We played the political game with the Order - it ends up being like a unloved Realm. Other Realms dont like it when you influence their politics, they get angry, and burn your temples to the ground, destroy your buildings, and generally attack your priests, while the Realm hosting you either can sit idly by and watch, OR try to defend you and get beat up by everyone because the rest of the Realms like to join in on the beat down to keep out TMP.
Priests and Temples don't have enough influence to play political games UNLESS they are already appointed to regions and your host Realm is incredibly strong. Generally playing political games with a faith is the best way to ensure you DON'T have a faith. It's a lot easier to piss off a Realm than convince even a few of their Lords that you might be useful.
It's far easier to play nice with a few Realms, be apolitical, and build up your inter-realm player base that way. Then those realms fight and you end up with your own faith fighting each other for land.
Outside of SA Ive yet to see a faith that actually holds much power for very long - generally because pushing political goals gets you owned as a Faith very very quickly. Everytime a region changes hands theres a good chance you'll lose the temples there - and if you'll be playing with fire taking it back if your own Realm isn't 100% your faith.
this is very close to my experience with religion.
crippling religions by making them financially and generally dependant on region lords all around, deprives religions of any real chance to play significant role, be it political or apolitical.
on those hypotetical situation when one overly strong realm would commit to support religion leads to one and one only way of playing it, and that is through theocracy.
no mundane powers would ever have interest to spend so much money and efforts to give power... to someone else, that simply counters logic. if religions cannot be powerful on their own, they will not be powerful at all, and will be just negligible decorstibe attachements now and than.
of, course, hypothetically, some religion would spread over continent by being so helpful to each and every region lord who host them, by helping regions by all means, transferring messages etc. but who would bother? who would make effort knowing that he will never be able to become indenpendant power. that is hopeless in my opinion.
