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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25593 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Brandon Sanderson is the most successful ‘Christian’ writer I can think of today, meaning a writer who both is Christian and whose religion clearly informs his work.

Notably:

  1. He never depicts literal Christianity in his work.
  2. Most of his characters who think a lot about religion really think about it. They have crises of faith, they wonder how to reconcile their faith with what needs to be done, etc.

If we're counting LDS as Christian, Orson Scott Card and Larry Correia might rival him depending on how you count 'successful'.

Orson Scott Card, definitely (dual Hugo-Nebula winner two years in a row; Ender's Game became required reading in many schools and the USMC, as well as a big budget movie). But I don't think Larry Correia is in the same weight class.

And Stephanie Meyer far surpasses any of them.

There's probably a worthwhile discussion there, right?

Sanderson, Card, Correia, and Meyer are all Mormons. Now as it happens I don't count Mormons as Christians, but that aside - it is interesting that all these examples are from the same religion. Are Mormons in general punching well above their weight in science fiction and genre spaces?

Mormon cosmology might have something to do with it.

Mormon cosmology definitely has something to do with it, but the "Banned Mormon Cartoon" doesn't have much in common with Mormon cosmology.

If you don't believe me (a Mormon), here are a bunch of bitter ex-Mormons saying the same thing.

As for the substance, it is largely accurate, in the sense that, for most things it says, you can find some quote where something like that was taught by a Mormon leader at some point. There are a few just plain misstatements like “Star Base Kolob.” No church authority has ever called Kolob a star base, as far as I can find anywhere.

But it is wildly inaccurate in the way it characterizes and connects things. If they were giving the Catholic Church the same kind of treatment, they would say that Communion is “Catholic ritualized zombie cannibalism.” And one could argue that they are technically correct. After all, Catholics believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And another word for a person who came back from the dead is a zombie. And Catholics believe that in a sense the Host is transformed into the literal body of this Christ. And another word for eating someone’s literal body is cannibalism. But calling it that communicates a wild caricature, that no Catholic would actually identify with. No Mormon would identify with the caricatures in the cartoon, despite the fact that you could find a seed of truth in most of the particulars.

Early Christians were put to death partly because they were said to be practicing cannibalism. This statement is much more true of Christians than most of the claims in that cartoon are of Mormons.

Many are saying this.

Every living, significant fiction author I can think of is either Mormon or atheist/agnostic.

In order to write seriously about religion, you probably have to believe seriously in religion. Given that Mormons are mostly in a small concentrated area of the US I would be unsurprised that a lot higher percentage of Mormons seriously believe than other religions.

I wonder if there's a cycle - there was a phase, I thought, of really Catholic science fiction, works like A Canticle for Leibowitz, or A Case of Conscience, and prominent Catholic authors; Gene Wolfe springs to mind. Apparently some people think there's something there even today, though to my untrained eye the golden age of Catholic science fiction was in the past.

So maybe just different subcultures or groups get into particular genres every now and then. There may not be that much to it.

Catholics are still writing Science Fiction, but it's generally not getting as popular. I think the age of seeing the world sacramentally/semiotically is in the past. In our materialist age, the Mormon worldview appeals more (not Mormonism specifically, but generally the idea of a God who is more like a superhero than something fundamentally different from a creature. And then the pseudo-scientific philosophy that comes out of that.)

Other Catholic science fiction:

  • Elfheim
  • The Sparrow
  • Lord of the World
  • Sun Eater
  • Voyage to Alpha Centauri
  • The Golden Age
  • Toward the Gleam

There's also a lot of Catholic-haunted sci-fi (often written by ex-Catholics or agnostics who are inspired by Catholicism):

  • Hyperion Cantos
  • Dune (arguably)
  • I'm running out of time but I feel like this list should be bigger than the first.

Hm, it wouldn't be that surprising, I suppose, if the materialist Mormon cosmos, and relatively creaturely God, lends itself to a very different type of science fiction story than the Catholic cosmos.

I might need to unpack that a bit further to myself, though, and since we've rolled over into the next week's thread, I'll leave that here for now.

In LDS theology there are no creatures at all. Everything exists eternally. We don't think God is "caused" somehow or dependent on some greater god for power; he's fully self-existent just as in other Christian theologies. It's just that we are too.

Kind of like Hinduism?

