Science Fiction as Scripture: Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and the Church of All Worlds
2011; University of California, Los Angeles; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0160-2764
Autores Tópico(s)Religion and Society Interactions
Resumopast participle stem of scribere, ‘to write’. 2 This may have had particular significance in past societies where only the most important, authoritative narratives were written down; in an age of mass literacy such as the twentyfirst century, potentially all writings are scripture. From the mid-twentieth century Western culture experienced a sharp increase in new religious movements (NRMs), some of which were generated within the West, while others were imported from the other cultures, chiefly the East (India, Tibet, and Japan in particular). Most of these new religions possessed scriptures, generally the writings of founders (for example, Sun Myung Moon’s Divine Principle for the Unification Church, and Dianetics and other books by L. Ron Hubbard, within the Church of Scientology). This paper investigates how Robert A. Heinlein’s bestselling science fiction novel, Stranger in an Strange Land (1961, reissued ‘uncut’ in 1991), became the foundational scripture of the Church of All Worlds (CAW), a Gaia-oriented Pagan religion founded in 1962 by two American college students, Tim Zell (b. 1942) and (Richard) Lance Christie (b. 1944) who met at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, and became fast friends. The Church of All Worlds, registered as a religion in the United States in 1968 and now a significant presence in the contemporary Pagan revival, takes its name from the fictional church in Heinlein’s novel. Tim Zell, now 1 I am grateful to my research assistant Will Noonan for library searches, note-taking and photocopying. Thanks are also due to the School of Letters, Art and Media for research funding, and to my partner Don Barrett for his sympathetic interest in my work and assistance in clarifying my thoughts during the writing of this paper. Special thanks are due to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, Primate of the Church of All Worlds, for his generous sharing of CAW history with an impertinent e-mail acquaintance. May he never thirst.
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