How Faith Helps Shape Our Sci-fi Worlds
- Jeremy Clift
- 6 minutes ago
- 5 min read
By Jeremy Clift, author of Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse
Science fiction has always been a literature of possibility. We look to the stars, to distant futures, to alien civilizations, and ask: What might we become? But beneath the spaceships, quantum networks, and planetary colonies, another force is quietly at work shaping our stories—religion.
Whether writers embrace it, resist it, or reinvent it entirely, religion is woven into the DNA of sci-fi. It colors our fears, frames our hopes, and provides a language for grappling with the mysteries that science has not yet illuminated. And, in many cases, it becomes a tool for interrogating humanity’s deepest questions: What is consciousness? What is creation? What does it mean to belong to something larger than oneself?
Religion as a Mirror for Human Anxiety and Aspiration
At its core, religion seeks to explain the unknown and give meaning to the chaos of existence. Science fiction does something similar. It shines a light into the dark beyond and gives shape to what might lie there. It’s no surprise that the two often meet in the middle.
Think of Frank Herbert’s Dune. On the surface, it’s a story about ecology, geopolitics, and the economics of spice. Yet its foundations are thoroughly spiritual—prophecy, messiahs, martyrdom, and the perilous fusion of religion with power. Herbert shows us how belief systems can be engineered, weaponized, and misunderstood across generations.
Then there’s Battlestar Galactica, where the conflict between polytheistic humans and monotheistic Cylons becomes a meditation on destiny, identity, and the possibility of divine purpose, even for artificial life.
Religion in sci-fi often reflects our modern anxieties: about technology becoming godlike, about leaders who confuse divinity with authority, about communities searching for meaning in a world where traditional structures are dissolving. The future becomes a canvas for wrestling with ancient questions.
Reimagining Faith in New Worlds
One of science fiction’s greatest strengths is its ability to strip away context and rebuild belief from scratch. When writers imagine alien species, they imagine alien spiritualities—and in doing so, they create a lens through which we can better understand our own.
Ursula K. Le Guin did this brilliantly in The Left Hand of Darkness, creating a world whose frozen landscape mirrors a spirituality of balance, ambiguity, and acceptance. Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books craft a new religion centered on change, adaptation, and the idea that God is not an entity but a process.
These invented faiths resonate not because they are foreign, but because they reflect human longings: to belong, to make sense of suffering, to find purpose in upheaval. In a galaxy filled with uncertainty, religion becomes both anchor and compass.
The Question of Creation
If science fiction is obsessed with anything, it is creation, the creation of worlds, of technologies, of life itself. Whenever humans begin to play creator, the echoes of myth become impossible to ignore.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often labeled the first science-fiction story, and it centers on a man who “steals” the fire of life and pays the price. This theme persists throughout the genre:
Artificial intelligence becomes our golem, born of logic instead of clay.
Genetic engineering raises questions about who gets to shape the future of humanity.
Terraforming turns planets into canvases for human ambition—and potential hubris.
These are not just scientific questions. They are moral and spiritual provocations. Who are we to create life? What responsibility do we bear toward what we create? When does innovation become transgression?
Religion provides a framework for exploring these dilemmas with emotional weight, not just technical detail.
Apocalypse, Judgment, and the Cycles of Renewal
Many classic sci-fi narratives are fundamentally eschatological. Alien invasions mirror biblical floods. Rogue AIs echo apocalyptic angels. Solar storms, pandemics, and environmental collapse become secular revelations.
But what’s remarkable is that many of these stories echo religious cycle patterns:
Destruction
Reckoning
Renewal
The Matrix is essentially a gnostic parable: humanity trapped in illusion, awaiting awakening. Station Eleven studies the persistence of ritual and belief after societal collapse. Even the Star Wars mythos, from its monk-warriors to its fall-and-redemption arcs, wears its spiritual lineage openly.
When we imagine the end of the world, we often reach for religious language, even if we don’t realize it.
Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning
One of the enduring tensions in science fiction is the perceived conflict between scientific rationality and religious faith. But the most interesting stories rarely choose one over the other. Instead, they explore where the two intersect.
Carl Sagan’s Contact dramatizes this philosophical wrestling match. Is meaning found in numbers, signals, trajectories—or in faith, trust, and personal experience? The novel (and film) refuses to offer a simple answer. Instead, it suggests that science and spirituality might be two languages describing the same ineffable reality.
Modern sci-fi continues that tradition. As our technological capabilities expand, so do our questions about consciousness, morality, and the nature of reality. Religion offers metaphors, cautionary tales, and emotional frameworks through which both writers and readers can explore those questions safely.
Why Religion Will Always Have a Place in Science Fiction
Above all, science fiction is a human genre, no matter how many aliens, androids, or parallel universes populate its pages. And humans are meaning-making creatures. We build myths, rituals, and stories to help us navigate the world. Even in the far future, we’ll still be asking: Why are we here? What should we do with the power we possess? How do we live together?
Religion, whether old, new, reinvented, or subverted, gives shape to those questions.
In my own Sci-Fi Galaxy series—Born in Space and Space Vault—religion appears not as dogma but as an undercurrent shaping human choices in extreme environments. The Seven Heavenly Babies, engineered in orbit and raised without cultural inheritance, become an experiment in what belief looks like when stripped of tradition.
Their search for identity echoes humanity’s oldest spiritual questions: Who created us? For what purpose? And what obligations do we owe to the life around us?
In Space Vault, the struggle over the Lunar Seed Repository mirrors a deeper moral conflict about stewardship, sacrifice, and humanity’s responsibility to creation itself. Though the stories are grounded in science and future geopolitics, the characters repeatedly face decisions that feel almost liturgical, choices about trust, destiny, and the fragile bond between creator and created.
Science fiction doesn’t need to be religious to be spiritual. It simply needs to keep doing what it has always done: shine a light into the unknown and listen for the echo.
And in that echo, through science fiction stories, we often hear something ancient, familiar, and profoundly human.
— Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space and Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse. Read Clift’s profile on Kirkus.