The Faith of the Seven
The dominant religion of the Seven Kingdoms ÔÇö septons, septas, and the Most Devout, and in troubled times the armed and barefoot Faith Militant.
The fuller tale
The Faith of the Seven arrived in Westeros with the Andals and outlasted every kingdom they conquered, worshipping one god with seven aspects ÔÇö Father, Mother, Warrior, Smith, Maiden, Crone, Stranger ÔÇö rather than seven separate deities, a theology precise enough that septons spend entire careers explaining the distinction to skeptical northmen who kept the old gods instead. Its great sept in King's Landing, raised on Visenya's Hill, made the capital the Faith's spiritual seat as much as the crown's political one, and for most of the realm's history the two authorities coexisted by mostly staying out of each other's business.
That arrangement had a violent precedent the story's present mostly forgets: the Faith once fielded its own armed orders, the Warrior's Sons and the Poor Fellows, a militant wing willing to make war on kings it judged unrighteous, until Maegor the Cruel crushed the movement and stripped the Faith of the right to bear arms at all. For a hundred and fifty years afterward, the Faith Militant existed only as history ÔÇö until Cersei Lannister, looking for a weapon to use against a rival house, personally restores its arms and its charter, on the theory that a barefoot fanatic in her debt will make a more biddable weapon than any soldier she could hire.
The theory fails spectacularly and in exactly the direction anyone paying attention should have predicted. The High Sparrow, once armed, recognizes no debt to the queen who armed him, and the movement he leads ÔÇö drawn from war refugees and the pious poor who have watched the great houses tear the realm apart for a crown ÔÇö turns its restored authority on the nobility indiscriminately, Cersei very much included. Her own walk of atonement, stripped and shorn and marched through a city she once ruled while a septa tolls a bell behind her, is the precise humiliation she had engineered for someone else, redirected back at its architect with the Faith's blessing.
The page and the screen
The published books have not yet reached the Faith Militant crisis's resolution ÔÇö Cersei's trial by the Faith is still pending as of the last volume, the Great Sept of Baelor has not been destroyed, and the movement's theological roots in Andal history and the earlier Faith-versus-Crown wars under Maegor the Cruel receive considerably more grounding on the page than the show's more compressed treatment allows. Where the show resolves the entire conflict in wildfire within two seasons, the books are still building toward a confrontation whose shape and outcome remain unwritten.
