Science Fiction and Religion -- Theology through time and space
By Eleanor Cooley
Disciple World, November 2003
In the 1968 Star Trek episode titled “Bread and Circuses,” Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy visit a planet where they meet a band of primitively dresses people who say they are worshipers of “the sun.” Kirk and company learn that they planet is technologically on par with 20th-Century Earth. The world’s civilization closely resembles that of ancient Rome as it would have been if the Roman Empire had lasted into our own time.
After the usual near catastrophe, Kirk and company return to the starship Enterprise, where they learn that the persecuted Children of the Sun were actually Children of the Son - that is, children of Jesus, who had come 2000 years before but whose word was just now spreading though Rome’s 20th Century.
This was science fiction seeing the recognition of the Messiah’s coming in the 20th Century instead of the First century, in a Roman Empire that never fell.
Science fiction is a medium through which writers and filmmakers express their ideas about ethics, end time, messiah figures, and reality. Many stories overtly discuss religion - for example, Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Others are ore subtle, like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and, more recently, The Matrix.
Religion can be defined as the state of being grasped by an “ultimate Concern”, one that qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of life. This ultimate concern may be a belief in a God who will reward followers with eternal life, as in Christianity, or it may be a state of being like Nirvana, as Buddhists believe. Whatever constitutes a group’s ultimate concern determines that group’s worldview.
Science fiction as the art of the hypothetical has been in a unique position to speculate freely about religious concepts, as both religion and sci-fi deal in matters transcending the everyday world, though “different possibly views of reality.”
A SCI-FI CHRONOLOGY
Before World War 11, English-language science fiction largely ignored religion. Jules Verne’s voyages are more concerned with technology as the ultimate answer to humanity’s problems than with the transcendent. Likewise, H.G.Wells envisions a future in which the notion of the spiritual has disappeared. When religion appears in these writings at all, it is primitive.
In the late 1940s and 1950s North American culture was basically optimistic. We had the bomb, after all. We were invincible. But the science fiction of this era is predominantly pessimistic, envisioning all kinds of horrible repercussions because we have the bomb. This is the era of movies such as Them, in which an explosion at the Trinity Atomic Test Site causes ants to become gigantic.
In the 1959 Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. looks far into Earth’s future when, after many near destructions and recoveries, Christianity is carried into space as Earth is destroyed.
In the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, society as a whole became much more pessimistic and cynical - while science fiction became optimistic again. Books like Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which became a kid of bible for the so-called love generation, and Herbert’s Dune series show a much more optimistic view of the future of humanity.
On television, Star Trek and its offshoots sometimes evince clearly religious themes that show an optimistic view of a future in which we solve our problems on Earth, overcome prejudice and poverty, and so are free to venture into space.
The Star Wars movies in the early 1980s are based on a Chinese Taoist understanding of reality. This mystical view conceives of a Tao, or way, that pervades all of creation and is made up of both good and evil. The theme of good triumphing in Star Wars is ultimately optimistic. Throughout the past six decades, science fiction has served almost as a mirror, reflecting the religious and cultural needs of each era.
RELIGION OF THE FUTURE?
As participation in mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches has declined in the last 30 years, science fiction has offered an alternative means for exploring philosophical and theological questions in the popular culture. By projecting needs, hopes, and dreams onto the future through science fiction, the sacred - when defined as that which is ultimately important - is not lost in the broader culture. Rather such a definition suggests that the sacred is being honored, but in new forms. For example, the Star Trek voyagers cannot go anywhere without running into some cosmically powerful being or a kind of psychic awakening.
Even though the genre focuses on the future, it sources are often from the past. The alien races so common in sci-fi are strongly reminiscent of the gods, angles, demons, and fairies of ancient legends and religions. Thus, the tendency for human cultures to revisit and repeat the past has given way to an aspiration toward a future that projects similar ideals to to those which first inspired our forebears.
Christianity revisits its past through the telling of stories and the enactment of liturgy. When the church rereads the scriptures as a message of promise and hope, it interprets the future as a time marked by the healing of all humanity and justice for all creation. Jesus’ ministry and teachings may encourage new expressions of faith for the future that are nearly as varied as the widest expressions coming from science fiction. The church has only to open itself and enter in.
Eleanor Cooley, MA, University of Kansas. Disciple World, November 2003
Mayo Moss, Other Worlds, Other Gods
Tim Maroney, “Science Fiction and the Mystic Future”, Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions (Summer, 1994)