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Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture
edited by Jennifer E. Porter and Darcee L. McLaren
State University of New York Press, 315 pages, $20.95, paper

Of the making of Star Trek books there is no end. Along with countless novels, memoirs and coffee-table books, the television and movie series has inspired an astonishing number of academic works—technobabble leavened with sociobabble. Some professors use Trek as a pedagogical aid: the physics, metaphysics, ethics, biology, and computers of Trek have been explored in separate volumes. Likewise, Trek's treatment of race and gender have been scrutinized, and reasons for the show's popularity have been posited.

Given that popularity, it seems safe to say that Trek embodies a contemporary myth, one that touches people deeply—from those still in their parents' basement to those beamed up to ivory towers. It's tempting to laugh at Trek's often obsessive fans, but tread carefully, for Trek covers sacred ground. Setting a story amid the silent, endless spaces ensures Big Questions will be raised. Accordingly, Star Trek and Sacred Ground fills one of the few remaining gaps in the literature with a look at Trek's take on religion.

Trek's take on anything, including the laws of physics, is famous for being adjusted to the needs of a particular episode. Yet there's a clearly discernable drift to Trek's treatment of religion, one which—not surprisingly for a popular phenomenon—runs parallel with our society's rising interest in spirituality during the past three decades.

Part one of Sacred Ground maps that flow. Classic Trek (1966-69) reflected creator Gene Roddenberry's inclination to leave religion in the wake of Progress with poverty, prejudice, and war. Yet Trek, "like American society at that time, was haunted by God and God questions." Biblical allusions abound and theological motifs are a constant preoccupation, one carried into the Trek theatrical films (1989's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier took the Enterprise crew on an ill-fated—and ill-reviewed—search for God himself).

This ambivalence is magnified in the second television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94), where confidence in Progress approaches the level of a revivalist faith. Religion is left to primitive aliens, not to citizens of the Federation, who have evolved since the time they (in the words of one character) "murdered each other in quarrels over tribal-god images."

On Roddenberry's 1991 death, the franchise passed to a generation less keen on ideological purity than on ratings, which meant accommodating cultural shifts: science and Progress were down, spirituality up. The space station of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99) hovered between a race of devout aliens and their gods. Commander Chakotay brought to Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) vision quests, spirit guides, and other Native American New Agery. Yet faith as expressed on these later shows is often content-free, something people do rather than believe. And in a true reflection of current culture, "respect" for religion comes at the price of neutralizing truth claims: Trek avoids asking whether a religion is true, only whether it seems to work.

In a way, this acknowledgment of Trek's mythic dimension calls into question the enterprise of measuring Trek against the real world. At some point such left-brained analysis is like hearing the poet describe a "city of the Big Shoulders," then going off to check the shoulder sizes of other cities.

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February 19 2001, Vol. 45, No. 3