By Andrew D. Thrasher
Underlying contemporary Western culture are the three posts, and each of these, especially the first, underlines a major portion of my co-edited volume, Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination. The post-Christian turn is characterized by both the turn away from traditional Christian orthodoxy and practice and the latent indebtedness even among the post-Christian turn to the inescapable effects of Christianity upon Western culture. But the post-Christian turn is also characterized by the exploration of differing religious options, the fascination with the spiritual, and even the option of deferring religious belief altogether. This particularly shows up in Part III of our volume, where the contributors explore this post-Christian turn.
For example, the turn begins with Levi Morrow’s exploration of the Jewish (postmodern) theological imagination in Rabbi Shagar. After this Jewish theological reflection, the contributors then explore the post-Christian turn found among late twentieth century fantasy literature, by and large in chronological order, to tell a complex narrative that does not support traditional secularization narratives (that the more modern we become the less religious we become). Here we see combined with the post-Christian turn an underlying postsecular narrative. This postsecular narrative questions the normal secularization thesis and tells another story. Rather than a movement from religion to atheism, the postsecular narrative underlying fantasy literature tells a story through the post-Christian turn in fantasy.
Oliver Crisp argues how the fantasy of Ursula le Guin resources Daoist, cultural anthropology, and Jungian psychology to shape the beginnings of a post-Christian turn in late twentieth century fantasy. One would think that this would lead to atheism, but as U-Wen Low argues, the fantasy of Terry Pratchett does not go that far—but it does lead to agnosticism. Contemporary to Pratchett, I argue that the fantasy of David Eddings and Robert Jordan results in a pluralistic or inter-religious resourcement. Again, coinciding historically with many of the fantasy subcreators listed above, Orson Scott Card was writing at roughly the same time as le Guin, Eddings, and Pratchett, and Brandon Sanderson is writing contemporaneous with Robert Jordan (and indeed Sanderson finished Jordan’s massive The Wheel of Time). But what is important about the fantasy of Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson is the distinct Mormon theological influence into how they imagine the hero in terms of Mormon theological anthropology.
What does this leave us at the intersection of the post-Christian turn and the underlying postsecular narrative? These two “Posts” tell a narrative about fantasy literature that moves from traditional Christianity (what we call classical Christian fantasy) not to secularization or the decline in religious believing, but rather to what Peter Berger argues as the pluralization of belief in fantastic literature. That is, the post-Christian turn in fantasy away from traditional Christianity leads not only to other religious traditions and agnosticism, but also more subaltern non-orthodox Christian traditions.
Crisp’s theological reflection on the fantasy of Ursula le Guin and Herring’s chapter on the Mormon Fantasy of Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson are important examples of the Christian latency even in the post-Christian turn in fantasy. Furthermore, Low and I underlie the turn to both agnosticism and pluralism as examples of the post-Christian turn when it by and large turns away from traditional Christianity as a theological resource (even if it is rescripted and synthesized as Thrasher argues in Jordan) for the creation of fantasy. The point I am trying to make here is this: the underlying postsecular narrative that late twentieth century fantasy tells is demonstrated through the post-Christian turn in fantastic literature. But what about the postmodern?
As I stated in the previous post, the postmodern is marked by three moves: a) the aestheticization and deferral of truth and b) the fragmentation and explosion of religious options that c) generates reactive responses and proactive forces that shape contemporary Western culture. Let us unpack each of these in relation to fantastic literature.
First what the post-Christian turn in fantasy displays is both an escape into alternate worlds that we come to admire and are enchanted by as we explore these subcreated worlds. We come to believe in the creation of subcreated, alternate worlds because of how fascinating they are and how much they reflect something missing in our own world. They shape and reflect much of what we desire to be true and this attributes to the aestheticization of these worlds. And yet, these worlds are clearly imagined. And how they imagine religious, spiritual, or magical traditions implies an implicit deferral of truth, particularly of traditional Christian truth.
On one side, Alison Milbank’s analysis of C.S. Lewis’ “Imaginative Apologetics” implies an enchanted realism that offers a Christian rebuttal to the effects of secularism’s deferral of truth. On the other side, my own analysis of fantastic inter-religious resourcement allows through fantasy the subcreation of a coherent religious system that in real-world religions is deeply incompatible (through Jordan’s subcreated merging of Hindu reincarnation with Christian messianism to solve the problem of evil).
With this fantastic synthesis, it not only defers the necessity of asking whether Hindu reincarnation and Christian messianism are (in)compatible, but moreover it masks and simulates the question of whether real-world religions are exclusive to one another when its fantasy portrays an alternate subcreation where they actually are compatible and make sense. Clearly there is not only a deferral of truth, but through fantasy, there is both the rescription of Christian truth and the simulation of religious pluralism that distorts and unhooks religious ideas from their traditional contexts.
Second, the postmodern is characterized by the fragmentation of explosion of religious options. This is directly apparent in the chapters by U-Wen Low, Josh Herring and myself. There is not only a fragmentation of truth in the turn to agnosticism, pluralism, and non-Nicene Christianity, but each of these illustrate an alternative option—and example of the explosion of religious ideas and options in a postmodern, post-Christian, and postsecular world. But it is the third aspect of the postmodern I want to dwell on: How does fantasy generate reactive responses and proactive forces that shape contemporary Western Culture?
Clearly, Alison Milbank articulates how the fantasy of C.S. Lewis offers an imaginative apologetics against secularism. Implicit in her analysis is how Lewis was prophetically aware of what the turn to subjectivism would lead to—the deferral of truth. But Milbank takes Lewis further to demonstrate how Lewis can offer Christians a set of tools that can help them respond to secularism—which is marked by the ideological differentiation between sacred and secular institutions. Tied to secularism is also the reality that the religious concern for truth is not only deferred—and is masked and hidden behind the turn to pluralism and agnosticism—but also finds new expression among alternate, non-Nicene versions of Christianity itself.
The imaginative power of fantasy helps us to not only explore alternate religious options that may not align with or necessitate orthodox Nicene Christianity, but a by-product of this is that it offers the space for the proactive visibility of new forms of religion and spirituality in the twenty-first century. I think Jacob Torbeck’s analysis of Magic: the Gathering demonstrates a keen awareness of both a critique of religion and a rescription of religion in ways that helps people in Western culture be aware of both the problematic history and potential fruit of religion in our contemporary world.
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So, I pose to the reader a simple question: Whose fantasy, which theology? Whose fantasy are we reading and ingesting? What is the theology of both the subcreator and of the subcreation? Whose theology are we ingesting? And tied to this, what does this consumption generate of the possibilities of believing? It is this last question that I pursue in a forthcoming volume on exegeting Post-Christian theology in popular culture. There is more to come, but in the meantime, I hope I have wetted your palate and that you are now excited for our volume, Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination!
Pop Culture and Theology 