Constantly exposed to distressing news about a polycrisis of geopolitical conflicts, political instability, economic pressures and ongoing environmental degradation, billions are anxious about the state of the world and its future.
How might religious traditions and communities help us navigate what comes next?
This the question at the heart of various kinds of “futurism,” which not only imagine, but use science fiction, fantasy and communal conversations to challenge the status quo, critique present-day issues and shape alternative realities.
Borrowing inspiration from Afrofuturism, various forms of “religious futurism” picture communities thriving on their own terms decades, or even centuries, from now.
Sitting at the intersection of religion, technology and the arts, religious futurism takes numerous forms, such as transhumanist theology, faith-based science fiction and new rituals for a climate-changed, algorithm-mediated world.
Background
Religious communities have long imagined worlds to come: heavenly kingdoms, messianic ages, liberated societies, apocalyptic endings, renewed earths and lives transformed by divine intervention. Today, those imaginations are also appearing in science fiction, visual art, fashion, music, film, gaming, artificial intelligence and debates about space travel and emerging technologies.
The various forms of “religious futurism” draw on the origins of Afrofuturism, a phrase coined by scholarly critic Mark Dery in 1993 to describe Black artists — from Sun Ra to Octavia Butler to George Clinton — who used science fiction to reimagine, reinterpret and reclaim “the past and present for a more empowering future for African Americans” according to Smithsonian curator Kevin Strait.
Scholars like Alondra Nelson, Ytasha Womack and Reynaldo Anderson later expanded Afrofuturism into a full aesthetic and critical framework, which broke into the mainstream through songwriter and actress Janelle Monáe’s music and films like Marvel’s “Black Panther.”
But Afrofuturism was never just about robots and space travel. From the beginning, it drew on African spiritualities, cosmologies and religious traditions to imagine different futures beyond racism and violence. For example, Sun Ra sees his music as a kind of prophecy from another world (Saturn). Womack frames her work as a form of “self-healing” and “mysticism.” And quite famously, the Nation of Islam’s own vivid cosmology — featuring a wheel-shaped spaceship (often called “The Mother Plane” or “The Great Wheel”) built by advanced Black scientists, for example — shaped early Afrofuturist thought in Chicago and beyond.
The template of using speculative art to reclaim a future a group feels it has been hitherto denied has since been adapted widely. Grace Dillon, an Anishinaabe scholar at Portland State University, coined “Indigenous futurisms” to describe Native artists and writers who use science fiction to picture sovereignty and survival after (as Dillon puts it) a colonial apocalypse many Indigenous nations have already lived through once — and may be forced to live through again.
“Muslim futurism” or “Islamofuturism” has also emerged from collectives like MIPSTERZ, an international arts collective of young, mostly urban-dwelling Muslims who blend contemporary Western pop culture with traditional Islamic identity. They picture Muslim and Islamicate futures free of both Western Orientalism and internal fights over orthodoxy.
Other forms — from Jewish, or Judeo-, futurism to Latinx/Chicanofuturism, Gulf futurism to Sinofuturism — have followed similar paths, each adapting the toolkit to its own history of displacement, diaspora or rapid modernization.
On the one hand, religious futurism is best understood as part of a wider family of identity-based futurisms, many of which are explicitly, not incidentally, religious — Afrofuturism’s debt to the Black church and Islamic cosmology, Muslim futurism’s grounding in Quranic calligraphy and Islamic astronomy, Jewish futurism’s roots in Zionist utopian literature and Kabbalistic imagery, for example.
On the other hand, it can be helpful to place the emphasis on the latter, explicitly spiritual aspects of these futurisms and appreciate how religious leaders and laity are thinking about their faith identities and communities through science fiction, biotechnology, AI, transhumanism and art.
In other words, how can we report on how religious adherents are imagining their community’s future when it isn’t ceded to secular tech culture and producing tangible output via art exhibitions, novels, theology conferences and even new religious movements.