INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
AUTHORTALK® HOST: RONALD WAY
AUTHOR: KEVIN NEECE
BOOK: The Gospel According To Star Trek, The Original Crew
Ron:
Hello, everyone. My name is Ron Way. I'm your host here on AuthorTalk, as well as A Rising Light Media websites. Every week, we try to bring you a diverse and interesting group of authors in the field of religion or spirituality. This week, we're going to take a walk on the wild side. We're going to be visiting a universe far, far away.
(Star Wars music)
Oops, that's the wrong movie.
Voiceover:
“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship, Enterprise. It's five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
(Star Trek music)
Ron:
That's better. That's better. [Laughter] Today, we're interviewing the author of a new book called "The Gospel According to Star Trek: The Original Crew". What's Christian about Star Trek? Heck, what's religious about Star Trek? Nothing, absolutely nothing. At least, that's the way I saw it, and that certainly seems to be the way the franchise intended it to be. There's no question that the Star Trek universe is based on a humanistic, rather than a God-centered world. In fact, it seems like every time that a god from an alien species (of course), shows up, we find out that he's a fraud. In fact, the series is set in a future time when religion has essentially vanished from earth. If that's the case, how can there be a gospel according to Star Trek? Well, that's what we're here to find out. Please help me welcome to our show the author, Mr. Kevin Neece. Welcome, Kevin, to AuthorTalk.
Kevin:
Thanks very much for, Ron. It's good to be here.
Ron:
Although I've seen the Star Trek series on TV, Kevin, and I think I've seen all the movies, I still don't think of myself as a “Trekkie”.
Kevin:
I think the opening music pretty much disqualified you! But, that's okay. [Laughter]
Ron:
Okay, I was at a Halloween party and a couple of my friends are definitely Trekkies, in full uniform, and if you're writing a book about Star Trek series, I assume that you definitely are a Trekkie.
Kevin:
That would be a safe assumption, yes sir. I've been a Star Trek fan for nearly 30 years, and though I did take a bit of time away from that. The first line of the book is my first step toward the “Gospel According to Star Trek” was walking away from Star Trek. I spent several years away, and it was upon returning, that I saw things in a new way, so yes, it's a lot of years of investment, but it's also everything old is new again.
Ron:
I'll just go with my questions, because I think you're going to explain it, if I can pull this out of you in the right way, because it's a big leap from watching the Sci-Fi episodes to all of the sudden, seeing hidden messages within them, especially Christian messaging, though I thought they were devoid of any religious messaging. In fact, I make fun of most of the characters posing as gods in the various episodes I noticed, but how did you begin to see a deeper message within the series, and tell us the process used to slowly comb out or comb through all these episodes of the original crew, and draw a consistent theme about God and perhaps Christianity from them?
Kevin:
The book covers not just the original series, but it talks about ... I have a whole section on Gene Roddenberry [ed. the creator of the series], four chapters on Gene Roddenberry, and then the original series, the animated series, the first six original crew movies and all three of the latest Star Trek film, so it's everything including Kirk and Company. I tried to put that all into one book, which was challenging, but yeah, it started several years ago. It started in 2008. Well, it started before that, because like I said, I had the several years as a Star Trek fan, and I stopped watching it, really in the late '90's, because it got to be too much. There was just too much on the air and I was not keeping up with it, and this was before DVRs and everything, and so I wasn't able to really re-watch the way I wanted to, and I'm picky about that sort of thing, so for a lot of years, I just fantasized about gathering up all of the commercial VHS's and watching them in order of when I could finally get around to it, and then by now, I have Netflix, so yay.
I was in that period of being away from it, and I hadn't even seen the latest Star Trek film, Nemesis, but I had been gathering up DVDs, collection edition DVDs of the movies, and one day, I was staying with my wife's granddad. I was taking care of him. We took care of him in the later years of his life, and I was over there, and I just really wanted to watch Star Trek and I only had the two most recent DVDs that I had bought, Generations and Nemesis, and I saw them again and I loved it and I saw Nemesis for the first time, and I saw Data in a whole new way. I had, in the interim, gone through what I call a world view conversion process, where I went into college because I had a scholarship, again provided by my wife's granddad. It wasn't something I planned on. I wasn't an academic. In fact, I'd driven away from my high school planning to never sit in a classroom again, and then one day, I went to an intro to Philosophy class with my professor, who's become a friend and mentor for many years since then.
