Over at Religion Dispatches, scholars Gabriel Mckee and Nick Street take a look at the growing intersection of religion and science fiction. From the formerly satirical Church of Jediism, to the intense religion-soaked warfare of Battlestar Galactica. According to both authors, the convergence of religion and science fiction fandom may provide a road-map for the future of religion.

“Nick Street’s recent essay on Battlestar Galactica viewed the show as a harbinger of the future of religion whose fans’ immersion in media and technology becomes a sort of spiritual practice in itself. One of the strangest religion stories in recent memory also involves a science fictional religion: the Church of Jediism … the [recent drunken] Vader attack [on members of the church] opens a window into an international new religious movement that, like Battlestar Galactica, may show us the shape of faith to come.”

McKee acknowledges that the confluence of sci-fi and faith is hardly new, obliquely referencing the Heinlein-inspired Pagan religion of The Church of All Worlds, and noting the sci-fi-faith of Scientology.

“Of course, neither BSG nor Star Wars is the first science fictional religion to gain prominence. The hedonistic Martian religion described by Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land was a direct influence on late-60s communes, and Scientology was launched with an article in an issue of Astounding Science Fiction.”

Street, in his essay, hints that the demographical “nones” and “spiritual but not religious”, who are a prime component of sci-fi fandom, could very well be gestating the faiths of the future from the modern “Dionysian” Western theatrical tradition of movies and television.

“If the fate of the Dionysian cults that birthed the Western theatrical tradition holds any lesson for American Catholicism, mainline Protestantism and the other traditional religious institutions that are shedding members—and isn’t it delightful to think that it might?—it’s that the interplay between inspiration and the forms of religious practice and observance must always be fluid. Imposing a sober orthodoxy on rituals intended to pierce the veil that separates the mundane from the sublime almost always diminishes the force of the experience; then, as Plato observes in the Ion, priests and poets become ‘like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind.’”

There is every possibility, as we continue to move into a post-Christian world, that modern Paganism will soon be joined by any number of sci-fi fandom cults at ecumenical councils and inter-faith gatherings. The question is how will the large numbers of nature-oriented Pagans deal with science-oriented futurist religionists? Will there be tensions, or will we both see ourselves as fruits from the same “Dionysian” tree.

ADDENDUM: By using the phrase “nature-oriented” I wasn’t trying to set up an either-or dichotomy between nature and technology, only that science-fiction-based NRMs may have very different theologies from modern Pagan religions (many of which sacralize the natural world to differing degrees). These may (or may not) create tensions between the groups. Personally, I love my modern technology, including the laptop I use to write on this blog.