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Chambers’ future religion

Several days ago, I mentioned having read Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Unsurprisingly, the thing that caught my attention the quickest was her depiction of religion. A Psalm for the Wild-Built has been characterized as “hope punk,” or SciFi that bypasses dystopian visions of the future—especially those caused by climate change and rogue technology—in favor of a vision where humanity figures out how to change for the better, becoming better aligned with the environment of which we’re part. And for Chambers, there’s also the optimistic presentation of kind-AI. When robots awake, they don’t want to kill us; robots just want to be free from the constraints of their “purpose”.

Dex, the main character of this novella, is a monk. The religion that seems to be commonly held by future humans is polytheistic, or better “pantheonistic” in that the number of gods is limited. There are “Parent Gods”. “Bosh” is the “God of the Cycle”. “Grylom” that of the inanimate. “Trikilli” is the “God of Threads,” i.e. “chemistry, physics, the framework of the unseen.” Then there are “Child Gods”. “Samafar” has something to do with knowledge and is symbolized by a sun jay. An old shrine to this god is a library. “Chal” must have to do with work of some sort, as this god is represented by a workshop-shrine and symbolized as a sugar bee. Then there’s “Allalae,” the “God of Small Comforts,” symbolized by a summer bear, whose monks, like Dex, serve people tea while listening to their problems, among other activities. That’s Dex’s role in society. They are a “tea monk”. Before Dex has an existential crisis, of sorts, they learned how to be a tea monk and spent their time traveling, serving tea, and listening to people.

In a novella that depicts the “Factory Age” as what almost ruined humanity (i.e. “the Industrial Age”), the gods of the contemporary world seem absent. There’s no dominant monotheistic being like we see in the so-called Abrahamic religions—at least not one mentioned. Does Chambers associate this sort of deity with the Factory Age? Instead, the religion that survives, thrives, and helps humanity live harmoniously with nature looks more like a collection of deities we’d find in ancient, ancient India or Greece, or maybe akin to Indigenous religions around the world.

The theology of these gods, and their interaction with humans and nature more broadly, isn’t quite deism but the nature of causation between the gods and things that occur seems to be more of a domino effect that direct intervention. Dex tells Mosscap the following:

“But the thing is, the Child Gods aren’t actively involved in our lives. They’re … not like that. They can’t break the Parent Gods’ laws. They provide inspiration, not intervention. If we want change, or good fortune, or solace, we have to create it for ourselves. And that’s what I learned in that shrine.”

The Parent Gods appear to have created a reasonable universe, governed by laws. The Child Gods inspire humans to do well in the environment given to them by the Parent Gods but humans (and other creatures, and robots) are ultimately in control of their own fate.

This doesn’t prevent gratitude and worship. Dex will say “Thank Allalae” and even chants to Allalae, saying, “Allalae holds, Allalae warms, Allalae soothes and Allalae charms.” The gratitude appears to be the point. Gratitude that emerged once humans had to learn that you might really miss something when it’s gone—something like clean air and water? No other miracles are necessary. The deities have provided the basics and for that they’re worthy.

Chambers’ presentation of future religion had me pondering the topic. What will religion look like in the future? Clearly, certain secularist dreams of a religion-less society (impossible?), or at least an agnostic-y one, don’t align with Chambers vision and I think the basics of anthropology push us in this direction. Is there’s a near cataclysm, I don’t imagine humans responding irreligiously. But they might alter their religions if there’s a sense that the “results” of their pieties almost annihilated them. So, what does religion look like in a couple of centuries from now? Chambers’ vision is one of many possibilities.

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Vaccine effectiveness, California’s water crisis, and American individualism

A few news stories/podcasts that caught my attention this week:

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Recently read: Chambers’ “A Psalm for the Wild-Built”

Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Tom Doherty Associates), 2021. (Amazon; Bookshop)

If you want a review of this book, I recommend Amal El-Mohtar’s for NPR: “A Monk And A Robot Meet In A Forest … And Talk Philosophy In This New Novel”. It’s what led me to buy it!

I don’t read much fiction or SciFi but this was a great book. It’s set in a somewhat pleasant post-apocalyptic world where humans avoided catastrophe and learned how to live sustainably. At some point, robots became self-aware and humans agreed to give them their freedom in the wilderness, so humans and robots don’t interact and haven’t for a long time. Except a monk (of a future, pantheonistic, nature-based religion) named Dex wanders into the wilderness (driven there because of their existential crisis) and runs into a robot named Mosscap. Mosscap guides Dex in their wilderness journey to keep Dex safe and as they travel their conversations turn philosophical.

My favorite part is when Mosscap questions Dex as to why humans are obsessed with having a purpose. Mosscap can’t understand this since humans celebrated robots choosing their freedom-to-be over their intended “purpose”. Mosscap says,“…why, then, do you insist on having a purpose for yourself, one which you are desperate to find and miserable without? If you understand that robots’ lack of purpose—our refusal of your purpose—is the crowning mark of our intellectual maturity, why do you put so much energy in seeking the opposite?”

