…and the 60th Anniversary no less! I thought I would be a buzzkill. I am old enought to remember watching STAR TREK on my brother’s little black and white TV in his bedroom. I would get a big bowl of chocolate ice cream and savor it and the show. I watched “The Menagerie” the very first time it played. I was a devoted fan and remain so.
I remember, seemingly centuries ago, when the sort of people who took STAR TREK to be Future History were incredibly confident that a post-Christian secular society of Enlightened People would naturally emerge, founded on science and reason and enlightened moral principles that were self-evident to all. The darkness and superstition that is the whole of the Christian tradition would vanish. In the words of John Lennon, speaking at nearly the same time STAR TREK premiered, “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right.”
Those people are now fighting a desperate battle to retain a moral tradition that owes everything to the Jewish and Christian tradition from which it sprang. As Tom Holland points out in DOMINION:
The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.
What is more, those who imagine themselves to be “post-Christian” are fighting that battle against a deeply and fundamentally anti-Christ paganism that proclaims itself the most Perfectly Christian Christianity in All of Time and Space, but which in fact retains a few sentimental attachments to Christian smells and bells while whole-heartedly embracing a worship of power and a predatory contempt for the weak that would have delighted Caesar, Sparta, and the architects of the Third Reich.
In the words of Nazi Catholic Nick Fuentes: “A lot of my racist followers are white supremacist neopagans so I have to assure them that my Catholicism comes second.”
A truly post-Christian society will not look like the United Federation of Planets because the UFP, like the creators of STAR TREK–imagining themselves to be Purely Secular–take for granted a host of deeply Christian assumptions. Christian “superstition” about human equality and dignity and rights, which naifs like Jefferson took to be “self-evident” will, if the monsters like Musk bankrolling MAGA have their way, be extirpated to recreate the world in their image: a world where, as Athens told the Melians, “The strong do as they will and the weak suffer what they must.”
That is the vision of Imperial MAGA Christians like Benny Johnson, who in practice adore Nietzsche, not Christ:
Nietzsche saw this clearly and mocked “English flatheads” who thought Christian moral assumptions about human equality and dignity would just roll on without the supernatural Christian foundations upon which all depends. Hyper-rich champions of the Master Race, ironically cloaking themselves in Christian piety and aesthetics, are like ichneumon larvae eating their way out of a dying American conservative Christian corpse to spawn a monstrous MAGA antichrist cult, much as the Nazis liked to put swastika atop their Christmas trees while denouncing the very idea of letting the lebensunwertes leben hold back the Ubermenschen from exterminating the weak. Christ said to feed the poor and welcome the stranger. Nazis and MAGA Christians want to crush them. And it is those who imagine they are “godless” who fight to defend Christ’s teachings. I wonder if the day will come when they gain a new appreciation for–and ultimately faith in–Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God, Love Incarnate crucified and risen for the salvation of the world that is, as Nietzsche clearly saw, the only reason to care about his moral teachings?
The way back for the Church, of course, is to focus on true repentance and not aesthetics, the inside of the cup and not the outside, virtue and not virtue signaling, the heart of the law, which is love and not performative piety, the Spirit and not the letter of the law, Christ who is in heaven and not Christian Nationalism, which is straight from Hell.
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One Response
I’m slightly younger than you, so after school I eagerly awaited watching re-runs that showed every day around 4pm
I didn’t realize that the network was very concerned about the lack of Christianity in the shows and offending viewers so they were able to force a bit in a few episodes. I specifically remembering thinking “Whoa!” when Uhura says the one liner at the end of the episode “Bread and Circuses”
From Google:
Network Censorship and Forced Inclusions
Because NBC was deeply worried about cultural landmines, the network’s Standards and Practices department tightly monitored anything related to faith. Rather than censoring religion out of the show, network censorship ironically forced religious elements into the script to appease contemporary 1960s audiences.
The compromise resulted in a bizarre blend of secularism and traditional American values:
• The “Son of God” Twist: In “Bread and Circuses,” the script—written by Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon—was designed with a safe twist ending. By showing that the parallel Earth was organically developing Christianity, the writers pacified network censors while safely hiding the religious theme behind a clever wordplay (Sun vs. Son) until the final seconds.
• The Ship’s Chapel: In the episode “Balance of Terror,” the network successfully pressured the production to show a wedding in a dedicated shipboard chapel, proving to anxious 1960s viewers that the traditional institution of marriage and religious spaces still existed in the future.
• Kirk’s Monotheism: In “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, when the alien being Apollo demands that the crew worship him like the ancient Greeks did, Kirk famously declines by saying, “We find one quite sufficient.” This line was deliberately injected to assure mainstream network audiences that the crew was safely monotheistic.