Fantasy and Religion
By: Dan Baxter
In Speaking of Faith’s program called “A Return to Mystery: Religion, Fantasy, and Entertainment” the movement toward portraying religious themes through fantasy and modern entertainment is described. “It’s a rebellion against so much intellectuality…so much rationalism and so much consumerism it’s a return to the mystery.” Phyllis Tickle, author of God-Talk in America describes how “nonfiction has been giving way to fiction and fantasy” and books have given way to movies. One example of this Tickle provided was the 1995 production of Touched by an Angel. In this “angels interfere in human affairs.” With this program, Tickle says, “God talk moved out of didactic and out of book form and into entertainment.” In addition Tickle explains how the effects of God talk in this new form are “exponentially larger.”
An excellent example Tickle gave of
God talk is the Matrix. Some
religious related themes in the movie include the last city named
“If its art…it comes up so sweetly
against the side of religion that they are essentially kissing each other. You cannot separate art…from religion if it’s
true art. We can’t escape the face that
somehow the religion is concerned with the subjective world as is art and they
share a territory that somehow circumvents or circumscribes the mind.”
Yet another example Tickle gave of fantasy showing religion is the Harry Potter series. She called it the “Mary Poppins for a new generation.” Harry Potter emphasizes that “life is as full of darkness as it is full of light.”
Finally, Phyllis Tickle concludes by saying how virtual reality adds a new unexplored mystery to our lives today and that with it come new possibilities as well as new questions.
Next, Lynn Schofield Clark, author
of From Angels to Aliens - Teenagers, the Media and the Supernatural, who has conducted a great deal of research
directed towards teens, came on the program.
She too talked about possibilities and how, for teens today, “there are
possibilities about what can exist, and they are aware that there are questions
that cannot be answered either by religion or by science, and that they are
intrigued by those questions and the media play with those questions by
presenting possibilities.” Her first
example was Buffy the Vampire Slayer because it involves a “young person
with sense of purpose of chosen-ness with intervention from caring adults.” This is an element which
In her
research, one theme
Joan of
Arcadia was
The key to
successfully integrating “God Talk” into entertainment,