Talking Religion and Science Fiction on Angel Studios' "Lightwise"

What are the connections between science fiction and religion? How are they different and how are they the same? What kinds of questions do they ask and what kinds of answers do they usually provide? 

I was excited to be the first guest on the new Angel Studios filmed podcast, “Lightwise,” a biweekly program that examines topics in the arts, movies, and TV in a way that amplifies the light, or are founded on inspirational and optimistic messages. Angel Studios, producing various films, documentaries, and live action and animated shows through crowd funding, has been making waves in the entertainment industry by garnering smash hit viewership numbers for its products that are rivaling major Hollywood productions. Their TV series “The Chosen,” about the life of Jesus Christ, is not only a major hit, but recently its theatrical release of a special edition of several of their season 3 episodes outperformed mainstream releases from much bigger studios.

 

In the pilot episode you can watch right here, host Joel Ackerman and I talked about how science fiction and religious faith intersect, where they are similar, and how they are different. Both religion and scientific inquiry—and science fiction by extension—I argue, are on the same basic quest. They are both asking the similar big questions of who we are, where is our place in the universe where did we come from, whether or not a sentient being created us, and where we might be going in the future. How those questions are answered, however, is where the two approaches can diverge…but not as much as some might think.

 

So check out the episode and hear us tackle these big questions and discuss how they are reflected in major sci fi entertainment like “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “The Matrix,” and literary classics by Mary Shelley, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells.

Facts, fiction, conspiracies, and Dungeons and Dragons

A new film based on the venerable Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game opened this weekend and I am quoted in this special edition magazine exploring all aspects of the game, its history, development, fan community, and fans who had played the games since childhood who are now major A-list stars.

If you see the magazine above on rack in a store, be sure and pick up a copy—or 5—for all of your friends and family members.

 

But most of my quotes appear in story about one of the strangest controversies that engulfed the game starting in the late 1970s. Following the suicide of James Dallas Egbert, a mentally ill college student in 1979 who also happened to be an avid D&D player, unwarranted speculation followed that perhaps the immersive fantasy world of D&D had the power to push young people to self-destruction and violence. But Egbert’s death also coincided with the “Satanic Panic” of that decade, a bizarre moral panic about a vast, international conspiracy of Satanists running daycare centers across America, sexually assaulting and murdering children in occult rituals, and seducing other youngsters to Devil-worship through heavy metal music, violent films, and, of course, a fantasy-oriented game like Dungeons and Dragons.

 

Check out a more detailed read of the history of the Satanic panic right here. I also wrote about the phenomenon in my book, CONSPIRACY FILMS: A TOUR OF DARK PLACES IN THE AMERICAN CONSCIOUS.

 

What is more bizarre than the claims of this layered, convoluted myth is how long the moral panic it created lasted. It took another decade until level-headed, intelligent people finally made peace with the fact there was no vast underground of Satanists, despite the fact that there was barely a scintilla of evidence for any of these allegations from the moment the very panic began. The reason for this, however, is the conspiratorial mindset it was all founded on. Conspiracism is founded on the very logical fallacy that no evidence for the existence of a massive conspiracy theory is evidence in itself. There is no evidence of a massive conspiracy of the Dallas Police Department, the FBI, CIA, oil barons, bankers, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, or weapons manufacturers having killed Joh F. Kennedy, this line of thinking argues, because the evil cabal behind the conspiracy made all the evidence disappear. There isn’t a shred of credible evidence for the Moon-landing-hoax conspiracy theory or the 9/11 conspiracy theories because the hidden forces of evil made that evidence disappear. The result of all of this, however, is that the conspiracists will wind up living in a fantasy land, in a delusion created by their own minds.

 

At least people playing Dungeons and Dragons know that it’s all a game, it’s all make-believe. It was only their critics, the conspiracy theorists, and the moral crusaders who wound up not being able to tell fact from fiction.