To be fully self-existent in Classical Christianity means to be fully actual, with 0 potential for change. If your idea of God is one that can change, then it is one that can be acted on. There is an explanation for why your God is in the current state instead of another state. This explanation pre-exists your God. Your idea of God doesn't really explain anything about the world and we are still left with the question of why is there something instead of nothing. Which is fine, it's something that the Greeks and other Pagans accepted and lived virtuous lives according to their customs for generations. It's not terribly satisfying to me, just like it wasn't satisfying to Plato and Aristotle. But it's not going to cause a huge cognitive dissonance on its own.

My point is that LDS teaches something like "God is just like us, just more self-actualized and powerful. Theosis is us leveling up according to the nature we already have that is equal to God's."

Classical Christian thought is more like, "We have a different nature from God's, but He promises Theosis anyways through the marriage of Heaven and Earth in the Person of Jesus Christ. Human nature has now been grafted onto a Divine Person and we are able to participate in the internal life of God through conformity to the perfected human nature of Jesus."

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Mormons also have people checking up on their religious adherence.

There's more to it than just geography--why are they mostly concentrated? Anyone who wasn't fully on-board with the religion in the 1840s, and willing to give up everything for it, would have stayed behind when they were kicked out of the state.

The result is possibly the most powerful religious selection effect ever. The only comparable effect I can think of is the early Christian church, when converts understood they faced pretty high odds of being executed for their faith if they converted.

It's also much harder to be a lukewarm Mormon than, say, Catholic. Our doctrine is much newer, our church much smaller, and there's far less room to say basically "sure maybe it's all just metaphorical but I like what it teaches my kids" when the Book of Mormon's very origin must be either literally true and from God, or a deliberate scam. (Arguably, other Christian churches are the same, but at least their "scams" were thousands of years ago.)

Mormons also actively check up on adherence to minimum religious practice. The Catholic church does this only on an ad hoc basis.

Very true, but her work doesn’t seem religious at all (bar ‘Meyer is twisting your childrens’ minds in service of her evil cult’ articles). I mentioned Sanderson because he really, obviously cares about how man relates to god and manages to tell good stories about it.

She wrote a vampire romance story where the main characters waited until marriage. In fact the entire story seems to be built on top of resisting the temptation to sleep together before then; Edward's bloodlust an obvious metaphor for actual lust.

There are some other connections--the eternal youthful marriage, the vampires from Rome possibly representing Catholics, the idea that you need to develop and grow as a person as much as you can before becoming immortal--but those are all stretches.

Sanderson's works deal much more explicitly with religion, but I'd argue his most important religious themes are also subtextual. For example, Mistborn has the explicit themes with Sazed, but the entire story is built around the implicit themes--the Lord Ruler is a false hero, and Ruin can alter any scripture not written on metal, leading to doctrinal decay over time. Elantris is built around the exact same theme, actually; the magic used to work but people forgot why, so when the underlying fundamentals changed it stopped working.

All the explicit dealings with gods are pretty lackluster in comparison, and arguably not really "religious" at all. The Percy Jackson books had that.

She wrote a vampire romance story where the main characters waited until marriage. In fact the entire story seems to be built on top of resisting the temptation to sleep together before then; Edward's bloodlust an obvious metaphor for actual lust.

The entire vampire baby plotline (where the choice is between aborting a fetus eating the main character from the inside out or...to let that happen and let her give birth and likely die) is basically an extended pro-life parable. It might be the most successful version ever really.

Characters explicitly refuse to call it a fetus and demand their opponents use the b word.

He's LDS at any rate.

I was wondering how a Christian worldview would mesh with interplanetary science fiction, but this explains it.

Christopher Ruccio is doing a pretty interesting job.

John C. Wright is a former atheist who did a hard-right turn into Catholicism. He's written space operas pre- and post-conversion.

There's been quite a lot of Christian big name science fiction writers, actually- Jerry Pournelle was Christian even if he changed denominations a lot, CS Lewis wrote science fiction, etc.

C. S. Lewis doesn't count; that was back when everyone was Christian, or at least Jewish. Even Jerry Pournelle was towards the tail-end of that era. A science fiction author being Christian doesn't really become remarkable until after the New Atheism of the 2000's.

It was remarkable for Lewis to be devoutly Christian and write a space trilogy specifically as apologetics against those who said that God can't care too much about Earth due to how large the cosmos are.

I thought it was the other way around. Lewis wasn’t a Christian for most of his life. He converted in his middle age and wrote those books. Not everyone was Christian.

He converted at 31 or 33 years old.

Source: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/the-most-reluctant-convert/

But I would say both serious atheism and serious faith were relatively rare for intellectuals at that time. The majority being cultural Christians, if you like.

Lewis's Space Trilogy does a pretty excellent job, I think.

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