Can Germanic religion become the dominant religion of Europe?

Gurps AE 2 suggested Thorism - a religion where Thor fight for his followers in the other world. Didn't give many details, though. And even there, pagans are only left in Iceland and Vinland, continental Vikings having been converted to a somewhat different Christianity.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
You need some Germanic Monotheism with some kind of infinite God with a defined afterlife or in better words, a religion with more defined theology and evangelistic. Paganism is very diverse and divided. It isn't very cohesive and cannot survive in its original sense. It needs to metamorphosize into something like Christianity which would be expansive.
 

Philip

Donor
How about Chlodwig 497ish does not convert to the catholic faith, but the arianic faith

Two problems:

This would cause a great deal of instability (or at least interfere with the stabilization) in Gaul. The population is Nicene with a strong established network. There will remain conflict between the post-Roman population and their Frankish overlords. Expect something closer to Iberia than OTL Gaul.

At some point, someone is going to notice the political advantages of attaching oneself to the Nicene community.
 
If you have a figure arise who serves as a kind of Mohamed analogue and creates a more formal scriptural version of OTL Germanic beliefs, I don't see why the Germanic conquests couldn't have taken on a religious aspect similar to OTL expansion of Islam.
Muhammad's religion wasn't an Arabic religion in the sense it emerged from Arab polytheism, even if I entierely agree it became a strongly Arabized religion : the principle itself of these practices, as in rather a decentralized network of various if related beliefs and rites, doesn't favour at all a religious unification and codification.
It could be argued, eventually, that Hinduism and other Karmic religions did managed this, but we're talking of religion emerging in already sophisticated states and cultures, and whom a good part of their solidification and self-conception came from the confrontation with Islam.

How about Chlodwig 497ish does not convert to the catholic faith, but the arianic faith (after Arius from Alexandria - people of that religion held that Jesus is not God, but was created)?
Homoeanism, that was what many Barbarians practiced (roughly, a middle-way between Arianism and Orthodoxy) didn't went into the nature of Christ at all. Basically, their credo was that the Son was similar (homoios) to the Father without precising how it was similar and what was their exact relation; which allowed Barbarians to prevent (at least partly conciously) to really loose themselves in the same disputes and differenciation than in Eastern Romania's various christologies.
Note that Homoeanism was far from being defined as a Germanic religion, but as a Roman faith originally adopted by Barbarians because it had original favor by the IVth century.

Anyway, while Homoeanism became a definite marker of "Barbarity" by the Vth and VIth century (to the point Burgundians, originally Niceans, came to adopt it), it didn't had much of a future by the same period and was mostly yet another cultural trait to differenciate Romans and Barbarians which became virtually undistinguishable (among the laws, clothes, origin stories, etc.) it would likely know the same fate as these, being gradually abandoned as the fusion between Romans and Barbarians (who included a mix of heavily romanized Barbarians and Romans already) in favor of what was the dominant religion including structurally especially in western Romania, more than central regions, due to the more important role of bishops in the militia and local management.
Even before Clovis' conquest of Aquitaine, Alaric II attempted to form sort of compromise with Nicean clergy (that remained essentially dominant within his kingdom) that would have paved the way in all likeness to a "Niceanisation" of Goths early on : which wouldn't have been extraordinarily difficult as the Nicean bishops considered Homoean's baptism as valid and didn't required a new one.

Would Clovis have adopted Homoean's belief? It's technically doable but either out of blue as Barbarians mostly adopted it in the IVth century or as an identitarian feature, but northern Gaul had very little on the way for this. It's not impossible, that being said; if we assume a more difficuly situation for Franks, and the necessity to adopt Homoeanism in order to pay lip service to Theodoric; but at this point Clovis' conquests are either butterflied or importantly challenged.

In a book I recently read, it was claimed that the arianic faith would have led to a more decentralized, local nationalistic church, something that CountPeter suggested above as potential springboard for such a development.
What you describe there is roughly the situation among Barbarian kingdoms until the Carolingian era, Homean or Nicean alike.

Geneviève Bührer-Thierry said:
Western churches always acknwoledged a spiritual primacy to the bishop of Rome, successor of St. Peter, but the pope only rarily intervened on the organisation of different churches, whom matters were decided by councils gathered under royal authority. This moral authority was first reinforced by the active role of Anglo-Saxons on the continent that, as Bonifacius, consulted the pope and abided to his opinion on various matters.

It's the pope too that presided the constitution of new churches in Germania, with the princes' agreement.

But it's essentially the ties made between Rome and Carolingians, that allowed the pope to play an acknowledged role on all Christiendom. To a Church considered as a federation of national Churches succeed a more unitarian conception of a Church under the control and rule of the pope. Political problems met by the different Carolingians kings in the IXth century motivated popes to pose themselves as arbitles of conflicts and to exercice a real moral mandate on the whole Christiendom

We're not really talking about a nationalist church, which would be an anachronism, but a regal Church whom the king (as inheritor of imperium) would manage regional councils as it happened in Francia, Gothia (even if the Councils of Toledo are a bit excentric on some regards), or even the Syndod of Whitby in Northumbria.
 
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