About the Book

TheoFantastique: One of the areas of research I find interesting is techno-theology, a theological exploration of our relationship with technology. As computers, artificial intelligence, and robotics become more advanced this pushes the boundaries of our conceptions of ourselves and what it means to be human. How have aspects of science fiction such as Star Trek: The Next Generation with its Commander Data, and the film I, Robot, explored transcendence in this context?

Doug Cowan: Well, I think first of all we need to abandon (or at least deemphasize) the question of “what it means to be human” as the benchmark of meaning and value. Of course, I’m not the first to suggest this by a long shot, but it is implicit in much of science fiction cinema and television. All too often, “human” is a slippery synonym for “like us,” especially given the numerous historical examples in which dominant cultures have labelled non-dominant ones “sub-human,” and when something is not “like us” we seem to feel we have license to treat it less than “humanely.” Consider, for example, Sarah Connor’s voiceover at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (which, in my opinion, should have been the end of the franchise, it was that good): “The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”

That said, usually, the relationship between humans and machines is considered solely from our point of view, and arguably, in the vast majority of cases, this is entirely appropriate. If my toaster goes on a rampage, I want it stopped. Now. When we are the victims of technological malfunction or the intended targets of mechanical malfeasance, the machines are defined as defective or evil (or possibly both). HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good example of this—though I argue that HAL is anything but evil. As long as machines meet the needs for which we created them, then all is well. If, for whatever reason, the understood economy between creator and creation shifts, few films leave any doubt that the latter must be terminated in favor of the former. As more than half a century of science fiction cinema (especially in its science fiction–horror hybrid) makes clear, in the balance between humanity and technology the scales must always tip in our favor. A number of films, however, suggest that the issue is not quite so clear-cut as this, not quite so obviously androcentric as we might like. These films ask us to imagine the question of transcendence from a rather different point of view.

Star Trek: First Contact is one of my favorites in the film series and it is among the most multifaceted, much of it turning on various metaphors of touch and sensation, of boundaries and evolution both achieved and denied. Indeed, First Contact illustrates three broad variations on the question of transcendence and artificial lifeforms. First is the issue of robotic consciousness. How far can it evolve and into what? What are the criteria we should use to determine whether something is a lifeform and what does that imply for the relationships into which we enter? After all, in the film Picard is prepared to sacrifice himself to the Borg collective in order to save Data—a human willing to die, essentially, for a machine. Second is the creation or modification of life “in our own image.” What happens when we create new life, not from neural nets and positronic matrices, but by manipulating our own cells, our own selves? What responsibilities do we have to those creatures that evolve in the laboratory under our often less-then-tender mercies? These are the questions that are raised in films such as The Island or Blade Runner. Are they simply organic material that we are free to use as we please, or does the potential for a separate consciousness demand the freedom and protection of a separate destiny? As the Creature says to Frankenstein in what has become the cinematic icon of the science fiction–horror hybrid, “What of my soul? Do I have one? Or was that a part you left out?” Third, if transhumanism represents the hubristic belief that the synthesis between humanity and machine will inevitably lead to a better, brighter future—a utopic melding of form and function—then the Borg represent the dystopic teleology of that vision. Unlike the tentative ventures into the cyborg represented by The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, in which the essence of humanity remains the touchstone of reality, such characters as Robocop, the Lawnmower Man, Johnny Mnemonic, and the numberless inhabitants of The Matrix suggest that the hope of transcendence is all too often bound by the unseen consequences of our limitations.

As TNG fans of the series know very well, Data has in many ways already achieved that which he seeks. Like a Zen Buddhist, he simply needs to realize it. In The Next Generation (and Star Trek: Voyager, in which Seven-of-Nine approaches the problem from the perspective of the Borg), transcendence is not a function of sensation, but of relationship and the reciprocal permeability of the boundaries between those who exist in relationship.

This is also clear in films such as I, Robot. First, the special NS-5 robot Sonny invites us to consider the evolution of consciousness, of personality in artificial lifeforms. Besides the distinction of having a personal name, he stands out in both behavior and self-awareness. He stands apart. “They all look like me,” he says, wondering at the ranks of other NS-5s and articulating a level of apperception never before heard in robots, “but none of them are me.”

One way (though not the only way) to evaluate the evolving self-consciousness of a robot as an entity apart from its programming considers its ability to fashion cognitive models of both internal and external worlds, and to understand both the difference and the relationship between those worlds. As consciousness develops and personality individuates, these internal and external models—self and world, as it were—appear increasingly distinct but require increasingly complex and nuanced interaction. What we perceive as “outside” influences who we are “inside,” demanding (and driving) the development of a reflexive autonomy that far exceeds the basic “if, then do” module on which all binary computing—whether human or robotic—is based.

This is most profoundly implicated in the moment of existential crisis, the ability to imagine a world in which one does not exist. So far as we know, death takes most creatures by surprise. If they are aware of it at all, it is in the fleeting moment of its occurrence, not the drawn-out uncertainty of its approach. We, on the other hand, contemplate death; we fear it, avoiding it when we can, preparing for it when we must; we ritualize and fetishize it, doing all we can to ignore its reality and forestall its inevitability. “Will it hurt?” Sonny asks Calvin as she prepares to use nanobots to decommission him, to “kill” him and bring forth a world in which he is suddenly and irrevocably not.

Once again, though, these are not simply questions of filmmaking and storytelling, but have serious implications offscreen. We may not be there yet, but they are issues with which we will need to deal someday. Perhaps someday sooner than many of us think.

TheoFantastique: At a couple of points you draw upon the film Contact in your discussion. In one instance you use it to illustrate human responses to contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. What basic forms have developed in science fiction to the earth-shattering “revelation” that would come with this form of transcendence?