Whatever he said in that class that day, it totally transformed my vision of what my education was about. I saw my intellectual growth as an inherently spiritual thing, and I began to see the gospel as something that was a part of the fabric of our existence, and that nothing was secular, that everything was sacred, and so when I came back to Star Trek, I saw it with those new eyes. I saw Data in a whole new way. I was going to do a paper on Data, and I started researching The Next Generation, and in doing so, I started realizing that the kinds of things I was interested in, I was seeing my faith resonating with the Star Trek stories and characters and worldview, over and over and over, just The Next Generation, and then I started watching a bit of the original series, because the new movie was coming, and I started realizing this was all over Star Trek, and so I ended up writing a paper on as much of Star Trek as I could, and I knew when I wrote that paper, I had a book, and that was in 2008, and by then it had become five books.
Ron:
Were you in college then, Kevin?
Kevin:
Yes, I was at Dallas Baptist University. I was writing this paper for a conference that's held there every year that I still go to, still present that, and that was my impetus for doing the research, so that I could write this paper, and it was just going to be research on Data, and then it ended up that I saw things that were relevant everywhere. You talk about there being these Christian messages in Star Trek. Well, I hesitate to use that kind of language, because certainly there are messages in Star Trek, intentional messages. The things that I'm reading, sometimes they are intentional, sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they're intentional in a certain way and then I read them in a slightly different way, so I don't want to ever give the impression with my work that I'm finding some secret, hidden meaning in Star Trek, that Star Trek has been Christian all along. That's just not the case. Certainly Christianity, certainly religion informs Star Trek, but the things that I'm seeing are certainly my own perspective.
Ron:
Well, I'll have to admit: the one similarity and the only symbolism that I could find when I first picked up your book was the famous saying, “Beam Me Up, Scotty,” and I could see the visuals of us suddenly disappearing from the troubled planet to the safety of the mother ship, or God or heaven; the total trust that they had when they'd arrived there, in their little heaven. It sounds a little like the rapture of Christianity. How do we know that it isn't a metaphor for a mystical experience, like Buddhism or Hinduism, to become one with the light? I'm struggling to see how you pull this all together in a Christian-only type of an interpretation with your book.
Kevin:
Right, well, of course, I don't think there's any really intentional metaphysical meaning behind the transporter. Although, there is a book called "Beam Me Up, Jesus" about the rapture.
Ron:
Right, exactly what I was thinking.
Kevin:
That does exist out there, but the transporter, like a lot of things in Star Trek, it exists the way it does for practical reasons. It saved on a special effects budget, because they don't have to land the ship, which is much more expensive. We just do it all with special effects.
Ron:
You said, Kevin, that Gene Roddenberry, who's the creator of the shows, you say that his own spiritual quest guided the franchise and it contained the image of Christ in Star Trek's most popular character. Well, who was that? Tell the audience and do you posit that?
Kevin:
Well, the reason I talk about it coming from Gene Roddenberry's spiritual quest is that I think the things that Gene's talking about, the things that he was interested in about humanity, who we are, what we're about, where we're going, what it means to be human. Those are inherently spiritually questions, and they do arise from a specifically religious journey of his being raised a Southern Baptist and then, in the 1930's in West Texas and Los Angeles, and then rejecting that in his teenage years, but still retaining the idea that there is something greater to our existence, still retaining a lot of the morality that he got from that, and developing his own ideas about God.
Ron:
Well, you know what? Kevin, I'm going to interject because Roddenberry says, and I take this quote out, of course, out of your book: "I believe that I am God. Certainly, you are. I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God." Now, this, I resonate with, along with the Star Trek's creator, but reading you, I would make a guess that it's not a part of your own faith journey, which seems to be deeply Christian.
Expand on Roddenberry's, vision of the divine and then let's get into your own spiritual journey a little bit so that we can see where you're writing from.
Kevin:
I've spent a lot of time more, but I did probably devote a solid year just to the Roddenberry section, which was originally just one chapter, and of course, I spent the whole eight years that I was working on this and the three years of really drilling into this particular book, I would talk ... I was thinking about and talking about Roddenberry all the time, researching Roddenberry all the time, but I think for about a solid year, Roddenberry was the center of my world and the center of my research.
Ron:
Sounds like it.