I’ll write a couple of blog posts about this book in the near future.

This is the first novella of a triquel by Becky Chambers (fellow Northern Californian!). It’s a quick read (I finished in less than a day) that leaves the reader anticipating the rest of the series. I highly recommend.

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Gen Z’s religiosity (or lack thereof)

The aforementioned PRRI “2020 Census of American Religion” continues to provoke a lot of thought and conversations. For example, the eyebrow raising stat that the white mainline is remaining static, or maybe even growing, while white evangelicalism plummets, is being questioned (e.g. Ryan Burge’s “Why It’s Unlikely U.S. Mainline Protestants Outnumber Evangelicals”). Also, the PRRI census seemed to indicate that the rise of the “nones” was slowing. Well, there’s other data out there like what Ryan Burge tweeted about Gen Z based on the data from the Cooperative Election Study.

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Introducing Confucianism

One of the final projects for my “Religion in Global Context” class asks my students to do a YouTube or podcast episode explaining what Confucianism is and whether it’s a religion. (I’ve blogged about it: see “Chinese Religions Podcast Project”.) Future renditions of the project will juxtapose Confucianism with Daoism and Shinto and not just Daoism. Thankfully, my life as a teacher keeps getting easier as Andrew Henry’s “Religion for Breakfast” project, which already includes several episodes on Shinto, now will have a series on Confucianism. The first video was released a few days ago:

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NPR discusses the prosperity Gospel

In the New Testament, Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. In the United States today, many Christians believe in something radically different. In what’s known as the prosperity gospel, wealth is a sign of virtue and God’s favor. The effects of this belief can be seen throughout American life from business to politics to social policy.

Listen here.

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Tripp Fuller talks to Helen Bond and James McGrath

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned Helen K. Bond’s excellent The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Eerdmans, 2020) (Amazon; Bookshop.) It’s a book I’d recommend to students of the Gospels. If you’re interested, and you want to know a bit more about the book, Tripp Fuller recently interviewed Bond on his Homebrewed Christianity podcast. Also, he interviewed James F. McGrath about his new book What Jesus Learned from Women, a book I haven’t read yet but intend on reading. When the pandemic began, I recorded an interview with McGrath where we discussed the Christian doctrine of the Ascension.

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Recently read: Dochuk’s “Anointed with Oil”

Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books, 2019). (Amazon; Bookshop)

Darren Dochuk‘s Anointed with Oil mixes together numerous strands of American history: the separation of “liberal” and “conservative” Christians; the rise of the gas and oil industry; the emergence of powerful, capitalism-advocating families like the Rockefellers; the motivation for American foreign interests, especially in the Middle East; and much more. If you are interested in American history broadly and/or American religious history, specifically, you’ll want to read this book. It’s so extensive, that it’s difficult to review in a succinct blog. What I’ll say is this: the oil industry has had more to do with the modern shape of the United States, and the United States’ within world affairs, than you could’ve imagined, and American Christians—liberal and conservative—were highly influential.

Dochuk’s work intersects everything from the origins of many of the energy giants you know—BP, Chevron, Exxon, Texaco, Shell—to how the pursuit of “black gold” was shaped by “wildcat” theology, premillennial dispensationalism, modern ecumenism and interfaith efforts, and more. In fact, one thing many American Christians shared for a few generations was the belief that oil was a gift of God, though there were detractors who observed of and warned of environmental devastation from the beginning.

Rather than write more about the book, let me recommend episode 56 of The Way of Improvement Leads Home podcast where Dochuk was interviewed John Fea. This was the interview that inspired me to buy and read the book. It’s one I highly recommend.

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Recently read: Burrough, Tomlinson, Stanford, “Forget the Alamo”

Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (Penguin Press, 2021). (Amazon; Bookshop)

A title like Forget the Alamo is bound to rile up a bunch of Texans but the book isn’t about forgetting the Alamo. It’s about rightly remembering what happened at the Alamo on March 6th, 1836, and how those events have been diversely remembered by different people. In other words, it’s a call to the normal work of historians. Historians are asked to reconstruct past events (which are gone now) in narrative form so that we can better understand how the past relates to the present. This process is always complicated; always messy…when done correctly.

A good history shouldn’t be a hagiography; a hagiography is a hagiography. But hagiographies can be extremely useful for culture building; for shared myth making. (Note: historians don’t use the word “myth” like “myth busters” but instead to speak of stories that provide some sense of “truth” in a given culture…sometimes based on actual, historical events, but not necessarily depending on the sort of accuracy demanded by modern historiography.) In Texas, students are often taught a hagiographical view of the Alamo. The “heroes” of the Alamo are sanitized. People like David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Travis are sanitized as freedom fighters protecting individual liberty and democratic principles. But reality is never this black-and-white. They wanted wealth; they wanted to protect the system of slavery that helped them accumulate that wealth. Those desires factored into their battle with Santa Anna as much their love of individual freedom did, if not more so. Therefore, the lives and careers of the fighters at the Alamo are more complicated than the mythologies and hagiographies suggests. This shouldn’t be controversial. This is what historians do. Historians re-present the past, stains and all.

