Democratic religion?

[mindstalk]

Pantheons seem to imitate their societies, from the brawling barbarian gods of the Norse and Greeks to the Celestial Bureaucracy of China, with household gods filing reports on their families to the Jade Emperor. I was wondering what religion a democratic society might develop after a couple thousand years, say if Athens had avoided being crushed by the Macedonians, Romans, or Christians. Data points I can think of are the relative egalitarianism of forager societies, coupled with animism, and, in a way more "exotic", my mother's favorite set of plays, the Oresteia, which culminate in Apollo and Athena defending Orestes against the Erinyes in a court of law. You also have a few hundred years of small-scale democracy in Switzerland and New England, but in a much larger Christian matrix. I don't know if the 400 years of the Roman Republic have anything interesting to contribute here.

I miss my parents; they'd have found this pretty interesting.