Political theology in contemporary sci-fi series: atheism, secularization and fundamentalism in mass culture

The current agenda of cultural confrontation behind the clash of civilizations brings about the need for understanding and rethinking the religious experiences of the West. This study aims to specify the role of sci-fi series in Western mass culture. The following tasks need to be addressed: 1) to clarify the key trends in the enactment of religious patterns by political theology of mass culture; 2) to analyze major problems of actualization and visualization of religious issues both in political and sci-fi discourses; 3) to identify potential trajectories of the development of religious images instrumentalized in the vein of politics and ideology. The research material is derived from sci-fi series with similar thematic universes, ranging from the classic Star Trek and Babylon 5, to the recently released The Orville. It is shown that the series have played a significant role in the modern history of consumer society. They present the development of political culture and historical memory as well as visualized political theology. In order to conduct the study the theoretical approaches of intellectual history, history of ideas, interdisciplinary historiography and sociology of religion and secularization were applied. Discourse analysis and the biography method were used to showcase the assimilation of religious aspects in mass culture. As the result the hypothesis that visualization of religious experiences epitomizes the conflict around secularization was proved. The author comes to three major conclusions. First, religious images in the studied sci-fi series respond to the need of American society to reflect on the threats of traditionalism and fanatism in the hypothetic universe. Second, the series stress the problems of constructing and deconstructing the religious, for example of the relation between science and faith. Third, religious images were assimilated by mass culture through sci-fi series, where religion also plays a role in characters’ identification. Thus, the series are more than entertainment, they serve as social and cultural vehicles of ambivalent secularization process by visualizing collective traumas and disputes about the role of religion.

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