A great example of this is the difference between the old 1960s movie, The Alamo, featuring John Wayne as Crockett, which has been very popular, and the 2004 box office flip, The Alamo, which doesn’t have the John Wayne heroics but instead presents Crockett (played excellently by Billie Bob Thornton!), Bowie, Travis, and adjacent figures like Sam Houston (played by Dennis Quaid), in their complexity. Last week, I watched the latter, and it’s actually a really good film but it’s not a hagiography. Bowie has problems with alcoholism and is a slave owner. Travis abandons his wife and children. Crockett is a washed up politician who falls way short of the contemporary (by this I mean his era) mythological figure “Davy Crockett,” who was nothing like the real man. For those who appreciate what good historiography offers us—that being a honest attempt to reconstruct the past, wrinkles and all—the 2004 film is far superior to the Marvel comics superhero version from 1960.

But that’s the problem isn’t it: we want our superheroes. We want our narratives and mythologies black-and-white. Unfortunately for many, this isn’t how things have worked, work, or will work. Humans will always be complicated. Your heroes will have faults. And Forget the Alamo reminds readers, especially Texans, that the people who fought at the Alamo were not gods—they were men.

Another thing this book does—and this is “problematic” because it challenges something near and dear to many Texans; something the Burrough, Tomlinson, and Stanford call “the Heroic Anglo Narrative”—is that it shows that the stories of the Alamo aren’t just about Texians/Americans; the stories aren’t just about American v. Mexico, Anglos v. Hispanics. Why? Because Tejanos were present. Their were non-Anglos who fought the Mexican army too, people like Juan Seguin (who has streets and a nearby city named after him but who is often ignored in favor of names like Crockett, Bowie, Travis, Houston, and Stephen F. Austin). This is important because one of the side effects of a sanitized re-construction of the events that took place at the Alamo is that Anglo children in Texas are often made to feel like they’re the descendants of the liberty-loving heroes while children of Hispanic heritage come away feeling like they were the “losers” and the villains. Chapter 21, “This Politically Incorrect Nonsense,” deals with this and shares anecdotes from Texans who faced backlash after their seventh-grade Texas history class or after a field trip to the Alamo. Removing the complexity from the events at the Alamo in an effort to create a “patriotic history” (as people like the current Governor of Texas would call it) does no such thing. What it does do is say that the events of the Alamo that features Native Americans, Tejanos, Blacks, etc. are secondary to the events that features whites. Healthy historiography can’t fall into the trap of ethnocentric hagiography; healthy historiography must try to tell the truth about the past based on the data available to us. This is what the authors of Forget the Alamo are trying to remind readers.

As a born-and-raised Californian, I find this controversy eye-opening. I’m not a Texan but I live in Texas and already, just yesterday, I saw the battle over how Texas self-remembers acted out as an event at a museum in Austin featuring the authors was canceled because of pressure from Texans who don’t like the premise of this book. (A premise, I surmise, that’s not actually based on reading the book, as online reactions to this book make very clear, but on fear of “cancel culture” or some other, similar worry.) I am proud to have been born-and-raised in California while simultaneously being horrified by what happen to Native Americans; by what happened to Californios (like Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo whose story parallels Seguin’s) after the arrival of the “Forty-niners”; by how Asian immigrants were treated for generations; etc. But I feel like becoming a better California meant recognizing and accepting the past (and ongoing work; an ongoing conversation) not censoring it, which is what some Texans appear determined to do when faced with the complexity of the history of this state. When people are hellbent on sanitizing the past—and canceling alternative/revisionary tellings in fear of being canceled (pre-emptive canceling?)—there must be a present, contemporary reason for doing so. Their must be something happening now that demands the mythologies, the hagiographies, take precedent over the complex and diverse histories, histories that demand a greater openness to pluralism, shared celebration and grief, and the hard work of asking what it means to walk forward, together into the future.

For this reason, while I’m not saying all historians will agree with everything presented in Forget the Alamo, and while I realize the provocative title may put many people on the defense before they give the book a chance, I will say that it’s an excellent book. The authors are honest. In my view, they don’t actually outright bury Crockett and company as some online commenters fear, but presents them honestly, in their context, as real humans and not as gods—real humans who are part of the story of Texas but who aren’t the only ones who are part of this story, a story that contains many voices who have been silenced for generations—voices of Tejanos, Mexicans, and enslaved African Americans who wanted the same freedom and the same autonomy that people like Crockett, Bowie, Travis, Houston, and Austin believed was due to them. It’s a book that interfaces the history of Texas with the greater narrative of an evolving Mexico—a Mexico that itself was very complicated, shifting between centralist and federalist factions; a Mexico where at the time Santa Anna was in control but by no means the universal embodiment of all that was Mexico. There’s nothing to fear in a well-written, well-researched history like Forget the Alamo; nothing to fear but fear itself.