Kevin:
His spirituality is really interesting, because it resonates a lot with Pantheism, but it seems to be really grounded in humanity. Where the Pantheist would say, "I am God. You are God. The rock is God. The tree is God." Gene seems to limit it to human beings, and he says intelligent beings, so I don't know if he means dolphins or what, but there are a lot of things that he never really expanded all that well on, and he definitely had a vision of an afterlife in terms of becoming one with the All, as he called it, and as a Christian, I look at those things and Gene Roddenberry notices things about humanity that I notice about humanity, and they're the best things about us, and he notices those things, and he says, "Aha, this is the spark of the divine in human beings. Therefore, human beings are divine or are part of the divinity." I look at those same things. I recognize them. I see what Gene sees, and I see the fingerprints of God on his very good creation. That is not to say that God does not indwell in us.
I talk in the book about the idea that there is a sense in Christian theology of God coming to dwell with and inside us. Not that we ourselves are God, but that ultimately, we are transformed into the ... Closer into the image and likeness of God. We are created in the image of God. That image is broken and fractured and fallen and so the process of our salvation, which is something that we work out and struggle with, the process of sanctification and the process of ultimate restoration of ourselves and all creation is bringing ourselves to be more like God, so the idea of being God is, yes, is not something that, as a Christian, I would agree with, but the idea that there is something of the divine in me, I think that's an absolutely essential idea, and one that Christians often lose sight of. One of the reasons I did this was because I felt like Christians are so busy talking about the bad things of humanity that we forget that we are the image-bearers of God and that image is still in us, and there's a lot about us that really is good, and can improve and can get better. We don't need to write things off just they're human.
I call my journey through all this that I do on my website, The Undiscovered Country Project, and one of the reasons I chose that title was that if there is an undiscovered country in contemporary Christianity, it's perhaps our own humanity. I think Star Trek can help us to discover that.
Ron:
In fact, with your permission, I'm going to read a part of your book here, a paragraph here ...
Kevin:
Oh, certainly. Please do.
Ron:
... because I couldn't summarize it, and I'm just going to pick an example that I'd like to amplify. This one is from chapter called, “The Return of the Archons”. Is that how they say it in the movie?
Kevin:
Oh yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ron:
And The Society on Beta III, and you write, "This episode seems to be saying that Christian religion often suppresses the spirit, rather than restoring it, and that the rigidity of religion misses the point of Jesus's teachings. It would also seem to suggest that our image of Christ is often merely an icon and does not reflect Jesus himself." I'm skipping a piece... "The remedy for the frozen chosen." I love that. Where did you get that?
Kevin:
That's a phrase that's been around for a long time.
Ron:
Okay, I never heard of it.
Kevin:
That's a colloquialism of Christian culture.
Ron:
"The remedy for the frozen chosen, locked in soul-killing religion, is to return to the heart and teachings of Christ as closely and as purely as possible. Indeed, Star Trek was produced in the earliest years of the Jesus Movement, which sought just such a return to first century Christian faith."
That's what I believe, Kevin, I believe we need to get back to that. I'm an Episcopalian, and quite honestly, I can't even mouth some of the things I'm supposed to mouth, say the creeds that I no longer believe, because I just can't. I want to get back to the Jesus teachings, and that's what I begin to see with new eyes, as you would say, in the book, in your book, but you helped me recognize them in the Star Trek episodes.
Kevin:
Well, I'm very, very glad and happy to hear that, because that's definitely one of my primary goals, and I hope that not just Christian people who read the book, but anybody who reads the book can start to see Star Trek in a new way, and start to see their own worldviews in a new way, and think critically, think carefully about how they engage media and the arts of popular culture, but also how they engage the world around them, and so that's marvelous that it's had at least some semblance of that impact for you. That's very gratifying.
You mentioned earlier about ... And people often go to this. When you talk about Star Trek and religion or Star Trek and Christianity, they use the idea that Star Trek often tears down false gods as evidence that Star Trek is Atheistic or that Gene Roddenberry is Atheist. Of course, I argue in my book that Gene Roddenberry was not an atheist. Although, there were certainly ideas, certainly conceptions of God in which he disbelieved. Those would be the most common conception, pardon me, but when Star Trek goes and tears down these false gods, that's a very Christian thing. I have a friend who's Presbyterian. He says that's a huge thing in his religious tradition. It's called iconoclasm, and it's tearing down things that claim to be God, but are not, and all of these gods, they fail the test for God.
