‘Religion in Sort of a Global Sense’: The Relevance of Religious Practices for Political Community in Battlestar Galactica and Beyond

Abstract

The TV show Battlestar Galactica (BSG) may be read as the melding of two polities infused with two different religious systems into one. Drawing on Theodore Schatzki, I argue that this process may best be analysed in terms of the religious practices which they come to perform together. BSG presents a story to the viewer of how a religious practice community that allows differences of creeds and rituals may be realised. With reference to the works of Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin, I argue that the key precondition for this to happen is the avoidance of what Voegelin calls political theology. Differences in creed, doctrine, and specific religious practices may exist side by side as long as certain practices associated with the sacred—in the case of BSG, primarily practices that have to do with burying and remembering the dead—are shared.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Melody Herr, Patrick Jackson, Jorg Kustermans, Cecilie Basberg Neumann, John Erik Riley, and the two anonymous referees of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for incisive criticisms that significantly changed and strengthened the argument pursued in this article.

Notes

Notes

1. Dispersed practices are tied-up implicit understandings, whereas integrative practices are, in addition, tied up with explicit rules and a teleo-affective structure, the latter being “a range of normativised and hierarchically ordered ends, projects, and tasks, to varying degrees allied with normativised emotions and even moods” (Schatzki 80).

2. In a Wittgensteinian perspective, individual meaning is as impossible as a private language. Meaning is in the last instance a social phenomenon. Individualisation is to be understood here as pertaining to reflexive self-understanding. A question that follows is whether such self-understandings make collective action more a series than a group phenomenon (see Sartre), but this is hardly the place for discussing it.

3. Major currents include Theosophy, the Gurdjieff movement, and the teachings of Jung (Heelas 48 et passim).

4. Both the English and German version of Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Böse (first published 1886) are available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4363, access date: 1 September 2011.

5. However, Nietzsche and BSG differ in their respective stances towards this cosmology. Nietzsche's point was not only that, if time is infinite and matter finite, everything material that plays itself out once must necessarily play itself out perpetually, but also that we should love this fate (Deleuze 68–70). In BSG, affirmation of this occurs in the discussions of death as a precondition for the fulfilment of life, but the general theme is fear of repetition and the need to break it.

6. Writing in 1938, Voegelin (Political 28) had the temerity to introduce his theme by writing that “no one up to now ever suspected” that the standard definition of state had “religious pretensions”. It is impossible that Voegelin was unacquainted with Schmitt's work; this is a case of the Protestant Christian wilfully overlooking the fascist. Further, although Durkheim is not noted, he is invoked when Voegelin (Political 46) notes how “[t]he Pauline idea of separating the corpus mysticum from the complementary functions of the community plays a part in the theories of the division of labor propounded by English and French economists and sociologists”.

7. In the coda to the final episode, the two principal angels walk the streets of Los Angeles, making references to a God that does not like to be called by that name (an echo to the Hebrew) and pointing out that their existence here on (new) Earth was in danger of being yet another repetition of the basic historical pattern, which may only be broken by coincidence (‘the law of averages’). One way of reading this coda is as an invitation to look at the whole show as a representation of another realm, which the viewers were able to slip into by watching BSG and which has direct relevance for their lives here and now (Geertz; Neumann, Harry Potter).