Doug Cowan: Some would welcome it, others fear it. There are a range of responses. For the more conspiracy minded, there are the variety of pop culture products such as The X-Files which are predicated on the notion that alien contact has already occurred, for good or ill. In terms of the narrowness of theological vision, though, the “Your God is too small” problem of which Sagan spoke, for me the most interesting position is what I call “terracentric human exceptionalism”—Christian fundamentalists who believe that the humankind is the only intelligent life in the universe. Now, there are lots of different people who believe that, but the reasoning behind the argument is fascinating in the breadth of its claims and frightening in the depth of it hubris.

In what I call in the book “the calculus of transcendence” their logic is clear: we know that there are no extraterrestrials because the Bible does not mention them. “Though atheistic scientists would scoff at this,” writes Ron Rhodes, a widely read fundamentalist Christian researcher and writer, “Scripture does in fact point to the centrality of planet Earth and gives no hint that life exists elsewhere.” Earth, he writes elsewhere, is “absolutely unique in God’s eternal purposes.” The logical fallacies inherent in his argument notwithstanding, fellow fundamentalist Bob Larson could not put this more clearly. “While the Bible does not explicitly rule out extraterrestrial life-forms,” he writes, “there is sufficient scriptural evidence that life on Earth was created by God as a special act of divine grace, duplicated nowhere else in the universe. Thus the aliens who contact us cannot be from another planet or solar system . . . Biblical logic then concludes that demons, fallen angels, are the creatures behind legitimate UFO occurrences.” For people like this, the possibility of extraterrestrial life presents an enormous problem—one that is, once again, theological (and, in my view, therefore also sociological).

TheoFantastique: Later in the book you explore various questions related to the reenvisioned Battlestar Galactica series. Unfortunately, I was never able to see much of it since it always drew my wife’s ire given her devotion to the original series of the 1970s! Can you talk a little about the ways in which the second incarnation of Battlestar Galatica explored religion in complex and multifaceted ways?

Doug Cowan: I have to admit I got hooked on the reenvisioned series, though I think it was a three-season story arc that was stretched over four seasons simply because of its massive popularity and the money it was making for the producers. In terms of the storyline of the last season, God may have had a plan for Gaius Baltar, but Ronald Moore, not so much.

Many argue that there are really only two contending faiths represented on the show: a basic polytheism versus a basic monotheism. I suggest that this dichotomy seriously diminishes the potential richness of the series. Put differently, I begin many of the various religious studies courses I teach with some version of the statement, “There is no such thing as ‘Christianity,’” a comment that never fails to draw the ire of at least one student in the class. “Of course,” I respond to their almost inevitable indignation, “there’s no such thing as Buddhism either, or Judaism, or Islam, or Hinduism.” By this point, many students are wondering if they’ve enrolled in the wrong course, but the point is this: there is no one thing that we can definitively call “Christianity”; there are only various and sundry Christianities, religious traditions that can vary dramatically depending where in the world one looks and when, and which are often as different from each other as they are from other religions. Roman Catholicism in the twenty-first century, for example, seems an entirely different religion from that of fifteenth century. And, in many ways, it is.

In the same way, though, there is no such thing as the human religion in the Colonial fleet clustered around Galactica, just as there is no such thing as the Cylon religion, resurrection hub or not. There are only the religions of Battlestar Galactica, and as we have seen in each of the other series we have considered, they reveal themselves most clearly through the people in whom they are embodied.

Many commentators, it seems to me, persist in posing entirely the wrong questions, questions that are either meaningless or unanswerable, both in the context of the series and of religious history and behavior. Noting the utilitarian ends to which both the Cylons and the humans put their respective religions, for example, Bryan McHenry asks, “Is the manipulation of religious beliefs ever justifiable?”—and goes on to interpret Adama’s original deception about knowing the way to Earth as a violation of the American Constitution. Although Ronald Moore, BSG’s creator, admits that “the show is really supposed to be about our society and political structure,” he warns us that relationships are not meant to be “as simple as the Cylons are Al Qaeda and Laura Roslin (the President) is George Bush.”

One certainly hopes not, since the analogy makes very little sense in the context of the “war on terror” waged by the Bush White House since October 2001 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which at this point has resulted either directly or indirectly in more than one hundred thousand civilian deaths. Indeed, though it shouldn’t be necessary, it seems worth pointing out that the Twelve Colonies are not the United States and that the Cylon rout of humankind could arguably sanction any number of extraordinary measures. More importantly, however, the plain and simple fact is that, whether it seems justified or not, religious beliefs are manipulated regularly, often egregiously, to serve a wide variety of ends and agendas—not least by the Bush administration in the prosecution of its putative war on terror. Asking whether the manipulation of religion is warranted, legitimate, or ethically acceptable may be an interesting intellectual exercise, but the question relies on a naïve and simplistic understanding of religion and rings utterly hollow in the context of lived religious practice.

On the other hand, philosopher Taneli Kukkonen wonders, “Are the Cylons and Colonials both justified in their respective faiths? Or do religious believers on both sides merely impose meaning on an otherwise cold and uncaring universe?” Kukkonen’s implicit fallacy of limited alternatives notwithstanding, once again we are back to the problem of evaluation and adjudication: Is this a reasonable religion? Does it make sense? Indeed, as Kukkonen puts it, “Are there independent, rational criteria by which the merits of the two contending faiths can be assessed”? Unfortunately, this is a very common line of analysis, but put simply, “No, there aren’t.

