White Box Religion

Clerics & Deities
One of the things about White Box that has always struck me as rather unusual is the inclusion of the Cleric as one of the three original character classes. A number of rule sets which followed hard on the White Box, Tunnels & Trolls, and In The Labyrinth for example, offer only the warrior and wizard options. The cleric class offers a combination of fairly good combat ability with supportive spell casting and therefore gives White Box and later editions of the game a PC option that helps set D&D apart. The cleric is a nice in-between PC for players that want to stand toe-to-toe with the monsters in combat, yet have access to some of the "magic" that makes fantasy gaming special.
Appendix N supplies us with a list of sources (as well as inspirational reading!) that supposedly influenced the white box development and it isn't hard to find certain aspects of the rules which are very similar in form to tropes found in the listed works, such as the paladin in Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson. Inspiration for the cleric seems to come more from the historic middle ages, especially the crusader monk/knights of the Templar and Hospitlar Orders. Mr. Gygax and Mr. Arneson were members of a gaming group called the Castle and Crusades Society, so perhaps that is where the idea for the cleric originates.
Clerics are obviously religious and their magic is divine, both imply the worship of one or more deities who actually exist and who intervene in the affiars of men (at least through granting their clerics spells). This implies a great deal about the default setting/milieu of the White Box (and later editions) and the creators of same. Often in the Sword & Sorcery (S&S) literature of Appendix N the gods seem indifferent to the needs of their worshipers. Seldom do they intervene or make an appearance. The Elric novels of Michael Moorcock being an exception to this (and several other standard S&S conventions). Of course White Box does not explicitly state the cleric need worship a god and for many years I played the game without gods. Clerics in "my world" had all the standard cleric abilities with no stated connection to a deity or pantheon. It seems to work fine that way and was rather more consistent, I thought, with the writers I mostly read in the 1970's (J.R.R. Tolkien, R.E. Howard and Fritz Leiber).
Most published settings, and the latest editions of the game, include a pantheon of deities who are often central players in the mega-plot of the setting. Even other rule systems that do not include a cleric PC class frequently make heavy use of deities. The nature of a setting's deities says much about that milieu and together with character generation, magic system, the bestiary and experience system are major defining elements of a game. The cleric, with or without an accompanying deity, brings an iconic role to the default White Box setting and helps set White Box apart from other iterations of fantasy. For me, the cleric class is like a signature and lasting tribute to the creator(s) of the game and their Castle and Crusade Society.