The New Same Old Wild & Woolly Western Frontier

When I was a small boy, sitting on the leading edge of the baby boom, television helped to shape my imagination, which 60 years ago meant especially the heroes of TV westerns.  There was Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the "Lone Ranger,"  and then a little later the iconic TV series, "Gunsmoke."  In these an countless other TV and movie westerns, young boys saw exemplified what it meant to be a real American man—tough and fair, caring and quick on the draw, law-abiding and above the law when the law wasn't fair, sociable and a rugged individualist—good with a gun but a reluctant warrior at best.  These cowboy heroes "did their own thing," but they did it for the good of frontier society and for true justice, which was something usually distinguished from "the law."

So, recently, I became aware of a new TV series on Syfy, the supposedly science fiction network that shows more silliness than science fiction but occasionally does justice to its name.  The series is "Defiance," which is set in a time in the near future when the Earth has been invaded by a host of alien species and accidentally terraformed in ways that have transformed it into a new,  largely dangerous world.  The hero is Joshua Nolan, the "Chief Lawkeeper" of the multi-racial enclave of Defiance, which stands on what used to be St. Louis.  The Gateway Arch, battered but still standing, is the visual icon of the new civilization Defiance is seeking to build out of the chaos of the post Pale Wars wreck of a world Earth has become.  Josh Nolan is the new Matt Dillion, tougher and more cynical, but still dedicated to justice.  Strip away the high tech, space and aliens veneer, and what we have is a trendy remake of the same old cowboy and western genre.  Indeed, both the new-fangled scifi drama and the old-fashioned cowboy shoot-'em-up dramas seem to draw on far older visions of chivalry, which takes us back to the frontiers of post-Roman, Dark Ages Europe.

One thing that stands out in all of this is how secular, how un-religious, these modern traditions in myth-making are.  Religion sometimes appears but mostly as a sideshow.  The heroes never pray.  They don't lead singing in church. The role of the church as one of the chief civilizing agencies of the real frontier is seldom portrayed, and in more recent TV series religion is more often represented negatively than positively.  Certain social values are portrayed, including the importance of weaponry as the only thing that keeps the bad guys at bay, but spiritual values are seldom to be seen. (One notable exception is the Hallmark Channel TV movie series, "Love Comes Softly," which is a Christian counter-cultural reworking of the cowboy genre).

Our race has a long way to go yet, and one can only pray that the Earth survives the trip we are on.  And we can only pray that eventually the values that define the Kingdom will find their way into the center of our thinking and acting because if they don't it is not likely that the Earth will survive us or us the progressive destruction of the Earth.  Matt Dillion and Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise are fine as far as they go, but it is not far enough. Their way is not the way of wisdom nor of the future we are created to discover.  It is not the way of the Kingdom.

The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Orson Scott Card's fascinating science fiction book, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996), is the story of how a team of scientists living in a future when the Earth can no longer sustain human civilization decide to erase their hurtful past by creating an alternate history.  The team identifies the discovery of the Americas by Columbus as the axial moment when their own past went sour, and it sends three of its members back into the past to prevent Columbus from returning to Spain and to build up the Indian cultures of the Caribbean so that they are the equal of Europe.  These three also recreate their Caribbean empire in ways that are more just and less violent than would otherwise have been the case.

Pastwatch is not only a speculative novel proposing an alternate history.  It is also a work of theology proposing a different kind of Christianity.  As Card makes clear, the Christianity Spain brought to the Americas was entirely able to preach a gentle Christ while visiting the horrors of exploitation, slavery, and violent racialism on the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.  Card's Pastwatch team consciously seeks to create a different kind of Christianity, one that integrates local religious ideas into an adapted Christian faith that actually reflects the teachings of Christ.  Card cleverly works his theology into the story so that it does not seem preachy or churchy while successfully driving home the point that our modern American society is built on the huge injustice Europeans visited on indigenous peoples.  It also drives home the point that the Europeans used a sordid form of Christianity as one weapon in their violent arsenal.  Card's theological message is that things didn't have to be the way they were had so-called Christian societies actually practiced Christ's teachings with other peoples and faiths.

And that is food for thought.