Religion as a social and a human (or, perhaps, Cylon) phenomenon is neither rational nor irrational. It is both, and both rationality and irrationality depend on situation and perspective. What seems eminently reasonable to some—from simple belief in a nonempirical entity to the willingness either to kill or to die at the behest of that entity, or from prayer in the face of personal crisis to belief in the efficacy of that prayer—is for others profoundly irrational. More importantly, while Kukkonen wants to stand on the platform of “independent, rational criteria,” he both introduces and concludes his argument in explicitly theological ways—rational from a certain perspective, perhaps, but hardly independent. According to him, “the Cylon God’s plan seems cruel and inscrutable if it includes the Cylons’ attempt to eradicate humanity.” But inscrutable to whom, and according to what criteria? Is this any more cruel than the commands of the Hebrew God to eradicate various Canaanite tribes when the newly designated chosen people escaped from Egypt and made their way into the promised land? Falling completely into the trap of the good, moral, and decent fallacy, Kukkonen seems to forget that what is one group’s sacred story is another’s hidden history of genocide.

TheoFantastique: In your discussion of The Matrix you note how various commentators have interpreted the film in keeping with their own religious views. Can you share a few examples of how this has taken place, and how might this serve as a reminder about the need to be aware of our interpretive perspectives and biases that influence our interpretations?

Doug Cowan: For all its action, intrigue, and dazzling special effects, and for all the commentary it has generated, I suggest that The Matrix is essentially tabula rasa, a blank slate. It’s a visual feast in many ways, but it’s also an empty canvas on which viewers inevitably paint their own understandings of reality, their own perceptions of the quest for transcendence. Contrary to outdated media theories that paint the audience as a collection of passive receivers and filmmakers as the ultimate arbiters of cinematic meaning, The Matrix is one of the best science fiction examples of the fact that what we take away from a film or television experience is inevitably a function of what we bring to it. Movies, as director Joe Dante says, are like Rorschach tests; “there is what you mean when you make them, and then there’s what people get out of them. And sometimes those two things are not always the same.” This is never more true than when we attempt to understand a film such as The Matrix in terms of the varied human quests for transcendence.

“The Matrix resounds with the elements of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought,” writes Paul Fontana, a New Testament student at the Harvard Divinity School, “specifically, hope for messianic deliverance, restoration and establishment of the Kingdom of God.” Indeed, Fontana asserts confidently that “anyone with a religious background”—by which we must assume he means either Jewish or Christian—“can notice some of the more obvious Biblical parallels in The Matrix.” There is no guarantee of this, however, as Stephen Prothero’s findings on the appalling lack of religious literacy in America make clear, but others concur, including fellow Christian Mark Stucky, who sees the first film as the “Gospel of Neo” and the two sequels—Reloaded and Revolutions—as the “Acts” and the “Apocalypse According to St. Neo” respectively. “Although various other allusions exist,” Stucky opines, “a major mythological motif in the film and its two sequels consists of blatant and vital references to Christ.”

Lest anyone think that The Matrix is little more than Christian missiology in black leather and bullet-time, however, there are a number of other interpretive options.

Acknowledging the film’s “the messianic motifs,” Buddhologist Paul Ford points out that “the Buddhist parallels in The Matrix are numerous.” “The Matrix itself is analogous to samsara, the illusory world that is not the reality it appears to be”; discipline and control à la the Noble Eightfold Path allow Neo to enter the Matrix as a bodhisattva; and the different characters’ actions demonstrate the balancing effects of karma. Moreover, at the conclusion, “no longer constrained by fear, doubt, or ignorance, Neo, like a Buddha, has transcended all dualities, even the ultimate duality of life and death.” On the other hand, Muslim philosopher Idris Hamid discusses “the Cosmological Journey of Neo” as “an Islamic Matrix,” while Anna Lännström writes about “The Matrix and Vedanta: Journeying from the Unreal to the Real.” Matt Lawrence offers a Taoist interpretation of the films, while Frances Flannery-Daily and Rachel Wagner see in them an unmistakable Gnostic allegory. Reading the films through the Advaitic teachings of the Indian guru Ramana Maharshi, Pradheep Chhalliyil interprets The Matrix trilogy as an elaborate tale of Self-realization.

As you know very well, indeed you’re writing about this for a collection in which I have an essay as well, The Matrix has even found its way into new religious consciousness, and in the years immediately following the trilogy’s release, I received regular emails inviting me to join Matrixism, “the Path of the One,” an online religion that, among other things, makes psychedelics a sacrament, equates pornography with prostitution, and locates the origins of its beliefs nearly a century ago in the public speeches of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, son of the founder of the Bahá’i faith.

In the end, whether you take the blue pill or the red, Morpheus is right: What matters is what you believe.

TheoFantastique: Is there any one major thing that you hope readers come away with from your discussion of science fiction and transcendence?

Doug Cowan: That these are important stories and that they tell us important things about who we are, what we value, and what we hope for.

TheoFantastique: Doug, thanks again for the opportunity to read the draft of the manuscript for Sacred Space, and for making time in a busy academic teaching schedule to discuss the book.

Doug Cowan: Always a pleasure, John.

TheoFantastique: I thoroughly enjoyed your first book that explored religion and horror, Sacred Terror, and your next volume, that looks at science fiction, Sacred Space, makes yet another valuable contribution to the exploration of this type of subject matter. Do you have any plans to turn your analysis to fantasy to complete a trilogy of books given that fantasy films are often neglected as sources of serious cultural analysis?

