The Bricolage Religion of LOST and American Religious Culture -- Sightings

The recently completed LOST TV show offered a six year long odyssey in which the show's creators and writers seemed to be making up as they went along.  I was a faithful watcher for the first several seasons, and then for a number of reasons I wasn't able to stay with it -- though I did watch the finale.  One of the things that the show did was mix in religious themes, but as Benjamin Zeller writes here in a Sightings piece, the religious ideas are not only eclectic but the varieties of religious elements are mixed together in what appear to be rather odd ways.  Thus the Dharma Initiative borrows an Indian religious term to define itself and yet it combines this with a Taoist symbol as its logo.  But that's really not the point -- the point is that Americans are very good at combining religious/spiritual ideas in creative ways, and this isn't all that new.  So, read, consider, and respond!

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Sightings 7/22/10

The Bricolage Religion of LOST and

American Religious Culture

-- Benjamin E. Zeller

This spring the television series LOST, which achieved cult status over its six seasons, came to an end. A tale of the survivors of an airplane crash on a mysterious tropical island, the series wove together stories of the survivors’ pasts and presents. It also slowly introduced the inhabitants of the island and what fans of the show call the island’s “mythos” – the supernaturalistic elements and features of this sacred space.

LOST’s flirtations with religion followed an intriguing pattern of bricolage that mirrors contemporary developments in American religion. Not content to remain within the bounds of any singular religious approach, the writers combined elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Egyptian religions, and New Age spirituality. The great mystery during much of the series, the enigmatic “Dharma Initiative” – a name derived from Indian religious traditions – curiously used Taoist symbols as part of its icon. Meanwhile a group of the island's original residents lived in an Egyptian-style temple, led by a Japanese master named Dogen, a reference to a Zen philosopher. Among the survivors, the Catholic Mr. Eko carried a large stick with scriptural references, and sometimes functioned as an unordained priest. The island itself became a sacred space of healing, miracles, and conflicts, set apart and forbidden by the mysterious Jacob, a two thousand year old guardian. Meanwhile characters with names like Locke, Hume, and Rousseau served to advance the plot of the series.

Despite these many references to religions and philosophies – and the previous summary barely scratches the surface – seldom did the writers delve too deeply into the meanings of such references. Besides some Buddhist-sounding platitudes, the character Dogen did not actually espouse the real Dogen’s philosophy, nor did LOST’s John Locke represent John Locke’s. The Dharma initiative was not particularly influenced by any Buddhist, Hindu, or even New Age notion of the dharma, and Mr. Eko’s Catholic vocation was completely divorced from the liturgical and sacramental reality of Catholic life. Religious elements in LOST generally appeared shorn of their cultural, historical, and theological moorings.

Yet LOST’s flirtations with religion should not be read as a failing of the writers. Rather, LOST represents a broader trend in contemporary American culture. The recent 2009 Pew Forum poll – which received treatment in Sightings – reveals Americans’ propensity for engaging in similar religious bricolage. Thirteen percent of American Christians have visited psychics, twenty-three percent believe in spiritual energy in trees, and twenty-two percent accept reincarnation. A decade ago in his study of American Baby Boomers, Wade Clark Roof found the same phenomenon. And Catherine Albanese has traced this pattern of religious combinativeness back to the colonial era. Religious bricolage is not a new phenomenon, though LOST made it explicit on national airwaves.

As viewers of the final episode of LOST discovered, the show’s writers even offered a vision of the afterlife. As the character Christian Shepherd (yes, that’s his name) explained, people create their own gathering places in the afterlife where they reunite with loved ones, before “leaving” to journey on. Reminiscent of both the Buddhist bardo and the Christian limbo, LOST’s afterlife had the added New Age element of envisioning the afterlife as a positive realm created by the power of the mind.