I talk in the chapter called, “Star Trek Five” about the conversation that they have with the god-being and how they throw all these things at him that God should be, and that he isn't, and therefore, arrived to the conclusion that he is not God. That does not negate the fact that God exists. That merely says that this being that I'm encountering right now is not God, and because of that, that being deserves to be torn down.
The religion that they undermine in “Return of the Archons”, which we can talk about the prime directive implications of that, but the religion that they undermine, it deserves to be undermined. These people are being enslaved by this religion and it doesn't reflect, really, the wisdom of the views of their founder. They never denigrate the founder, Landru, which stands in for Jesus, if you will, if you read this in a very Christian context, which is pretty easy to do and a lot of people do. They don't ever denigrate the founder. They denigrate what's been done with his teaching, and I think that is really, really important to key in on, and to have a very careful conversation about these things, so that we don't jump to conclusions.
Ron:
I'm going to read one more piece, because ...
Kevin:
Yeah, please, go ahead.
Ron:
I resonated on so many levels with your observations and your commentary, Kevin.
Kevin:
I'm very glad.
Ron:
And in fact, I do a blog and we get probably over a 100,000 people that click on the website. Some we have extensive conversations with, and it goes all over the world, which is fascinating, because I'm continually trying to pass on the Jesus love between warring religious people that are on the blog, and of course, some of them I just delete, but this next paragraph, I've copied for use in one of my blogs in the future. You'll see it someplace here.
Kevin:
Oh, marvelous. I'd love that.
Ron:
Because it's powerful and it's true.
Kevin:
Thank you.
Ron:
You say, I am quoting: "Neighbor love is so fundamental to what it means to be a follower of Christ that Jesus places it second only to love of God." Then you go on to say, "Star Trek may have a better grasp on and be more potent example of a lived-out gospel than much of our modern church world has been able to muster." I would quote for your most elegant observations about our faith in the church, but I would rather like to hear from you in words how you see that why you say that, and if people are looking for a reference in the book, it's on page 64 of his book in Chapter Six: “Last Battles and the Neighbor Love”.
Kevin:
Last Battles and the Neighbor Love is one of my favorite chapters.
Ron:
Me too, me too. You got to the heart of Christianity there.
Kevin:
It really is. I actually have on my website right now, a free PDF that you can download, called "A Non-Trekkies Reading Guide" for this book, and that chapter is on there. What I do is I list the chapters and I explain what the chapters are engaging and why you might be interested in the chapter. It's all the chapters that don't lean too heavily on Star Trek, so that anybody could really pick it up and read it and know what I'm talking about, and so it walks you through the book. If you have no idea about Star Trek, you can read these sections and you'll get my message one way or another.
Ron:
Well, Kevin, our time has grown thin. We are bumped up against the clock, so give us your website.
Kevin:
www.kevincneece.com and Neece is spelled N-E-E-C-E or you can go to gospelaccordingtostartrek.com and you can click back to my main website from there.
Ron:
Perfect, Kevin. Folks, the book is called “The Gospel According to Star Trek; The Original Crew”. The author's name is Kevin Neece. Now, here's the good news: the publisher is going to give away ten copies of Kevin's book. Did you know that, Kevin?
Kevin:
I did not know that. [laughter]
Ron:
That's coming right out of your bottom-line. On our website, when you're listening, click on the word "Enter Drawing", and you'll jump to a sign-up page. Fill it out. Hit the submit button. At the end of one week, we will have a drawing and the publisher, Wipe and Stock, will send out ten free copies of Kevin Neece's book to ten lucky winners. It doesn't matter where in the world that you're listening, the books will be mailed to you. Good luck, and now, unfortunately, it's time to say goodbye for this week. Thank you, Kevin, for being on our show, AuthorTalk. I am so grateful for you taking the time to join me today.
Kevin:
Thank you very much for having me. It's been a wonderful conversation. I hope that people will engage in the book, and it will be beneficial to them.
Ron:
Well, there's a million Trekkers out there, so you will undoubtedly resonate with some of them. Even if you don't, you're going to end up with some feelings that give them a deeper message behind all those episodes. At least, that's what I got out of your book, and it was a great read.
Now, it's time to say goodbye this week, until we meet again here on AuthorTalk, this is Ron Way, your humble host. Thank you for listening and letting me introduce you to another fascinating author. May the force be with you.
(Star Wars music – not Star Trek)
Here I go again. [Laughter] Sorry, Kevin, here I go again. [Laughter] Goodbye, everybody, thanks for listening.