Doug Cowan: Thanks for inviting me back to talk about the book. I do, in fact, have a third book underway, which will also be published by Baylor University Press. Its working title is Sacred Visions: Fantasy, Film, and the Mythic Imagination, though, like Sacred Space, it’s not just about cinema. In it, I also explore the mythic dimensions of television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Kung Fu, and Xena, Warrior Princess, as well as what I call “the ordinary fantastic,” the dimensions of fantasy that suffuse everyday life apart from witches, demons, swords-and-sorcery. I even begin discussion in the book on Gilligan’s Island, because, essentially, all cinema and television products are fantasies. We seem to forget that, though, when we relegate “fantasy” only to such films as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Contrary to the implication of shows such as Mythbusters, which is one of my favourites, but which renders “myth” as “falsehood” or “fiction,” mythic stories are those that tell us significant things about ourselves—what we value, what we are willing to sacrifice for what we value, and how those two things change as we grow, learn, and evolve. It’s not dissimilar, in many ways, to both horror and science fiction. Indeed, the hybrid versions of each—fantasy-horror; sci fi-horror; sci fantasy—demonstrate clearly that these are not discrete categories. They interpenetrate and inform one another, but we separate them artificially because it makes it easier for us to talk about them.

TheoFantastique: You had an early love for science fiction. Given this why did you start your exploration of the fantastic with a book on horror rather than science fiction?

Doug Cowan: That’s a good question. I hadn’t planned on writing three books on religion and film—though you have to understand “religion” in its broadest sense, as a relationship with what William James called “the unseen order,” however that is conceptualized—indeed, I hadn’t really planned on writing any. I’m trained as a sociologist of religion and my area of specialty is new religious movements. Sacred Terror began almost by accident. I was watching a Hellraiser marathon and realized how much religious significance there was in the series (at least the first four installments) and began to wonder about the larger religious dimensions of cinema horror—and what they could tell us sociologically. That is, what could they tell us about the way different groups of people construct, confront, and resolve (or not) their fears? When I got into researching and writing Sacred Terror and saw how much there was there, how little serious attention had been paid to it, and, I’ll admit, how much fun I was having (after all, I watch movies and call it work), I thought about bringing the same kind of analysis to science fiction and, as it turns out, to fantasy.

TheoFantastique: In Sacred Space you suggest that science fiction provides examples of the human quest for transcendence. How are you defining transcendence, and can you provide a few examples of various conceptions of transcendence in science fiction to illustrate?

Doug Cowan: Let me set the scene for that a bit. Sacred Terror was organised around the principal of sociophobics, the idea that what we fear, how we fear, and how we resolve fear are culturally contingent—that is, not everyone fears the same thing or for the same reasons. Zombie films, for example, do not do well in India, if for no other reason than the preferred method of corpse disposal there precludes the notion of reanimated bodies wandering the countryside muttering, “Brains… brains…” In Haiti, on the other hand, where the concept of zombiism is a minor, though important part of an indigenous religious tradition, there is a significantly different sociophobic resonance. There is a fear factor in one place that simply doesn’t exist in the other.

Sacred Space, on the other hand, is oriented around the notion of sociospera—culturally constructed and reinforced understandings of hope, hope that is often manifest in the concept of transcendence. Now, for many people, transcendence is limited to (and by) their understanding of deity: God is transcendent, we are immanent, that sort of thing. I say “limited” here because, like the lack of attention paid to cinema horror, much of the writing about religion and science fiction is limited to finding this or that example of one’s own tradition in a particular film or television series, or to dismissing those films or tv shows because one doesn’t find those examples. It becomes a rather uninteresting, and ultimately fruitless, exercise in “Find the Christ figure,” for example. I say “fruitless” because Christ figures become almost ubiquitous when that’s what people want to find, not necessarily because that’s what’s there. In order to address some of the different dimensions of this problem, throughout the book and in various ways I return to one of Carl Sagan’s comments. I’m paraphrasing here, but his basic point is: “Your god is too small, your theological horizons too provincial.”

Put simply, the quest for transcendence is the search for something beyond ourselves, the belief that outside the boundaries of everyday living something greater exists. For some, the quest for transcendence is our trust in a purpose larger than the faint echo registered by a single life, the possibility of transcendence is a conviction that invests our lives with meaning and value. For others, it is something else: the beyond that hovers on the other side of the horizon, the edge of the map marked hic sunt draconis (here be dragons), the “second star to the right” that guides our imaginations into the unknown.

If we set aside the limited theological binary of transcendent God/immanent human, three different domains tend to shape our understanding of transcendence. First, there is the quest for transcendence of human limitations. From 1974 to 1978, for example, millions of viewers tuned in weekly to ABC and heard Richard Anderson’s famous opening narration for The Six Million Dollar Man: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.” Together with its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, in 2004 the two main characters in these series, Steve Austin (Lee Majors) and Jamie Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), were named to TV Guide’s “25 Greatest Sci-fi Legends.” Whenever a boundary has presented itself—there is a depth below which our submarines cannot descend, a height our aircraft cannot reach, a speed our powered machines cannot exceed and a distance they cannot cross—human ingenuity, tenacity, avarice, courage, foolhardiness, and dumb luck have combined in various measures to transcend what some regard as fixed limits, others merely as challenges.

The second domain is marked by the transcendence of social, cultural, or racial/species boundaries. When do we consider something a being worthy of the same rights as humans, for example? Can there be such a thing as a society of robots, of clones, of genetically engineered humans—and what are the hopes and fears these questions engender?

Rituals and rites of passage, for example, structure both the transcendence and the reinforcement of social boundaries, connecting the participants to all who have preceded them and presaging all who will proceed in generations to come. That it, they immanentize the framework of transcendence within which meaning is located. Both science fiction cinema and television have explored these areas extensively. During “Amok Time,” for example, one of the most famous episodes in the original Star Trek series, Mr. Spock is overtaken by pon farr, a traumatic regress from the dictates of logic into the unpredictability of emotion, a change that determines when a Vulcan is ready to mate. In the postapocalyptic society portrayed in Logan’s Run, the ecological limits of a population condemned to live in domed cities demands that those who reach the age of thirty participate in the rite of “Carousel”—suicide in the service of population control. In The Empire Strikes Back, while training under the impish Jedi master, Yoda, Luke Skywalker must face rites of passage drawn almost directly from the archetypal hero’s quest; he must transcend the limits of who he thinks he is in order to realize the possibilities of who he will become.

