McGrath, who teaches a course called Religion in Science Fiction, said religion and religious symbols have been ever-present in Lost. Look at the first season, he said, when Locke explained to Walt that backgammon is a game older than Jesus Christ and has two sides playing each other – one light and one dark. Note names like the Dharma Initiative (“dharma” being the Indian religious term meaning “one's righteous duty”). See the Egyptian religious symbolism of the statue or the hieroglyphics on the temple.
We’ve also seen religion as an overarching storyline, he said, in the long-running battle between Jack, a man of science, and Locke, a man of faith, as well as the battle between Jacob and the Man in Black depicted in “Ab Aeterno.”
“Religion, God, the meaning of human existence, destiny, deity manipulating human lives – we’ve been getting increasing amounts of that,” McGrath said. “And as we might expect in our time, it’s eclectic and drawing on different traditions.”
For six seasons, the series about survivors of an airliner that crashed on a remote island has given viewers a world populated by multiple beings that could be called deities, McGrath said. “That’s not necessarily incompatible with Biblical traditions, in which other spiritual forces besides one supreme God are part and parcel of what is called monotheism.”
McGrath said Lost has offered “a fascinating and interesting treatment of religion.” And unlike other science-fiction series, Lost doesn’t have a specific message – or at least, not yet.
“In the original Star Trek series, for instance, there was a fairly consistent message – that reason and scientific outlook will basically debunk religion,” McGrath said. “The crew of the Enterprise either encountered enlightened, areligious societies or ones that were enslaved by superstition and need to be liberated from what seemed like a god but was really just a highly advanced organism or supercomputer. In the X-Files, on the other hand, there was a fairly consistent but opposite message: that there is more in this world than modern science and reason can explain or account for.”
Is Lost balanced in its treatment of religion as a force in the universe?
“It’s hard to say until we see how they wrap it up and give us some answers,” he said. “But I’m fascinated by it. Having said that, I reserve the right to revise any statement I make about Lost and religion on Lost in light of any subsequent episodes.”
James McGrath, the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, joined the Butler faculty in 2002. His primary area of expertise is New Testament. He is the author of two academic books, John’s Apologetic Christology, which examines how and why John arrived at a Christological portrait of Jesus that is so different from that of other New Testament authors, and The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context, about whether early Christians departed from Jewish monotheism.
To find other Butler University experts, visit http://www.butler.edu/experts/
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