AUTHORTALK® HOST: RONALD WAY
AUTHOR: KEVIN NEECE
BOOK: The Gospel According To Star Trek, The Original Crew
Ron:
Hello, everyone. My name is Ron Way. I'm your host here on AuthorTalk, as well as A Rising Light Media websites. Every week, we try to bring you a diverse and interesting group of authors in the field of religion or spirituality. This week, we're going to take a walk on the wild side. We're going to be visiting a universe far, far away.
(Star Wars music)
Oops, that's the wrong movie.
Voiceover:
“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship, Enterprise. It's five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
(Star Trek music)
Ron:
That's better. That's better. [Laughter] Today, we're interviewing the author of a new book called "The Gospel According to Star Trek: The Original Crew". What's Christian about Star Trek? Heck, what's religious about Star Trek? Nothing, absolutely nothing. At least, that's the way I saw it, and that certainly seems to be the way the franchise intended it to be. There's no question that the Star Trek universe is based on a humanistic, rather than a God-centered world. In fact, it seems like every time that a god from an alien species (of course), shows up, we find out that he's a fraud. In fact, the series is set in a future time when religion has essentially vanished from earth. If that's the case, how can there be a gospel according to Star Trek? Well, that's what we're here to find out. Please help me welcome to our show the author, Mr. Kevin Neece. Welcome, Kevin, to AuthorTalk.
Kevin:
Thanks very much for, Ron. It's good to be here.
Ron:
Although I've seen the Star Trek series on TV, Kevin, and I think I've seen all the movies, I still don't think of myself as a “Trekkie”.
Kevin:
I think the opening music pretty much disqualified you! But, that's okay. [Laughter]
Ron:
Okay, I was at a Halloween party and a couple of my friends are definitely Trekkies, in full uniform, and if you're writing a book about Star Trek series, I assume that you definitely are a Trekkie.
Kevin:
That would be a safe assumption, yes sir. I've been a Star Trek fan for nearly 30 years, and though I did take a bit of time away from that. The first line of the book is my first step toward the “Gospel According to Star Trek” was walking away from Star Trek. I spent several years away, and it was upon returning, that I saw things in a new way, so yes, it's a lot of years of investment, but it's also everything old is new again.
Ron:
I'll just go with my questions, because I think you're going to explain it, if I can pull this out of you in the right way, because it's a big leap from watching the Sci-Fi episodes to all of the sudden, seeing hidden messages within them, especially Christian messaging, though I thought they were devoid of any religious messaging. In fact, I make fun of most of the characters posing as gods in the various episodes I noticed, but how did you begin to see a deeper message within the series, and tell us the process used to slowly comb out or comb through all these episodes of the original crew, and draw a consistent theme about God and perhaps Christianity from them?
Kevin:
The book covers not just the original series, but it talks about ... I have a whole section on Gene Roddenberry [ed. the creator of the series], four chapters on Gene Roddenberry, and then the original series, the animated series, the first six original crew movies and all three of the latest Star Trek film, so it's everything including Kirk and Company. I tried to put that all into one book, which was challenging, but yeah, it started several years ago. It started in 2008. Well, it started before that, because like I said, I had the several years as a Star Trek fan, and I stopped watching it, really in the late '90's, because it got to be too much. There was just too much on the air and I was not keeping up with it, and this was before DVRs and everything, and so I wasn't able to really re-watch the way I wanted to, and I'm picky about that sort of thing, so for a lot of years, I just fantasized about gathering up all of the commercial VHS's and watching them in order of when I could finally get around to it, and then by now, I have Netflix, so yay.
I was in that period of being away from it, and I hadn't even seen the latest Star Trek film, Nemesis, but I had been gathering up DVDs, collection edition DVDs of the movies, and one day, I was staying with my wife's granddad. I was taking care of him. We took care of him in the later years of his life, and I was over there, and I just really wanted to watch Star Trek and I only had the two most recent DVDs that I had bought, Generations and Nemesis, and I saw them again and I loved it and I saw Nemesis for the first time, and I saw Data in a whole new way. I had, in the interim, gone through what I call a world view conversion process, where I went into college because I had a scholarship, again provided by my wife's granddad. It wasn't something I planned on. I wasn't an academic. In fact, I'd driven away from my high school planning to never sit in a classroom again, and then one day, I went to an intro to Philosophy class with my professor, who's become a friend and mentor for many years since then.
