Editing Valkor (section)

==Government==

When the Templars declared the Church of Element to be the official religion in the kingdom of Valkor, they simultaneously issued an order that barred the Church from ever having a central leadership. The official explanation for the ordinance was the need to preserve the purity of the faith and to help the clergy work more closely with the people. But the true reason was no doubt clear to all by then: the Templars wanted to limit the power of the Church. The Church could only consist of individual monasteries, each led by a patriarch with the power of spirit in that monastery. Other monasteries in the Church of Elements have no power over other patriarchs, though their patriarchs and matriarchs can express disapproval.
 
The Templars mandate was a success, and the Church of Elements is today a fragmented entity, both physically and scholastically. However, people cannot be prevented from organizing as they please, and sects based on the elements have arisen within the Church. These began to evolve from the recorded teachings of individual wise priests, and today there are extensive scholarly entities that are recognized by tens of thousands of people throughout the valley.
 
Each elemental sect represents a specific interpretation of the doctrine of the Church of Elements, and while most monasteries acknowledge the support of a single sect, there are  some monasteries that have priests of several sects. So the members of a sect are not united by a common leader, but rather by a common ideology and morality. Church members of the same sect usually offer strong support to each other.
 
The ordinary people are unaffected by this arrangement. They are lectured in weekly sermons by the priest from a nearby monastery, and otherwise have no time for in-depth reflection on Church doctrine. However the sects are not always capable of peaceful coexistence, and the common people sometimes become pawns, and the different sects struggle to claim their souls while slandering the other sects as heretics.