Science Fiction and the Dangers of Dismissing Faith
“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.”
One of my favorite science fiction films is The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington, which explores the power of faith to both manipulate and motivate. In this apocalyptic story, all sacred texts have been destroyed and Denzel follows a call to deliver a copy of the Bible to the one outpost trying to preserve wisdom and knowledge. Religion can motivate its adherents to fly commercial airlines into the Twin Towers. It can also motivate Irish monks to maintain the records of Western civilization, copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost.
It was of interest to me, therefore, that we are watching a nation, once powerful but now humbled by defeat by another superpower, exert its waning militaristic power on a much smaller people group. A nation that is literally razing a capital city without regard to the innocent civilians that are killed in the process. A subtext to the story is the alignment of religion and state that has nurtured resentment and fueled nationalist ambition, and the tacit approval of the religious leaders for their nation’s aggression.
This is the story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is also the story of the Anacreons in Episode 6 of Apple’s Foundation series, based on Issac Asimov’s science fiction opus, which explores cultural and nation-state conflicts that implicate religious belief.
Over the past several weeks I've been struck by the convergence of fact and fiction watching the saga unfold in Ukraine at the same time as watching the Apple+ series. The Russian invasion is an extension of the centuries-old conflicts in Europe that have more often than not been linked to religion, as well as the more recent conflicts between modernity and religion. As the West, and particularly western elites, become more removed from religion, it is to their peril that they overlook the role that it plays in people’s identities and global affairs, even in their own backyard.
Issac Asimov, the author of Foundation and an avowed atheist, understood the peril of underestimating the potency of religion, although at the same time he rejected its claim to truth:
“Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous,” Asimov wrote. “How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern.”
In Foundation, mathematician Hari Seldon predicts, based on “psychohistory”, the fall of the Empire to religious adherents and subsequent fall into a millennial-long dark age. In its hubris of rationality, the Empire dismisses the possibility of defeat by something as “irrational” as religion, and subsequently falls victim to it. Asimov’s Foundation points to the danger of dismissing the potency of faith.
Miroslav Volf, head of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, notes that despite its crucial role in the lives of billions of people, there is a widespread view, especially in the West, that faith is increasingly irrelevant or even a barrier to meeting modern challenges: “The links between the religious, economic, and political forces shaping our world are too rarely explored or explained. Intentional and sustained reflection on the critical issues of faith and globalization leads to the kind of reconciliation and peaceful coexistence that the 21st century demands.”
Clapham undertook research into the role that religion can play in violent radicalization and spent some time with Dr. Volf to understand his perspective on countering it. He impressed on two things: first, that one of the greatest dangers he has seen to individual liberty is the marriage of religion to the state; and second, that the counterweight to radicalized religion is not secular atheism, but faithful discipleship within a given religious tradition. All major religious systems have the antidote to violence built into them, but secular elites are ill-equipped to discern the difference.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow performs a divine liturgy at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to mark the feast day of Our Lady of Kazan, Moscow, Russia, Nov. 4, 2021 PHOTO: MIKHAIL TERESHCHENKO/ZUMA PRESS
Several months ago, Vladimir Putin gave a talk at the Valdai Discussion Club, framing Russia as the vanguard in a growing confrontation with progressivism, thereby presenting Russia as a defender of traditionalist values. “We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our own historical tradition, and the culture of our multiethnic nation,” he said. “The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of new and better consciousness … their prescriptions are not new at all … after 1917 the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society.”
This is the same concern heard from social and religious conservatives here at home in the US, who echo Putin’s perspective that neo-Marxist ideologies promote “the destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family.” He goes on to name cancel-culture, the downgrading of western classic literature, reverse discrimination, and gender norms as further evidence of this influence.
Noting this perspective is not to justify Putin’s actions, quite the opposite. What he is doing is evil, and I use that term with all its moral and spiritual connotation intentionally. The invasion of Ukraine is an unjustified response to a clash of civilizations, but what has been missed by many is that Putin has been signaling that his growing confrontation with the West is motivated by more than a nationalistic desire to expand Russia’s geographic boundaries.
Putin’s close alignment with the Russian Orthodox Church and its reciprocal tacit support for the invasion has also been underreported in the media, as has the complexity between Ukraine’s two dominant Orthodox religious communities, one tied to Ukraine’s national identity and the other historically aligned with the Russian patriarch. This conflict could lead to a historic split within the Eastern Orthodox Church.
I addressed modernity’s deafness to the spiritual dimension of life in my graphic novel The Blessed Machine, based on EM Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops”, in which the elite’s blind allegiance to technology keeps them from seeing the way out of its control over their lives.
One of our missions at Clapham, and to some extent a business proposition, is to help elite institutions “see” the role of faith in people’s lives, in culture and its flourishing, and even in global affairs to help them explore constructive, mutual partnerships with religious institutions.
Although religion can be used destructively to manipulate, it can also be a partner to progress, promote peace, and serve as a necessary component of personal wellbeing and cultural flourishing. Could an intervention by global Christian ecclesial bodies, appealing to the Russian patriarch on biblical grounds, have an impact on Putin? It is certainly possible. For example, it was his religious affiliation and desire to be faithful to his Christian tradition that led South African President F. W. de Klerk to pursue the end of apartheid. According to the Rev. Pieter W. Bingle, Mr. de Klerk's Cape Town minister, the President put it simply: ''Dialogue is God's style.''
The question for our public policy officials, global elites, foundations, and others with outsized influence on our lives is not whether religion is an obstacle to progress, but how it should be engaged constructively for the betterment of all.
Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) and Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) are academics, exiled to an inhospitable planet for defying the galaxy in an attempt to preserve it.
In Foundation, it is revealed that Harry Seldon made plans to kill himself and become a martyr and a myth to sustain the commitment of followers needed to preserve the knowledge of the Empire before it is cast into darkness. In a sense, despite his commitment to rationality rather than faith, he is willing to set in motion a pseudo-religious devotion to preserve the future of civilization.
Maybe we should all read a bit more science fiction and get some faith in the importance of religion before those radicalized by it storm the barricades. As one of the protagonists, Gaal Dornick, in Foundation says:
“The clockwork of civilization, the rise and fall of cultures, causes and worlds, these were answers Hari Seldon had long since unriddled. Belief is a powerful weapon. That’s why the Empire feared Hari Seldon’s predictions so much. Empires govern worldly concerns, but what comes after? Our souls? These realms are the purview of faith. And faith is a sword forged in the fires of the infinite.”