Whatever he said in that class that day, it totally transformed my vision of what my education was about. I saw my intellectual growth as an inherently spiritual thing, and I began to see the gospel as something that was a part of the fabric of our existence, and that nothing was secular, that everything was sacred, and so when I came back to Star Trek, I saw it with those new eyes. I saw Data in a whole new way. I was going to do a paper on Data, and I started researching The Next Generation, and in doing so, I started realizing that the kinds of things I was interested in, I was seeing my faith resonating with the Star Trek stories and characters and worldview, over and over and over, just The Next Generation, and then I started watching a bit of the original series, because the new movie was coming, and I started realizing this was all over Star Trek, and so I ended up writing a paper on as much of Star Trek as I could, and I knew when I wrote that paper, I had a book, and that was in 2008, and by then it had become five books.
Ron:
Were you in college then, Kevin?
Kevin:
Yes, I was at Dallas Baptist University. I was writing this paper for a conference that's held there every year that I still go to, still present that, and that was my impetus for doing the research, so that I could write this paper, and it was just going to be research on Data, and then it ended up that I saw things that were relevant everywhere. You talk about there being these Christian messages in Star Trek. Well, I hesitate to use that kind of language, because certainly there are messages in Star Trek, intentional messages. The things that I'm reading, sometimes they are intentional, sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they're intentional in a certain way and then I read them in a slightly different way, so I don't want to ever give the impression with my work that I'm finding some secret, hidden meaning in Star Trek, that Star Trek has been Christian all along. That's just not the case. Certainly Christianity, certainly religion informs Star Trek, but the things that I'm seeing are certainly my own perspective.
Ron:
Well, I'll have to admit: the one similarity and the only symbolism that I could find when I first picked up your book was the famous saying, “Beam Me Up, Scotty,” and I could see the visuals of us suddenly disappearing from the troubled planet to the safety of the mother ship, or God or heaven; the total trust that they had when they'd arrived there, in their little heaven. It sounds a little like the rapture of Christianity. How do we know that it isn't a metaphor for a mystical experience, like Buddhism or Hinduism, to become one with the light? I'm struggling to see how you pull this all together in a Christian-only type of an interpretation with your book.
Kevin:
Right, well, of course, I don't think there's any really intentional metaphysical meaning behind the transporter. Although, there is a book called "Beam Me Up, Jesus" about the rapture.
Ron:
Right, exactly what I was thinking.
Kevin:
That does exist out there, but the transporter, like a lot of things in Star Trek, it exists the way it does for practical reasons. It saved on a special effects budget, because they don't have to land the ship, which is much more expensive. We just do it all with special effects.
Ron:
You said, Kevin, that Gene Roddenberry, who's the creator of the shows, you say that his own spiritual quest guided the franchise and it contained the image of Christ in Star Trek's most popular character. Well, who was that? Tell the audience and do you posit that?
Kevin:
Well, the reason I talk about it coming from Gene Roddenberry's spiritual quest is that I think the things that Gene's talking about, the things that he was interested in about humanity, who we are, what we're about, where we're going, what it means to be human. Those are inherently spiritually questions, and they do arise from a specifically religious journey of his being raised a Southern Baptist and then, in the 1930's in West Texas and Los Angeles, and then rejecting that in his teenage years, but still retaining the idea that there is something greater to our existence, still retaining a lot of the morality that he got from that, and developing his own ideas about God.
Ron:
Well, you know what? Kevin, I'm going to interject because Roddenberry says, and I take this quote out, of course, out of your book: "I believe that I am God. Certainly, you are. I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God." Now, this, I resonate with, along with the Star Trek's creator, but reading you, I would make a guess that it's not a part of your own faith journey, which seems to be deeply Christian.
Expand on Roddenberry's, vision of the divine and then let's get into your own spiritual journey a little bit so that we can see where you're writing from.
Kevin:
I've spent a lot of time more, but I did probably devote a solid year just to the Roddenberry section, which was originally just one chapter, and of course, I spent the whole eight years that I was working on this and the three years of really drilling into this particular book, I would talk ... I was thinking about and talking about Roddenberry all the time, researching Roddenberry all the time, but I think for about a solid year, Roddenberry was the center of my world and the center of my research.
Ron:
Sounds like it.
