Serving a god or oath seems inherently different than knowing about religion.
I always interpreted it as knowledge of religion in general. You can be faithful to a god, but knowing what rites, edicts, ceremonies, rituals, holy texts, and even history of other religions is separate from that.
Like, if you are Catholic, does that mean you know all about other religions like Judaism or Islam?
Yeah, like the proficiency represents training and study, but an Int (religion) check usually involves knowledge of deities, mythology or symbology. That said, you might rule that a practical application of that knowledge, such as how to perform ceremonial rites, might constitute a Wisdom or Charisma check instead.
Something I’ve always liked about White Wolfs d10 systems is the ability to roll a skill against any attribute depending on situation.
If I’m rolling to determine knowledge of religion, int+religion.
If I’m rolling to verify I’m performing a ritual correctly, wis+religion.
If I’m rolling to dodge the advances of the local priest, dex+religion.
D&D has that too
The issue isn’t really there, but that it’s also the check for knowing about your own religion.
DMs: if a character wants to know something about their own religion, a good solution to this is to just tell them, rather than requiring a check (or if you want the group to make checks for something obscure, give a bonus or a lowered DC to someone if they’re a member of that faith.)
Religion checks are about recalling knowledge, which is intelligence. It’s already a severely neglected stat, it doesn’t need to be made worse for the sake of making clerics more SAD.
INT is a pretty powerful stat if your DM has done a lot of work to put lore into the world and then has plots that rely on it - and it’s pretty good for monster knowledge checks. At the right table INT is probably the most important stat to have!
Having said that WIS covering perception means it needs no help.
The solution to sad clerics is to just assume they know things it’d be sensible for them to know, without a check needed, and reserve Religion checks for stuff that they wouldn’t know, like “the stats of a mummy” or “the rites of Azmodeus”
Checks are only supposed to be for things there is a possibility for failure for. So a Cleric of Pelor probably wouldn’t need to roll to recognize a symbol of Pelor or to know about specific Rites of Pelor. Knowledge(Religion), and later Religion(Intelligence), would be for general knowledge of religions or more esoteric religious knowledge. Having Proficiency in Religion shows that they had studied it, but not all Clerics would be scholars that pursue even further knowledge of the subjects.
Couple that with the ability tied to skills in 5e are suggestions, and the checks absolutely can be altered depending on the situation. Religion(Wisdom) would be perfectly in-line for a Cleric to make if that would make more sense for the roll.
Zeus would answer to CHR
IMO, religious checks should be inverse intelligence checks.
IE the higher your int, the more likely you suck at religion.
Intelligence is just knowing things and being able to process things, so in theory knowing about religion would be intelligence, however in religion knowing the *significance* of things is much more important, so it should really be wisdom…
Low intelligence may mean you follow blindly, but ask the average religious person the reasoning for The Great Schism and they’ll probably pull a blank. Ask an irreligious trivia expert and they’ll probably be able to tell you about how it was a disagreement over some traditions and the powers of the pope and who it should be which resulted in Christianity splitting in two in the 11th century, but it would take wisdom to know why it was significant, and why Catholics/Orthodox have historically disliked each other less than either/Muslims, along with a bunch of other useful contextual information which is lost when regurgitating facts