'SF is historical fiction’s antimatter twin, its futures reflecting and extending the historic past.'

Science fiction author Philip Purser-Hallard looks at faith in an increasingly futuristic world

Listing the top five science fiction Popes back in my August column reminded me of one of the more fruitful areas where faith and science fiction (SF) collide: the intersection of Future History with Church History.

SF is historical fiction’s antimatter twin, its futures reflecting and extending the historic past. It’s not surprising that the church – dominating as it does the history we study in the West – should be a major player in many of the futures thus envisaged.

Not all SF authors agree, of course. Some predict confidently – if rather plaintively – that our inexorable advances in scientific rationality will render all forms of religion obsolete any day now. Others, no more historically plausible, simply ignore faith as irrelevant to their streamlined, backlit, disturbingly homogeneous futures.

Star Trek ’s utopian Federation is a case in point, disquietingly devoid of earthly (as opposed to alien) religions. We never find out quite what happened to all the religious humans in the Star Trek universe, but it was evidently something terribly discouraging.

Faust Contact

Still, SF which does feature the church often gives it a starring role – whether as hero or villain. Sometimes it’s shown making a surprise comeback, often in the new Dark Ages which inevitably seem to follow global holocausts.

The best of this sub-genre is Walter M Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which the Abbey of St Leibowitz preserves the relics of a physicist who may have precipitated a nuclear apocalypse. The novel takes a cyclical (and cynical) view of history, ending after a millennium with the church once more a cultural backwater, the secular world around it hurtling towards a second Armageddon.

Equally depressing are the futures where the church enjoys resurgence only through a Faustian bargain with a totalitarian state. The propaganda posters in Alan Moore’s dystopian graphic novel V for Vendetta proclaim ‘Strength Through Purity – Purity Through Faith’, and the church of this future England is shown to be as corrupt as the fascist government it condones.

A similar unholy alliance underpins Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, with women conscripted into breeding, gays and Muslims routinely executed and the mass media turned over to state propaganda, courtesy of the former televangelists who rule the emergent North American Republic of Gilead.

A New Pope

Some fictional future churches are simply weird. One future Pope who didn’t make my top five is Innocent XIV, the elderly pontiff who undergoes experimental rejuvenation treatment in Bruce Sterling’s novel Holy Fire.

The newly young and vigorous Innocent proceeds to revolutionise the church, introducing sacramental hallucinogens which make miraculous apparitions of the Virgin and saints routine occurrences.

Far more plausibly, some SF chooses to show a future church much like the present one – a part of society, in the world (and indeed others) yet looking beyond it, impinging on the lives of individuals in different ways at different times.

The TV series Babylon 5 departs from the Trek model in exploring the religious beliefs of human as well as alien characters, and even shows a community of monks settling on the titular space station.

One episode, Passing through Gethsemane, explores a moral dilemma from a profoundly theological viewpoint, questioning whether one Brother Edward – a murderer ‘mercifully’ brainwashed to forget his past – can ever repent his sins and be forgiven.

SF like this presents the church as neither hero nor villain, but no mere bit-part either. Its future church is a faithful reflection of the present church we experience: a comfort to many, a vocation to a few, a source of perennial contention for others.

Such portrayals, being the most honest, may also be the most inspiring of all.

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