Kevin:
His spirituality is really interesting, because it resonates a lot with Pantheism, but it seems to be really grounded in humanity. Where the Pantheist would say, "I am God. You are God. The rock is God. The tree is God." Gene seems to limit it to human beings, and he says intelligent beings, so I don't know if he means dolphins or what, but there are a lot of things that he never really expanded all that well on, and he definitely had a vision of an afterlife in terms of becoming one with the All, as he called it, and as a Christian, I look at those things and Gene Roddenberry notices things about humanity that I notice about humanity, and they're the best things about us, and he notices those things, and he says, "Aha, this is the spark of the divine in human beings. Therefore, human beings are divine or are part of the divinity." I look at those same things. I recognize them. I see what Gene sees, and I see the fingerprints of God on his very good creation. That is not to say that God does not indwell in us.
I talk in the book about the idea that there is a sense in Christian theology of God coming to dwell with and inside us. Not that we ourselves are God, but that ultimately, we are transformed into the ... Closer into the image and likeness of God. We are created in the image of God. That image is broken and fractured and fallen and so the process of our salvation, which is something that we work out and struggle with, the process of sanctification and the process of ultimate restoration of ourselves and all creation is bringing ourselves to be more like God, so the idea of being God is, yes, is not something that, as a Christian, I would agree with, but the idea that there is something of the divine in me, I think that's an absolutely essential idea, and one that Christians often lose sight of. One of the reasons I did this was because I felt like Christians are so busy talking about the bad things of humanity that we forget that we are the image-bearers of God and that image is still in us, and there's a lot about us that really is good, and can improve and can get better. We don't need to write things off just they're human.
I call my journey through all this that I do on my website, The Undiscovered Country Project, and one of the reasons I chose that title was that if there is an undiscovered country in contemporary Christianity, it's perhaps our own humanity. I think Star Trek can help us to discover that.
Ron:
In fact, with your permission, I'm going to read a part of your book here, a paragraph here ...
Kevin:
Oh, certainly. Please do.
Ron:
... because I couldn't summarize it, and I'm just going to pick an example that I'd like to amplify. This one is from chapter called, “The Return of the Archons”. Is that how they say it in the movie?
Kevin:
Oh yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ron:
And The Society on Beta III, and you write, "This episode seems to be saying that Christian religion often suppresses the spirit, rather than restoring it, and that the rigidity of religion misses the point of Jesus's teachings. It would also seem to suggest that our image of Christ is often merely an icon and does not reflect Jesus himself." I'm skipping a piece... "The remedy for the frozen chosen." I love that. Where did you get that?
Kevin:
That's a phrase that's been around for a long time.
Ron:
Okay, I never heard of it.
Kevin:
That's a colloquialism of Christian culture.
Ron:
"The remedy for the frozen chosen, locked in soul-killing religion, is to return to the heart and teachings of Christ as closely and as purely as possible. Indeed, Star Trek was produced in the earliest years of the Jesus Movement, which sought just such a return to first century Christian faith."
That's what I believe, Kevin, I believe we need to get back to that. I'm an Episcopalian, and quite honestly, I can't even mouth some of the things I'm supposed to mouth, say the creeds that I no longer believe, because I just can't. I want to get back to the Jesus teachings, and that's what I begin to see with new eyes, as you would say, in the book, in your book, but you helped me recognize them in the Star Trek episodes.
Kevin:
Well, I'm very, very glad and happy to hear that, because that's definitely one of my primary goals, and I hope that not just Christian people who read the book, but anybody who reads the book can start to see Star Trek in a new way, and start to see their own worldviews in a new way, and think critically, think carefully about how they engage media and the arts of popular culture, but also how they engage the world around them, and so that's marvelous that it's had at least some semblance of that impact for you. That's very gratifying.
You mentioned earlier about ... And people often go to this. When you talk about Star Trek and religion or Star Trek and Christianity, they use the idea that Star Trek often tears down false gods as evidence that Star Trek is Atheistic or that Gene Roddenberry is Atheist. Of course, I argue in my book that Gene Roddenberry was not an atheist. Although, there were certainly ideas, certainly conceptions of God in which he disbelieved. Those would be the most common conception, pardon me, but when Star Trek goes and tears down these false gods, that's a very Christian thing. I have a friend who's Presbyterian. He says that's a huge thing in his religious tradition. It's called iconoclasm, and it's tearing down things that claim to be God, but are not, and all of these gods, they fail the test for God.
