"Cellar-Christians": What it Really Means When an SF Author Says Religion Doesn't Exist in the Future

They walked around the chalet... At one side, they saw the top of a cellar window brightly illuminated and heard the muffled chant of voices: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."

"Cellar-Christians!" Foyle exclaimed.

He and Robin peered through the window. Thirty worshipers of assorted faiths were celebrating the New Year with a combined and highly illegal service. The 25th century had not yet abolished God, but it had abolished organized religion.

"No wonder the house is man-trapped," Foyle said. "Filthy practices like that. Look, they've got a priest and a rabbi, and that thing behind them is a crucifix."

"Did you ever stop to think what swearing is?" Robin asked quietly. "You say 'Jesus' and 'Jesus Christ.' Do you know what that is?"

"Just swearing, that's all. Like 'ouch' or 'damn.'"

"No, it's religion. You don't know it, but there are two thousand years of meaning behind words like that."

"This is no time for dirty talk," Foyle said impatiently. "Save it for later. Come on."

--Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

A few months ago, a couple of blogs made the argument (or at least stated the assumption) that SF doesn't deal with religion, or that humans in SF aren't religious, or some combination of the above. At a glance, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination proves this—religion has been outlawed, and the hero is disgusted by it. But take a look at this passage from a few pages later, when Gully Foyle visits one of the seedier sections of Rome and hears the following solicitation:

"Filthy pictures, signore? Cellar-Christians, kneeling, praying, singing psalms, kissing cross? Very naughty."

In The Stars My Destination, religion has been suppressed, but it cannot be destroyed. Indeed, by presenting religion with the terminology of pornography, Bester places the spiritual drive on a primal level equal to that of the sexual drive. By the time he introduces the Skoptsies, an extreme religious group that cuts off all of its sensory nerves (and which takes its name from a 19th-century self-castrating Christian sect), it's far more reasonable to conclude that Bester thinks human beings must be religious, even if his protagonist is not. And some additional evidence that's more-or-less completely unconnected beyond the fact that I just finished reading it: In Philip K. Dick's The Crack in Space, when a portal into a parallel dimension populated by Homo erectus pekinensis, one character's biggest fear is that their religion will be more advanced than ours:

"They may have developed into areas which we've never even imagined. Scientifically, philosophically, even technically, in terms of machinery and industrial techniques, sources of power, medicines—in fact every area, from contraceptive devices to visions of God."

There's some merit to the argument that SF's protagonists don't necessarily talk about their religious beliefs, and I have a half-written post lying around that talks about the nicely subtle role that faith plays in Gary K. Wolfe and Archbishop John J. Myer's recent book Space Vulture. But consider: does personal faith play that big a role in non-SF writing from the last century, either? Sure, you can name a handful of mainstream novels about faith, but I can do the same with SF. Considering the great degree to which SF deals with matters of religion in general (if not matters of personal faith in the evangelical sense), it's a whole lot more religious than non-SF. So there. Who says SF ain't religious?

Comments

[DroidRules]

Heartily agree.

Heaps of interesting perspectives on my faith (and others) in scifi.

If what you believe in cannot be discussed from a positive and negative perspective it is not worth believing in (IMHO)

[Åka]

Wow, I had completely forgotten (or missed) that aspect of The Stars My Destination. I almost want to read it again.

By the way, I'm now half way through your book. Very interesting.

[Silence Indigo]

Another example to add of religious censorship: Orson Scott Card's ENDER'S GAME, where the boy Ender remembers from childhoold his mother praying over him while he pretended sleeping, so that he wouldn't know and be ashamed of her illegal faith. ENDER'S GAME, a Hugo and Nebula award SF winner, is vibrant with faith and purpose as driving themes.

In my humble opinion, some of this absence of faith in SF and general may be simply related to SF writers' general mindset: many are geek techies, more interested in technological gimmicks, statistical control and the controversial paradigm of scientific positivism, if not actually sympathetic to Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy.

After all, SF stories also seldom speak about Love beyond individual relationships, the purpose of mankind, interpersonal feelings, moral dilemmas and subjective experiences. After all, there's the word "science" in "science fiction", and science nowadays is usually equated with radical, atheistic positivism.

Those exceptions, such as Gene Wolf, O.S. Card and Philip K. Dick, tend to have overwhelming themes of faith in their works, on the contrary.

Maybe just some repercussion of that old "left brain, right brain" personnality classification style. Fantasy writers are perhaps more "artistic", less "techie" than SF writers on the whole.