Except that religious affiliation is frequently not exactly voluntary. That’s not to say that it’s usually involuntary, exactly, but if you grow up in an environment that is passively or explicitly hostile to those who aren’t a part of the religion you are taught is true from birth, it can lead to some pretty powerful indoctrination. When you complain about doing your duty in the military, that’s not really valid because you signed up, then went to boot camp.

Boot camp is designed to break you down and build you back up as a soldier over the course of weeks or months.

A religious upbringing is designed to build you up from the beginning as a soldier for your god. Literally. I was raised christian and repeatedly told that I was a soldier in god’s army.

And I don’t mean that in a creepy cult way, either. That’s just standard rhetoric. Monotheism especially does this, where the faith is treated like a military campaign, and they say it’s a metaphor, but they’re still talking about having the kind of devotion to duty that it takes to volunteer to stand on a battlefield and kill or be killed for your cause. Martyrs and generals are the heroes of a lot of religions.

So Lief basically went through boot camp and then was offered the chance to sign up. That wasn’t voluntary. If you spend a child’s life telling them they’ll burn in hell if they don’t follow the teachings of your god, when someone offers them the opportunity to become a monk and they take it, it isn’t about tranquility so much as it’s about fear and brainwashing.

I am surprised that Lief hasn’t been utterly destroyed by this decision for weeks, months, or years. I am pleasantly surprised that someone so indoctrinated is being depicted as able to throw it off like that, but it’s not that easy.

I’m an atheist, and I still catch myself talking to a god that isn’t there sometimes, because this stuff is as ingrained in me as your military training is in you. Religious thinking is not honestly much different from aiming for center of mass or saluting a general. They are reflexive things. But you asked someone to give you the reflex and the duty. Lief was raised in a culture where “celibate monk” is possibly the only career his friends and family would have expected.

There is no dereliction of duty where the duty is not voluntary, and there is no voluntary duty in a religious context, because religion, especially that you are raised with, holds a metaphysical gun to your temple to make you conform and promote the faith.