First Things and Battlestar Galactica

At the risk of veering off into the fever swamps of sci-fi fandom, I’d like to make a plug for Battlestar Galactica. As nearly as I can tell, and against all reason, this show is probably the most serious offering on television for exploring the boundaries and relationship between faith and public life.

Really, you say, how interesting. Tell me more.

Well, if you insist.

For those unacquainted with the background of the show, the Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi channel, is a grimy, minimalist update of the velveeta-drenched 1970s, post-Star Wars television program starring Loren Green and a host of eminently forgettable actors. It appears to have been filmed mostly in British Columbia which probably accounts for the fact that the entire cast looks grungy even when in dress military uniforms. About the only thing the new series has in common with the old is its basic premise: 12 colonies of human beings numbering in the billions of people are effectively wiped out by humanoid machines called Cylons armed with nuclear weapons. The remnant survivors form up around the last surviving military ship, the Galactica, and begin their trek to…somewhere. Here’s where the religion angle comes in.

It is pretty clear that before the Cylons begin nuking the humans, the colonists were fat, complacent, and drained of spiritual energy. The gods (names identical to the gods of ancient Greece) are worshipped in a pro forma manner, treated as a kind of corporate mythology to prop up the state and unify the civilization. The gods themselves are without value because in the minds of most they don’t exist. Among the technocrats of the 12 colonies, religion is boob-bait for bubbas. (Speaking of that, the most religious colony is Gemenon which appears to have been inhabited entirely by black Baptists. Wade Henderson, call the Racial Stereotypes Division.)

Here the show’s writers take note of the atheists-in-foxhole conundrum. With colonial civilization in ruins and Cylons dropping out of hyperspace every 33 minutes to finish off what’s left of the human race, the hard-pressed colonists are facing a crisis of hope. Through despair, religion makes a come-back. The colonial scriptures tell the story of a 13th colony called Earth. Galactica’s commander, Adama (first man, get it?), declares that he knows the location of Earth which has been a closely guarded government secret. He will lead the people to salvation. In fact, Adama has lied, playing the old double game of using religion to rally the people while believing not a word he says about the existence of Earth.

Adama’s civilian counterpart, President Roslyn, under a death sentence from cancer, finds true faith. She believes in Earth’s existence, that the scriptures are authentic and the information they contain essential to human survival. Her religious vision animates her constitutional role as leader and protector of the people. As she agitates for finding the way to find Earth, Adama leads a coup against her government. Undeterred, Roslyn peels off a third of the civilian fleet to search for Kobol, the ancient home planet of human civilization. On Kobol, she finds what she’s looking for, a kind of planetarium that shows the general direction of the Earth. For the first time since the attack there is hope and direction for the survivors. Even Adama is converted to her viewpoint. Technology has failed, military strength has been found wanting. The myth, it turns out, is both true and full of hope.

The human struggle to balance and integrate religion and public life is juxtaposed against the single-minded religious fervency of the Cylons themselves. In the old series, the Cylons were pure machine. In the new show, they appear identical to humans – only sexier. Unlike the lukewarm polytheistic colonists, however, the Cylons are zealous monotheists serving the One True God. They evangelize the top human scientist and tell him to repent of his sins. The head Cylon, the eye-popping Number 6, says repeatedly that God has a destiny for each person. She also makes it clear that you don’t want to be a sinner in the hands of angry Cylon. Here is the worst of religion as we know it: belief at the point of a sword, an inquisition, holy coercion, a jihad. In their single-minded war against the humans, they resemble nothing so much as al-Qaeda out to impose a universal caliphate.

It is hard to watch these murderous Cylons without feeling a twinge of sympathy. Their war appears to be a nuclear powered adolescent rebellion on steroids. These are the children of men returned with a vengeance. The implication is that these beings are made not begotten, filled with gifts but devoid of love. One of the sub-themes of the show is the Cylon effort to duplicate human reproductive processes. I doubt we will find this to be a simple issue of the relative efficiencies of cell division versus manufacturing. The Cylons want to be fully human, and, perhaps, to supplant the colonists as the sole heirs of divine love. In their desperate effort to replicate every detail of human life they are pathetic and menacing at the same time.

There is much to be examined in this series, and it is interesting the producers devoted so much of the first and second seasons to the complexities of religion in a democratic society and to driving home the point that for faith to be real it has to be freely chosen as well. It is ironic that in a time when the role of religious faith in public life has taken center stage both at home and abroad, it has fallen to a science fiction program to ask questions unfit for prime time. For the sake of economics, Hollywood might want to rethink that. It turns out sleek special effects and ersatz high-technology are unnecessary when a program inhabits a rich moral universe.