Two things are worth separating at the outset, because critics of these adaptations usually blur them and then get dismissed for it. The complaint is not that the adaptations fail to be reverent. It is that they fail to be comprehending — they cannot render a worldview in which religious claims are load-bearing, and so they quietly rebuild the source material on foundations the original author never used. That is a craft failure before it is anything else.
The Númenor problem
The Rings of Power is the cleanest case because the material it adapts is, at its center, a story about apostasy. The fall of Númenor in Tolkien is not primarily a political collapse. It is a religious one: a people who had been given long life and the friendship of the Valar come to resent the one prohibition laid on them, and Sauron’s conquest is achieved not by arms but by liturgy — he becomes the king’s priest, redirects worship to Melkor, and institutes human sacrifice in a temple built for the purpose. The Faithful and the King’s Men are a confessional schism. Their quarrel is over whether the Ban is legitimate and whether death is a gift or a theft.
The series renders this as court politics: guild anxieties, a succession crisis, suspicion of foreigners, a queen regent managing factions. The White Tree and the Valar appear, but as heraldry and atmosphere rather than as claims anyone is staking a life on. What is lost is not piety; it is motive. Without the theology, Ar-Pharazôn is an ambitious man who makes a bad strategic decision, which is a story you have seen a hundred times. With it, he is a man who decides that mortality is an injustice and that the remedy is to storm the shore of the deathless. Tolkien described his work as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” and whatever one makes of his particular commitments, he meant something operational by it: providence, sub-creation, and the corruption of worship are the engine, not the paint.
In fairness, part of this is legal rather than ideological. Amazon licensed The Lord of the Rings and its appendices, not The Silmarillion or the unfinished writings, which is where most of the Númenórean religious architecture actually lives. But rights constraints explain what the writers could name; they do not explain the instinct to fill the resulting hole with modern political anxieties rather than with religious ones invented for the purpose.
The Mary Bennet problem
The BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister, which ran ten episodes this spring, is the same operation performed on a smaller and more revealing target. Mary Bennet is the one character in Pride and Prejudice defined by religion. Her conversation is moral sententiae; she reads Fordyce; she is Austen’s portrait of piety without understanding — someone who has acquired the vocabulary of virtue without the thing itself. That is a religious joke, and it only works inside a religious frame. Austen is not mocking seriousness about the moral life. She is mocking a counterfeit of it, and the standard she measures Mary against is the same standard by which she measures Mr. Collins and, differently, Elizabeth.
Hadlow’s novel keeps some of this; the series does not. Reviewers have described it as a bold feminist narrative about a young woman finding her voice, one that nods openly to twenty-first-century sensibilities, and it converts Mary from someone who repeats what she reads without understanding it into a genuinely bright radical thinker stifled by her society. Once that swap is made, Mary’s moralism can no longer be a spiritual condition. It has to be a symptom — of neglect, of a nasty mother, of a world with no other outlet for a clever girl. Her arc becomes a therapeutic one: the piety was the wound, and the cure is London, the Lake District, and self-possession.
Notice what disappears. Austen’s actual diagnosis of Mary is available and dramatically richer: that a person can be genuinely devout and genuinely vain at the same time, that religion can be pursued as a competitive accomplishment like playing the pianoforte badly in company, and that the remedy is not liberation but self-knowledge. That is a harder, stranger, funnier story than the one about a stifled radical.
Why it keeps happening
The underlying assumption is what Charles Taylor called a subtraction story — the belief that religion is a layer over human beings rather than a structure inside them, so that removing it exposes the real motives underneath: power, status, desire, trauma. A writer working from that premise will always read a devout character’s stated reasons as a screen for unstated ones, because that is what the premise instructs. Sincere belief becomes unwritable except as fanaticism, hypocrisy, or a coping mechanism. Nobody in these productions is ordinarily, unremarkably observant, which is what nearly everyone in a Regency parish or a Númenórean city would have been.
The practical consequences are severe for anyone trying to dramatize a pre-modern society, because a huge share of historical behavior is only legible through categories these writers have no working grasp of: oath, vow, sacrilege, blasphemy, blessing and curse, holy days as the shape of the year, providence as a plot logic, sin as an offense against God rather than a harm to another person. Take those away and you cannot explain why a man keeps a ruinous promise, why an army halts, why a woman refuses a good match, why anyone dies rather than say a sentence. So the adaptation substitutes what it can write — romance, ambition, trauma, institutional injustice — and the result is people in costume.
What comprehension actually requires
It is not agreement. Scorsese’s Silence and Malick’s A Hidden Life are made by people who take Catholic categories seriously enough to dramatize them as real stakes; The Northman does the same for Norse fate and vengeance without endorsing either. The requirement is more like translation competence: the adaptor has to know the internal grammar of the belief system well enough to know what it costs to hold it, what counts as a violation, what a character would fear, and what would constitute relief. Then the belief can generate plot rather than decorate it.
Three specific disciplines follow. First, read the source author’s theological vocabulary as technical language, not period flavor — Austen’s principle, duty, candour, vanity are catechetical terms with definitions, and mistranslating them produces a different novel. Second, treat the worldview as true-for-the-characters and let it have consequences, including consequences the modern audience will dislike. Third, resist the impulse to supply a character who thinks as the audience does; the appeal of the historical mode is precisely that its inhabitants do not.
The cost of not doing this is not merely that religious viewers feel slighted. It is that the adaptations become interchangeable, since every past becomes the present in different clothes, and that audiences are trained in an assumption — that people never really believed any of it — which makes both the past and most of the present world harder to understand.