Finally, there is the notion of transcendence as a supernatural category. In one kind of theological understanding, God is transcendent; we are immanent. God is the Creator; we are the creation. God is radically absolute; we are radically contingent. For others, though, transcendence remains a function of moving past or beyond the perception of boundaries that keep us limited. For some, transcendence is the potential that what Stanislav Grof calls “transpersonal consciousness,” the belief that we can breach the boundaries of time and space as these have been established by material existence and reinforced through social and cultural frameworks that don’t allow for the possibility of a world (or worlds) beyond those boundaries. Calling on Jung’s seminal work on the “collective unconscious,” Grof argues that we participate in a much wider and deeper universe than most of us imagine and that we have the ability to participate with far greater intentionality and far keener awareness of our place in that universe.

On the other hand, if transpersonalism is predicated on the existence of non-ordinary states of consciousness to which we have access and which we can use to transcend the limitations of the physical brain, the concept of transhumanism posits that we can do the same for the physical body. We can transcend the limitations of the meat-bot, as it were. Of course, we have been doing this for some time, though at relatively primitive levels by transhumanist standards: iron lungs, pacemakers and artificial hearts, portable oxygen systems, dialysis, and cosmetic surgery. In all these cases, when the organic components deteriorate or fail, technology allows for life to continue. Even the ubiquity of corrective eyewear focuses attention on our willingness to address our disabilities technologically. In broad terms, for there are a number of varieties, transhumanism proposes to take this process out of the reactive realm of medical intervention and into the proactive domain of life enhancement and progressive immortality through cybernetics and other forms of organo-technological hybridity, nanotechnology, and “uploading”—releasing dependence on the physical body entirely and transferring the entirety of one’s consciousness into a computer.

TheoFantastique: How does your training as a sociologist provide the reader with a helpful perspective for considering transcendence in science fiction?

Doug Cowan: First and foremost, I think, by recognizing that transcendence means more to us, both individually and socially, than the difference between our contingent reality and some non-empirical reality we call “God.” It means I am neither bound by nor beholden to a particular theological perspective, which is something I think is a problem with much of the writing about so-called “religion and film.” It’s not really “religion and film” that people are writing about, but theology and film. They are bootlegging particular ontological understandings into interpretations of cultural products, often without acknowledging that that’s what they’re doing. Or they are suggesting that “religion” equals “theology,” most often Christian theology. What they are saying— sometimes subtly, other times not so much—is that “religion” equals their tradition and that the beliefs of others are somehow less. This is a significant problem in the field that I hope my own perspective as a sociologist can address.

The 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is a good example of this theological bootlegging or the way in which H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was so drastically changed when George Pal produced the first film version of the story in 1953. In the first case, the interpretive tradition apparently ignored the putative religious dimensions of the film for nearly a generation, then all of a sudden, in the early 1980s, people started talking about Klaatu as an alien messiah and the story as a gospel allegory. Now, it’s virtually impossible to read anything about this film without encountering this kind of thing. People are entitled to see in films what they want, but you have to ignore pretty significant portions of the film and go through some serious theological gymnastics to turn it into a gospel story. I’ve written about these shifts in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, in an article called “Seeing the Saviour in the Stars.”

I treat transcendence as a social fact and try not to make moral or ethical (which are often products of a particular theology) evaluations on the worth or value of different visions of transcendence. This helps me avoid what I have called elsewhere the “good, moral, and decent fallacy,” the mistaken belief that religion as a human and social phenomenon is about making people good, moral, and decent. Certainly there are examples in which this is the case, but that is not (or should not be) a defining characteristic of human religious belief and practice.

Now, all this is not to say that I do not have my own biases or blind spots. That would be absurd, though I am certain that I will be accused of precisely that. We all have these blind spots, they’re just different for each of us.

TheoFantastique: There are many aspects of your discussion that I found fascinating in your book draft, but one in particular was the exploration of The War of the Worlds. How has the portrayal of religion shifted as the story moved from its initial literary expression to various film treatments?

Doug Cowan: The first thing to note is that Wells’ novel is anti-religious to the core. His commentary on religion is incarnated in the Weybridge cleric, who is shown throughout the book as a venal coward when compared with the more enlightenened narrator, a writer of “philosophical articles.” There is nothing redeemable in either the cleric or the religion he purports to represent. George Pal’s 1953 production, on the other hand, completely reverses the role of religion in the story and places the minister at its heart. Indeed, the Rev. Dr. Collins, the pastor of the local church, is the heart and soul of the film. He is the one who occupies the moral center, questioning the military option when communication with the aliens has not even been attempted, sacrificing himself in an unmistakably Gandhian moment prior to the attack on the Martian machines.

Unlike many 1950s science fiction films, though, there is a parity of religion and science throughout, though it is clear that by the end, science has demonstrated itself incapable of dealing with the Martians, the military has exhausted its options, and religion—particularly 1950s Protestantism—is the only bulwark left against the chaos of the Martian attack. It so completely reverses Wells’ novel that had he been alive to see it (he died in 1946), I am certain that he would have been absolutely furious.

What is even more interesting is that this tremendous difference has been all but entirely missed in the commentary on the film. Most commentators actually dismiss Collins as a minor, indeed deluded character—which, to my mind, means they have utterly misunderstood the film. Like so many films that find their origins in literature—something I take up in much more depth in Sacred Space—one cannot simply look at the screen. As I pointed out in Sacred Terror, what happens onscreen only makes sense in the context of what is happening offscreen—which makes this a sociological issue, as much as anything else. Since alien invasion is scary enough on its own, why would a producer in the 1950s so drastically change a piece of literary fiction—especially one that was so popular and prominent in the genre—and invoke a theme that is in diametric opposition to the original novel? That question can only be answered by looking at the people who lined up around the block to see it when it was released.

