I know we're all drowning in it right now, so I hate to add to the dangerous outgassing of hot air going on all over the world right now over the Force Awakens, but we obviously talk about Star Wars a lot because it's important to us. For some it's the "badassness" of the characters. For some it's the richly realized world and the art direction. Increasingly, for me, I think it's the post-christian philosophical and religious structure that's hinted at in the soothing religious connotations that they don't dive too deeply into. And, just putting this out there, I think that's a big reason for it's enduring popularity in the rest of the world as well. Star Wars is the only philosophical framework we can all agree in the gap caused by the increasing failures of modern religion in kindness to the other. Partly because in Star Wars the philosophy is appealing, but it's shallow enough that there's not enough dogma to really fight over. Partly because it's something you can secretly like for it's philosophical appeal while pretending to like the badassness of it all. And finally, because it's a popular and well-known fictional philosophy seriously trying to pick up the important pieces Christianity keeps leaving on the ground in favor of deference to power and fear of change.
Speaking as a mildly bitter, very gay ex-christian who has lots of complaints with church culture these days, I think the anger partly comes from disappointment in Christianity's failure to defend some vitally important ideas that must stand in opposition to greed and power, because they're too focused on playing the persecution complex card over their right to discriminate against people they don't like for superficial reasons. Christianity has been a wildly transformative influence because it championed ideas that even today still feel like heresy: redemption, even for the worst of the worst, community for all, the transcendent power of relentless kindness and the pursuit of peace, even when violence and demonization are emotionally justified and cathartic. The more they drop the ball on a consistent pattern of behavior based on these core ideals (and probably a few I'm missing), the more people tend to dismiss them as more or less hypocritical and/or actively harmful to the communities they claim to love.
The thing is, and this has been my struggle since coming out of the closet and leaving my church structure, there has yet to be a transformative ideology that encompasses the strongest, most true and important aspects of christianity and then taken them a step further. And one thing I'm starting to realize is, even though we collectively eschew institutional ideological structure, I assume because we've been so damaged by the institutional failures of christianity and democracy, we cannot help but live by philosophies and ideologies. So if we're not choosing them consciously and carefully, ad-hoc structures will form to take their place, either based on our own unconscious needs, or as imposed by the opportunistic sith lords currently roaming the populace bellowing fear and promising security if we'll only give up a little more. For instance, we shouldn't bow to Mark Zuckerberg's idea that privacy is out-dated, simply because he has money and influence, and no compelling intellectual or philosophical credentials. But we DO, because we don't think enough about what ideas are important to us and whether they're worth defending. This is an assumption, but one borne out by how passively people agree to the constant creep of privacy violations by Facebook and Google and other interested parties. Put another way, if you're not living by your own principles then you're living by someone else's.
And it's not that atheism or some variation of atheism can't embody and champion all the ideals christianity is so happy to drop, or at least only offer to the comfortably similar, but so far, in my experience, it does the opposite. Not only does modern atheism seem to reject the church, but they seem disdainful of people that even ask the questions christianity tries to answer. Do you wonder if there's life after death? Well that's stupid, because there isn't. Do you even wish there was life after death? That's stupid, because you should be content with your total obliteration as a token of your commitment to realism. Do you wonder if there's a grander purpose to life on this planet than it appears? Well that's stupid because there's only the cold hard laws of the universe and so you have to make your own meaning, before your inevitable, meaningless annihilation, which you would embrace with no complicated emotions if you were as enlightened as THIS atheist. And so on. In too many situations, dogmatic and evangelical atheism offers little but nihilism in a fancy dress, which, I'm afraid offers little chance at a transformative cultural moment. Many of us step back from religion and say "well, I don't believe in invisible sky gods," but then have no compelling philosophical framework to latch onto that is well on it's way to subsuming and surpassing the institutional philosophies we're rejecting.
So we know what we don't believe in, but I'm not sure we know what we actually do believe in just yet. But we DO believe in star wars. It's nice in this post-christan idealogical hellscape to hear, just for a couple hours, that there are more important things binding us than fear and power. That it's important to know what you believe and fight for it. That redemption is possible, even for the worst of the worst. That community is possible, even if you get lost for a while. That we are connected more than we are separate. That it's not wrong to hope for a grander purpose to the universe that has yet to reveal itself. That your feelings are just as important as your reason. That your meditations are just as important as your action. That your humanity should not be crushed for the sake of expedience or fear or a really beautiful societal machine that craves your blood to grease its wheels.
I think we need a better post-christian framework than Star Wars. And that the longer we resist forming it consciously ourselves, the more space we leave for opportunistic demagogues to step in and carry us all off in the wrong direction. But while we're trying to untangle this mess we've made of things ideologically, Star Wars will have to do as the one thing we can agree on.
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