Separation of Church and Spaceship I
On the question of whether religion and science fiction are at odds with each other, I think the answer is a qualified yes.
Portrayal of religion as a human institution, is, of course, part of SF or any literature, much the same way that portraying the odd customs of distant islanders is part of a travel literature. The fact that Ming of Mongo worships the Great God Dyzan is merely an interesting bit of local color, and so is the fact that in 200000000 AD, the people of Gonwandaland, the super-continent arising from the seas of the post-historic future, will worship Ptath, Ineznia, and L’Onee.
Portrayal of religion as a divine institution is very rare, for the very simple reason that belief in divinities is widely regarded as an unscientific belief, not the proper subject for science fiction speculation. The ‘Outsider’ in NIGHTSIDE THE LONG SUN by Gene Wolfe is arguable an honest-to-goodness God; but the other gods are computer imprints of dead tyrants: ghosts. Fakes.
Science Fiction takes at least some of its inspiration from Mark Twain. Reading nearly any book from the early days, one recognizes the Connecticut Yankee and his Yankee can-do know-how, or a close cousin, Heinlein’s Competent Man. Science Fiction in general regards religion much as the Connecticut Yankee regarded the black magic of Merlin: hokum. Bunk.
Skepticism of religion has been a major theme in SF from the STAR TREK movie where Spock shoots God with a phaser canon, through the use of the Great Galactic Spirit as a fraud in Asimov’s Foundation series, through the Church of Fosterism as a fraud in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND and as another kind of fraud in SIXTH COLUMN by Heinlein, all the way back to Olaf Stabledon and HG Wells, whose views, to say the least, were not those of the religious mainstream of their day. Some of these men were Left in their politics (HG Wells was, certainly), but Science Fiction by its nature challenges tradition, and concentrates on how the future will change us.
Even SF stories that portray religion in the futures as recognizably related to our own, such as in DUNE (the Fremen are Zensunni, i.e. Zen Sunni, that is, Buddhist Mohammedans) or in ENDYMION (a Catholic Church dystopia) or in Gordon R. Dickon’s DORSAI books (The Friendly are Space Puritans) once again emphasize how these institutions would differ from our own, almost beyond recognition.
SF books that are positive toward religion, usually relegate religion to the background (The Norlaminians in SKYLARK OF SPACE, for example, seem to have a vaguely Protestant Deism, no doubt worshipping the same Great Cosmic Spirit that Klatuu mentions in DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL who alone possesses the power of life and death).
And this is for the quite reasonable reason that dwelling on religion in a positive way, as a divine institution rather than a corrupt human institution, departs the story from Science Fiction. If your story has in it a Church guided by the Holy Spirit according to Heaven’s Plan rather than Seldon’s Plan, you are no longer in a scientific universe. Ergo skepticism of religion is natural for Science Fiction: the default assumption.
I should mention this is not some special peculiarity of SF. You can have ghosts or monsters in a Pirate story, for example, or other spooky elements, but if Captain Jack Sparrow is rescued from danger by an Angel of the Lord, you have departed from a Pirate story, and are now writing devotional fiction. On the other hand, if the religious element is handled merely for its spooky flavor, and not to make a homily, this is a counter example: when Indiana Jones sees the Nazis melted for tampering with the Ark of the Covenant, the Angel of the Lord there is simply an eerie occult power, no more ‘religious’ than the strange lights seen in the sky in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Jones is still solidly in the realm of boy’s adventure fiction, because the religious element is used not to encourage devotion in Jewish or Christian or Muslim morality, but merely to say that There Are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.
Science Fiction is also prone to utopianism, at least in its early incarnations. Utopian planners regard human society as a machine to be tinkered with until the outcomes are right. One could make the argument that any social engineering scheme, from libertarian near-anarchies to socialist new world orders, are based on the axiom that human moral codes, laws, and customs are human inventions subject to no greater authority than man’s will or whim: and that this axiom naturally allies itself to secularism: a default assumption. If you think marriage is a sacrament, you talk about it differently than if you think the rules are no less arbitrary than traffic laws telling you which side of the street to drive on.
This does not imply that Science Fiction writers are necessarily atheists or agnostic, although, God knows, many of them are. Many very religious men are very suspicious of religious institutions, particularly ones with political power. You will hear more skepticism uttered when a Protestant and a Catholic debate than an atheist with a deist, and quite a bit of that old Odium Theologicum.
What is the count of denominations in SF? The freethinkers are fairly numerous, but we have a surprising number of old-fashioned church-going types among our number, not to mention a Buddhist or two.
See Also
- Separation of Church and Spaceship I
- Separation of Church and Spaceship II
- Separation of Church and Spaceship III
- Separation of Church and Spaceship IV
- Separation of Church and Spaceship V
- Separation of Church and Spaceship VI
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