TheoFantastique: At one point in your discussion you draw attention to human beings as homo narrans, the story-tellers who draw upon myths, legends, fairytales, and sacred stories as a tool of meaning-making. Do you see science fiction as a contemporary expression of this process, and if so, in your view, why don’t more scholars take science fiction myth-making as seriously as other forms of the process?

Doug Cowan: I do see it as a major part of that meaning-making process—to me that just seems so obvious. Aside from everything else about science fiction—its popularity, its breadth and depth—think for a moment about the emulative aspect: people want to be (or at least be like) their heros on these programs. There is something with which they identify—Spock’s Vulcan stoicism, Worf’s dedication to honor, Delenn’s ambiguous pacifism, Starbuck’s manic enthusiasm, whatever. These are parts of our experience that, though reflected on the screen and refracted through often alien presentation, resonate with us at very deep levels. And, once again, for me that’s a significant and fascinating sociological issue, one that goes far beyond what’s going on onscreen.

Unfortunately, the problem with many scholars is that because these are entertainment products, they are not taken seriously; they’re not considered “worthy” of scholarly attention. Archeologists can argue for hours over the provenance of pottery shard that was likely the place where some guy spat his olive pits a couple of thousand years ago and that’s scholarship. Asking what meaning a television show that’s watched by tens of millions of people each week—that’s fluff. It’s nonsense, really, nothing more or less than narrow-minded academic elitism. It’s part of the problem of popular culture studies in general, something against which we have to push at every opportunity.

Doug and I have been discussing our common interest in horror and religion for some time, and this resulted in a series of conversations that formed some of the backdrop for Doug’s new book Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror in the Silver Screen (Baylor University Press, 2008).

Sacred Terror reveals how religion and religious images play an integral role in the success of horror films. When there are so many other scary things around, why is religion so often used? Cowan argues that horror films are opportune vehicles for externalizing the fears that lie inside our religious selves; what scares us reveals important aspects of who we are, both as individuals and as a society. Six basic themes of fear are explored in Sacred Terror: fear of evil; of the flesh; of sacred places; of change in the sacred order; of the supernatural gone out of control; of death, dying badly, or not remaining dead; of fanaticism; and of the power – and the powerlessness – of religion. Sacred Terror is groundbreaking work that will appeal to readers of film studies and religion studies as well as horror film fans.

John Lyden, Professor and Chair of Religion at Dana College and author of Film as Religion: Myth, Morals and Rituals (New York University Press, 2003), endorses the book with these comments:

“Horror films have been largely neglected or denigrated by scholars of religion and film. Cowan offers a new approach, arguing that religious elements are central to the success of horror. He debunks the myth that modern secular rationalism has banished the ghosts of the past, demonstrating that religion-related fears of death, damnation, supernatural forces, and religious ‘others’ often support the continuing ability of horror to terrify and create frisson. A book that is both entertaining and important!”

I highly recommend this book for students of horror films who want to explore an often neglected or misunderstood facet of them. Douglas Cowan and Baylor University Press have done us a service with this new volume.

Look for a future volume from Cowan that explores the religious dimensions of science fiction. A few hints of what may be in store in this volume are evident from my interactions with one of Cowan’s papers on The War of the Worlds.

Here is the description of the volume from Baylor and endorsement statements:

Sacred Terror examines the religious elements lurking in horror films. It answers a simple but profound question: When there are so many other scary things around, why is religion so often used to tell a scary story? In this lucid, provocative book, Douglas Cowan argues that horror films are opportune vehicles for externalizing the fears that lie inside our religious selves: of evil; of the flesh; of sacred places; of a change in the sacred order; of the supernatural gone out of control; of death, dying badly, or not remaining dead; of fanaticism; and of the power-and the powerlessness-of religion.

Available October 2008

Reviews:

“Up to now, horror films have been largely neglected or denigrated by scholars of religion and film. Doug Cowan offers a new approach, arguing that religious elements are central to the success of horror. He effectively debunks the myth that modern secular rationalism has banished the ghosts of the past, demonstrating that religion-related fears of death, damnation, supernatural forces, and religious “others” often support the continuing ability of horror to terrify and create frisson. A book that is both entertaining and important!”

-John Lyden, Professor and Chair of Religion, Dana College

“Proving that the genre of horror film belongs firmly in the interest of religious studies, Douglas Cowan offers an ample map of where any interested, and perhaps somewhat scared, scholar might turn to revisit this ancient form of storytelling. In the end, we learn about what horror might have to say to the human, beyond the death-life divide.”

-S. Brent Plate, Associate Professor of Religion and the Visual Arts, Texas Christian University, and author of Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-creation of the World

TF: In your book you discuss the “metataxis of horror.” Can you briefly define this and how you discuss it in your book?

Doug Cowan: The “metataxis of horror” refers to the process by which films generate their horror by reversing or inverting the accepted taxonomic categories of the dominant religion. They challenge the dominance of Christianity, for example, threatening its inevitability, or reflecting the ambivalence people feel about its power to explain the universe in toto. This process occurs in three principal ways: inversion, invasion, and insignificance. Inversive films, for example, challenge the dominance or legitimacy of Christianity (or whatever the dominant tradition is) from within, seeking to invert the power it enjoys or the popular understanding people have of it.

Take The Prophecy, for example, the basic story of which is a second war in Heaven led by the angel Gabriel, who has grown tired of God favouring “talking monkeys” (i.e., us) over the angelic hosts. That’s one level of inversion. A deeper level in the film, though, has to do with how we conceptualise angels themselves. When many people think of angels, for example, they think of TV series like Touched by an Angel, little gold “Guardian Angel” pins, God’s little helpers who seem to have nothing better to do than help us find our lost keys. But as the main character in the film points out, “You ever read the Bible? You ever notice how, in the Bible, when God needed to punish someone, make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? Your whole existence spent praising your God, always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?”

