After sixty years of Star Trek and its subsequent spin-off series, films, and other media, Gene Roddenberry's creation has proven that its worlds can be continually generative of new ways of thinking about humanity, religion, and our relationships. The papers in this session explore the ways that fans and religious imaginaries use the ideas in different Star Trek franchises for religious reflections in the modern world.
Star Trek has shaped modern fandom in numerous ways that have had profound impacts on popular culture. I argue that fandom in general is best understood as a type of spirituality, a type of communal experience that provides key tools to the project of life integration. The Star Trek fandom in particular demonstrates this as the optimistic vision of Star Trek provides the necessary conditions for a fandom to thrive in the first place. This inclusive and diverse vision has shaped modern fandom as a whole, enabling it to be places of intense community and shared imagination. This is spirituality precisely because fandom is so central to the lives of millions, and Star Trek has influenced this like few other franchises.
Speculative fiction has often been a place where questions of morality, theodicy, and ethics are wrestled with. While Star Trek has often portrayed a post-Christian (and perhaps even post-religion) universe, several of its characters, particularly its captains, have played the role of chaplain or spiritual director, guide, and mentor. Star Trek’s Discovery and Strange New Worlds have given us the opportunity to see Christianity remixed. Captain Christopher Pike, whose father taught both science and comparative religions, provides a glimpse into the tension between science and faith. Although not explicitly a priest or minister, Pike fulfills that role to his crew (and to some of his fans), to the point that one fanfic author reinterprets him as a Jesuit priest from the Vatican Science Observatory. This paper explore how Star Trek captains, particularly the most recent incarnation of Christopher Pike, provides fandom with ethical guides and fictional spiritual directors.
This paper argues that the Trill are more than a science-fiction metaphor for transness; they offer a theological framework for Jewish reflection on embodiment, memory, and communal responsibility. In Star Trek, a joined Trill is a composite self in which host and symbiont become interdependent, carry memories of previous lives, and ritually bring past selves into the present. Read this way, the Trill function as a contemporary midrash, opening Jewish questions about identity, continuity, and transformation. Drawing on queer and trans Jewish scholarship, this paper explores how halakha can be read through the Trill. The roles of host and symbiont, along with Trill social and religious norms, challenge assumptions that personhood is singular, stable, and biologically fixed. The Trill help articulate a Jewish queer/trans theology in which covenant is grounded in relational continuity, sacred becoming, and belonging, so that transition may be understood as tamim tihyeh, becoming whole with the Divine.