to stop the attempted genocide.
While the rest of the church doesn’t place much emphasis on controlling how people live, the Pure Flame has much more exacting standards. Many of these, such as a variety of sexual prohibitions, are allegedly in the name of avoiding temptation and corruption by supernatural creatures like succubi and incubi. Others are “rooted in church history,” declaring certain cultural trends from several centuries ago were spiritually holier than and morally superior to contemporary cultural standards.
Over the last century, the Pure Flame has been most popular in Aundair, where members often claim persecution to justify their beliefs and actions. However, in the public papers most discussion of the Pure Flame is about Thaliost, where Archbishop Solgar Dariznu has implemented many of their tenets as law. Beyond Thaliost, the other refuge of the Pure Flame within Thrane is the southeastern city of Aruldusk, on the shores of Lake Arul.

Type

Religious, Sect