That’s a stunning way of inverting the popular conception of angels based on a perfectly reasonable reading of the biblical texts themselves. Another example is the Wishmaster series, based on Arabic legends of the djinn. Far from the cutesy lamp-dwellers played by Barbara Eden and Robin Williams, these are terrifying creatures with no love or compassion for humankind. They put the horror in the notion of being careful what you wish for. In one instance, a character wishes for a million dollars. The scene cuts to his own mother signing a million-dollar travel insurance policy before boarding a holiday flight. She names her son as beneficiary, and the plane explodes on take-off. “Make you wishes,” says the Djinn, “but beware of what you wish for.”

Metataxis frightens us because it presents the possibility that the world may not be exactly the way we believe, that the unseen order to which we have, perhaps, dedicated our lives may not be as powerful, as inevitable as we imagine. There was a time, you know, when Christianity was not, when it didn’t exist, when other gods ruled. These films often explore what that time might look like if those times came again. That frightens people, I think, because it challenges the long-term stability—what I call the inevitability—of their worldviews.

TF: You note in your book that horror films often draw explicitly on Christian mythology and iconography, but you also note other cultural and religious myths that are referenced, such as Hong Kong horror cinema and its use of Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist narrative, mythology and iconography. What do you see as the power of these underpinnings for American culture?

Doug Cowan: I’m not sure they have so much power for American culture. An example is the way some Japanese horror films have recently been remade for American audiences, and, in my opinion, suffered horribly because of that. What I am pointing out more importantly here is that there are vast cinematic industries that exist beyond Hollywood, and the horror films they produce respond to a different set of sociophobics, different set of cultural conditions that determine what we fear, how we fear, and what we do to confront or resolve our fear. Chinese vampire films, for example, are a wonderful example of this. Vampires rise because they are not buried according to proper feng shui, for example (Mr. Vampire), and it is the ritual symbols and magic of Taoism that put them back in the grave. Different cultures fear different things, and fear them in different ways. We may watch zombie movies and shriek in delighted terror, but I guarantee that they are watched in a very different way in Haiti (if, indeed, they are ever screened there at all). That’s the point of using a sociophobic approach in the book, as opposed to a theological or psychological one.

There are some connections, though, between different versions of the unseen order, and American (and British, in this case) popular culture and popular imagination. Take Mummy movies, which I admit (Pinhead and the Cenobites notwithstanding) are my favourite sub-category of horror. If vampire movies are low-end porn in many cases, then my contention is that Mummy movies are love stories, and they draw on a popular fascination with all things Egyptian that has existed in both the U.S. and Britain since the end of the nineteenth century. They are also good examples of the ways in which we constantly construct (and reconstruct) the religious other, since those who are fascinated by the Mummy often know precious little about Egyptian history or religion. These films become, though, symbols of what they think that religion and history must be like. As a sociologist, this is the point at which I become really interested.

TF: With the increase in Japanese horror films in this country as well as American remakes, and Hong Kong horror (e.g., The Messengers, 2007), might a shift in the religious makeup of America mean that other religious myths and icons might be drawn upon more frequently in horror in the near future?

Doug Cowan: I would hope that would be the case, but I admit that I have my doubts. Even though the same Japanese director made the American version of Ju-on as The Grudge, I think his attempts to tailor it to American tastes resulted in a decidedly inferior product. This is, however, another example of how sociophobics work: what scares one culture doesn’t automatically scare members of another. Things don’t automatically translate, and there’s no good reason why they should.

TF: I know you take a book to try to answer this in more depth, but could you share a few reasons as to why you think that horror cinema continues to be so popular, whether through motion pictures in the theaters or straight-to-DVD releases?

Doug Cowan: That is a hard question, but central in many ways, because horror is, arguably, among the most robust genres precisely because it does produce so many films only for fans. Even before the advent of DVD technology, and mainstream studios’ realization that they can make as much if not more money in that market than with theatrical release, the vast majority of horror films never made it to theatres, yet they were eagerly awaited by fans. Put simply, though, in addition to homo sapiens, we are also homo narrans, we are story-telling creatures, and among the most oft-told stories throughout our history have been scary stories about the variety of unseen orders we have envisioned. We tell stori
es both to locate ourselves in relation to that unseen order, and to express our anxieties about the shape that order takes, what it demands of us, how it might confront us if we turn our backs for a moment. As I suggest at the end of Chapter 2:

Technology has not banished the fear of the dark—candles burn down, batteries go flat (that is, they “die,” and so often the characters in horror cinema die with them), and flashlights all but inevitably refuse to work just when we need them most (witness the terrifying end of Capt. Dallas [Tom Skerritt] as he hunts for the creature in Alien). No matter how powerful our halogen headlights, the darkness and all the fears that live within it still exist on the ragged edge of the light we use to keep them at bay. Moreover, even while we keep it at bay, even as we use all our technological resources to pierce the darkness (that is, to “kill” it), we can still see it out there. We have, in fact, done nothing more than prick it, because in the context of the pitifully small segment of the electromagnetic spectrum to which we have visual access, darkness is our natural condition. Light is the intruder, a temporary island of relative security in a larger, largely uncharted ocean of dark.

TF: You discuss cinema horror in relation to the process of secularization and what this means for religious belief in late modernity or postmodernity. Can you summarize some of your thinking here?

Doug Cowan: A number of commentators, like the missiologist you mentioned before, seem to think that cinema horror represents the denigration of religion and the relentless advance of secularization. This is far too limited a reading, in my view. It seems to ignore the fact that fear lies at or near the heart of much of human religious experience and expression.