The LOST survivors met in the afterlife in an interfaith chapel replete with sacred objects and symbols from a variety of world religions. Such a place, and the metaphysical belief in the power of the mind to construct reality, is an apt metaphor for LOST’s engagement with religion and philosophy. Rather than focus on a single worldview, its writers created a patchwork. Such an approach may sometimes lead scholars of religion to scratch their heads, but it also speaks to a continuing proclivity for combinativeness in American religious culture.

References:


For treatments in Sightings of the 2009 Pew Forum poll, see Martin E. Marty, “Decline in Conservative Churches,” December 14, 2009: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2009/1214.shtml; and Martin E. Marty, “Searching for God,” December 21, 2009: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2009/1221.shtml

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths.” December 9, 2009: http://www.pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/Many-Americans-Mix-Multiple-Faiths.aspx

Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (Yale University Press, 2007).

Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton University Press, 1999).

Benjamin E. Zeller is Director of College Honors Program and Assistant Professor of Religion, Brevard College, and the author of  Prophets and Protons: New Religious Movements and Science in Late Twentieth-Century America (NYU Press, 2010).

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In this month's Religion and Culture Web Forum ("The Primacy of Rhetoric"), Marty Center Senior Fellow (2009-10) W. David Hall addresses the centrality of rhetoric in the Western humanist tradition by engaging the work of Ernesto Grassi, whose commentary on the Renaissance, especially, diverged from standard Platonic models of interpretation to include arts such as rhetoric, literature, and poetry. Of especial interest for Hall is Grassi's "retrieval of the humanist tradition" during this era and the possibilities that thorough understanding of such a retrieval opens more broadly in the fields of philosophy and religious studies. With invited responses from Andrew Hass (University of Stirling), Jeff Jay (University of Chicago), Santiago Pinon (University of Chicago), Donald Phillip Verene (Emory University), and Glenn Whitehouse (Florida Gulf Coast University). http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

The New Physicality of Resurrection

Last week Bruce Epperly offered an alternate progressive understanding of Resurrection, one that allowed for it to be more than a parable or metaphor, but allows for a sense of physicality.  This post got considerable discussion going, for we struggle with what all of this means.  Part of our issue is that we must, whether we like it or not, recognize that science plays a role in the conversation.  Progressive/liberal Christians tend to have a problem with discussions of reality that rely on supernaturalism.  The assumption is that God does not contravene the laws of nature.  There are a lot of reasons for that position, which I'll not go into here.  But, it does raise questions about the physicality of Jesus' resurrection and that of any post-death experience.

Last night, if you watched it, the conclusion to the Lost series reflected upon life after death and while envisioning a rather inclusive/interfaith understanding, offered a sense of physicality -- even resurrection.  On that end, I'll leave it to expert Lost watchers like James McGrath to break down the meaning of the finale.  But, what it does suggest is that many people hope for an embodied future post death. 

With that introduction, I wanted to add in a paragraph from N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope, that deals with Paul's understanding of post-death physicality.  As a prelude to this quote, Wright makes it clear that he has in mind a sense of this new physicality of resurrection being part of "life after life after death."  That is, what is spoken of in John 14 as the "many mansions" or Jesus in Luke speaking of paradise, infers an intermediate state prior to the new physicality that Jesus will embody in his own resurrection, and which we will share in at the time of the General Resurrection.

What Paul is asking us to imagine  is that there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body does to a ghost.  It will be as much more real, more firmed up, more bodily, than our present body as our present body is more substantial, more touchable, than a disembodied spirit.  We sometimes speak of someone who's been very ill as being a shadow of their former self.  If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one -- or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.  (p. 154). 

In this statement, which is a reflection upon Paul's discussion of the new creation in 2 Corinthians 5, he speaks of our current bodies being mere shadows of the future body, the spiritual body.  The spiritual body is not ghostlike, but even more tangible than the current one.  I would invite your response to this statement as we wrestle with what it means to embrace the idea of resurrection in the contemporary world.  What is it, after all, that the hope of the resurrection, which Paul makes so central, have to say to our lives in the hear and now?