I talk in the chapter called, “Star Trek Five” about the conversation that they have with the god-being and how they throw all these things at him that God should be, and that he isn't, and therefore, arrived to the conclusion that he is not God. That does not negate the fact that God exists. That merely says that this being that I'm encountering right now is not God, and because of that, that being deserves to be torn down.
The religion that they undermine in “Return of the Archons”, which we can talk about the prime directive implications of that, but the religion that they undermine, it deserves to be undermined. These people are being enslaved by this religion and it doesn't reflect, really, the wisdom of the views of their founder. They never denigrate the founder, Landru, which stands in for Jesus, if you will, if you read this in a very Christian context, which is pretty easy to do and a lot of people do. They don't ever denigrate the founder. They denigrate what's been done with his teaching, and I think that is really, really important to key in on, and to have a very careful conversation about these things, so that we don't jump to conclusions.
Ron:
I'm going to read one more piece, because ...
Kevin:
Yeah, please, go ahead.
Ron:
I resonated on so many levels with your observations and your commentary, Kevin.
Kevin:
I'm very glad.
Ron:
And in fact, I do a blog and we get probably over a 100,000 people that click on the website. Some we have extensive conversations with, and it goes all over the world, which is fascinating, because I'm continually trying to pass on the Jesus love between warring religious people that are on the blog, and of course, some of them I just delete, but this next paragraph, I've copied for use in one of my blogs in the future. You'll see it someplace here.
Kevin:
Oh, marvelous. I'd love that.
Ron:
Because it's powerful and it's true.
Kevin:
Thank you.
Ron:
You say, I am quoting: "Neighbor love is so fundamental to what it means to be a follower of Christ that Jesus places it second only to love of God." Then you go on to say, "Star Trek may have a better grasp on and be more potent example of a lived-out gospel than much of our modern church world has been able to muster." I would quote for your most elegant observations about our faith in the church, but I would rather like to hear from you in words how you see that why you say that, and if people are looking for a reference in the book, it's on page 64 of his book in Chapter Six: “Last Battles and the Neighbor Love”.
Kevin:
Last Battles and the Neighbor Love is one of my favorite chapters.
Ron:
Me too, me too. You got to the heart of Christianity there.
Kevin:
It really is. I actually have on my website right now, a free PDF that you can download, called "A Non-Trekkies Reading Guide" for this book, and that chapter is on there. What I do is I list the chapters and I explain what the chapters are engaging and why you might be interested in the chapter. It's all the chapters that don't lean too heavily on Star Trek, so that anybody could really pick it up and read it and know what I'm talking about, and so it walks you through the book. If you have no idea about Star Trek, you can read these sections and you'll get my message one way or another.
Ron:
Well, Kevin, our time has grown thin. We are bumped up against the clock, so give us your website.
Kevin:
www.kevincneece.com and Neece is spelled N-E-E-C-E or you can go to gospelaccordingtostartrek.com and you can click back to my main website from there.
Ron:
Perfect, Kevin. Folks, the book is called “The Gospel According to Star Trek; The Original Crew”. The author's name is Kevin Neece. Now, here's the good news: the publisher is going to give away ten copies of Kevin's book. Did you know that, Kevin?
Kevin:
I did not know that. [laughter]
Ron:
That's coming right out of your bottom-line. On our website, when you're listening, click on the word "Enter Drawing", and you'll jump to a sign-up page. Fill it out. Hit the submit button. At the end of one week, we will have a drawing and the publisher, Wipe and Stock, will send out ten free copies of Kevin Neece's book to ten lucky winners. It doesn't matter where in the world that you're listening, the books will be mailed to you. Good luck, and now, unfortunately, it's time to say goodbye for this week. Thank you, Kevin, for being on our show, AuthorTalk. I am so grateful for you taking the time to join me today.
Kevin:
Thank you very much for having me. It's been a wonderful conversation. I hope that people will engage in the book, and it will be beneficial to them.
Ron:
Well, there's a million Trekkers out there, so you will undoubtedly resonate with some of them. Even if you don't, you're going to end up with some feelings that give them a deeper message behind all those episodes. At least, that's what I got out of your book, and it was a great read.
Now, it's time to say goodbye this week, until we meet again here on AuthorTalk, this is Ron Way, your humble host. Thank you for listening and letting me introduce you to another fascinating author. May the force be with you.
(Star Wars music – not Star Trek)
Here I go again. [Laughter] Sorry, Kevin, here I go again. [Laughter] Goodbye, everybody, thanks for listening.