Secularization, of course, is the belief—some would say the ideology—that technologized societies are becoming less religious, less dependent on faith-based models of interpretation and action. Numerous sociologists and historians of religion, however, have challenged that notion, and I take a similar position. We may tell ourselves that we are becoming more sophisticated in our worldview, that we have left behind the superstitions of the past, that our explanations for unexpected phenomena now account for their origin and power without reference to supernatural beings or powers, and that religion is no longer a necessary component of social life—but in North America, at least, most of the data available to us quite simply indicate otherwise. Indeed, the issue is not one of secularization—that cinema horror discloses to us the abandonment or minimization of religious belief in late modern society—but an overwhelming ambivalence toward the religious traditions, beliefs, practices, and mythistories by which we are confronted, in which we are often still deeply invested, which we are distinctly unwilling to relinquish, and which we just as often only minimally understand. It is this ambivalence, and the various fears it both evokes and embeds, that I’m concerned with in the book.

My basic argument in Sacred Terror is that religiously oriented cinema horror remains a significant material disclosure of deeply embedded cultural fears of the supernatural and an equally entrenched ambivalence about the place and power of religion in society as the principal means of negotiating those fears. As a pop culture exercise in sociophobics, cinema horror provides a window into both the cultural stock of knowledge on which those fears depend and the various cultural discourses they support. As Stephen King writes in Danse Macabre, which remains one of the most insightful analyses of the horror genre, “When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats—the B-picture as tabloid editorial—they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things that trouble the night-thoughts of a whole society.” Put differently, what scares us reveals important aspects of who we are, both as individuals and as a society. And religion, whether some people like it or not, scares us.

TF: Related to this you mention a yearning for belief in the supernatural as expressed in the persistence of belief in the paranormal, and mention the growth of this in connection with The X-Files television program, without making an explicit connection. Do you see human religiosity and a yearning for the supernatural as also playing a part in the continued popularity of horror films?

Doug Cowan: Sure, that only makes sense, and it is in many ways at the heart of what I’m trying to do. But what needs to be clarified here is that human religiosity *is* a yearning for the supernatural, in the sense of an unseen order which we can try to understand, and to which we can harmoniously adjust ourselves. Talk of the supernatural and the paranormal as though they are somehow different from religion only reinforces the problem I’m trying to address. What one group calls “paranormal,” for example, the other calls ecstatic vision or prophecy. What one derides as “supernatural,” the other uses to define their faith as charismatic Christians. I recognise that there are colloquially understood categories of the “paranormal”—ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance and clairaudience, etc.—but I would like to suggest that those are political divisions as much as they are experiential. They privilege certain understandings of our relationship with the unseen order, and marginalize others. The X-Files is simply one of the latest in a long line of pop cultural products that has drawn attention to these issues.

TF: At the conclusion of your first chapter you ask whether “it is possible that cinema horror is one cultural means by which we confront the classical theological problem of evil.” Might horror films be a neglected cultural artifact that theologians should consider in regards to the problem of evil and contemporary answers to this perennial issue?

Doug Cowan: I hope that would be one of the things people get from the book. Cinema horror is far too often simply dismissed, as though who both produce and consume it have no voices worth hearing in the discussions and debates about the unseen order. This is ridiculous, quite frankly. I think, though, that Christian theologians (at least) will learn most only when they learn to bracket any claim to normativity in their assessment of other religious traditions. That is, they need to stop arrogating to themselves the right to decide who is “properly religious” and who isn’t. Of course, there are theologians who do this admirably (Hans Kung comes to mind in this regard, and Matthew Fox), and I don’t mean to generalise across the spectrum of Christianity. But, in the evangelical/ fundamentalist streams, one is hard-pressed to find more than a handful who take the religious experiences of others seriously and on their own terms, that is, without some hidden proselytic agenda. In that, they could learn a lot from Pinhead: what are angels to some are demons to others.

TF: Finally, Doug, you also state that “our culture teaches us in a variety of ways what to fear, and through a variety of cultural products reflects and reinforces the fears we have been taught.” As you explore horror films and their connection to religion, just as theologians might be missing the significance of horror films for their discipline, might other disciplines and academics learn important things by reflecting on this?

Doug Cowan: I think you’re right. Many academic and professional disciplines suffer at various points in their evolution from tunnel vision and single-mindedness. Accord
ing to Lee Smolin, for example, theoretical physics has for some time been locked in a very narrow and unproductive battle over string theory, and won’t really move as a discipline until both sides retire from the field for a while. There are a number of things different disciplines can learn from this work—at least I hope that there are. Seems a waste of time, otherwise. As I pointed out in the first part of the interview, for example, this is the first step in a much more detailed consideration of the relationship between religion and fear. In a nutshell, my hypothesis in this is that religion begins with fear, and is fear remains an intimate part of the human religious phenomenon. This is not something which has been explored in any real depth, that I can see, but an exciting direction to move.

TF: Doug, thanks again for participating in this interview. Please let me know when the book is available so we can promote it here.

Doug Cowan: Thanks for asking me. The book is being published by Baylor University Press, and should be available for you to give to all your friends for Hallowe’en next year. Boo!

Doug also has teaching and writing experience and a great interest in religion and popular culture. He has articles coming out on the religious underpinning of the 1953 version of War of the Worlds, and on the apocalyse and millennium in American popular culture. He regularly teaches courses at the University of Waterloo on Religion and Popular Film, one of which includes an exploration of religion and myth in the science fiction film, and another in cinema horror. He is currently writing a book, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen, which is under contract with Baylor University Press, and due out next year. Doug made some time in his schedule to share his thoughts on horror movies and religion.