The Church of Fandom
Where religion fails, fandoms rush in
Harry Potter turned twenty this summer. The books did, not the fictional boy. For the occasion Gracy Olmstead penned a tribute with a fan rebuke. “Although few millennials would admit it, their love for ‘Harry Potter’ is more like veneration than fandom: It’s a secular stand-in for religious belief.”
Actually, all fandoms are. In fact, it is one of their primary functions, to fill the God shaped holes in our souls. For the religious, this should both concern us and have us recognize an opportunity.
The holes fandoms fill
A fangirl of many ‘verses myself, I’ve seen this over the years, but the full truth of it struck me two years ago at a fan studies conference in England. (Are you surprised there is a conference? Heh. Read the next.) One of the panel speakers was a professor of sociology from the University of Limerick, Ireland talking about Latino/Chicano fans of Morrissey. (Absorb that for a moment.) He described a room of Post It petitions at the pub where the band got its start, at least that’s what I remember. It may have been a pub named after Morrissey or one otherwise significant to his fans. Whatever the connection, his fans come to this pub to leave their praises, to give their thanks, to lament or commiserate, or to ask for a voice. As he posted an image of the back room, he told the audience the notes reminded him, a lapsed Catholic, of the petitions to Mary. Maybe it was the colors and the mention of Catholicism, but my mind jumped to the stands of prayer candles in churches all over Europe. Make a donation, say a prayer, light a candle.
It was fandom as religion. It only took a few moments to see how all fandoms are like that.
Once upon a time, I was a typical young religious fan, using the structure of the stories and characters as an extra foundation for my own understanding of life’s big concepts. But in the past few years I had taken an almost anthropological interest in fandoms. (I’m hardly alone in this, hence the annual FanStudies Conference. Here’s last year’s call for papers. They tweet too, under the tagline “Keeping Fandom Scholars Connected.”) After stumbling upon an 80’s cartoon reboot — an awful reboot — I found fan fiction for the first time. It turned out that women wrote fan fiction, which seemed to run against conventional expectations that teenage boys wasted their time concocting alternate timelines and original characters — or “AU” and “OC” in the fan vernacular.
After studying the matter, I theorized that women sought community, or fellowship, to use the term preferred by Christians. Specifically, they sought fellowship for those things that modern feminism tends to put out of bounds for discussion. They retreat into fantasy and anonymity to play with the traditional concepts. Nothing I’ve seen since has made me doubt this theory. Many things I have seen have made me more sure of it.
Furthermore, now that I’m looking, I’ve seen fandoms do all the things religions do. They have canons. They have recognized authoritative bodies which police for unorthodoxy. Excommunications happen. So do celebrations and festivals.
People seek connection with each other and with ideas bigger than ourselves. Historically this has happened in communities and in faiths. Lately, religion has not provided those connections — partly by its own fault and partly by the ravages of relativism in culture. Fandoms rushed in. Like fast food or ready prep meals for a society too busy to cook, fandoms make for easy community with a quick common language and context for seeking meaning. While Christians lament the development, we can also use it.
The opportunities fandoms present
For the religious, fandoms can be tools. First, they help us deepen our understanding. This is easiest to illustrate with CS Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia”, which he wrote with this precise intent.
While most fandom creators stumble upon deeper understanding as incidental to the fictional universe they created, Lewis’s Narnia is a re-imagining of the New Testament in a parallel of world in which animals are fully rational and God/Christ/Holy Spirit appears not in the form of a man but in the form of a lion, Aslan. An extended family of children from our world come to Narnia as the symbolic stand-ins for Adam and Eve, the prophets, kings, and Apostles. The themes, the basic plot, and most of the main events remain consistent between the two works.
Lewis’s Narnia is also a notable example of how to translate adult themes for children, as well as freshening themes for adults. If we applied our modern “Is this child appropriate?” filter to Bible stories or characters, we would lose most of them. Neither the Old Testament nor the New are full of happy tales. The name “Good Friday” is a double and bloody irony, and the modern parenting impulse tends to censor the stories, to take out the blood, betrayal, sex, and death. But without the darkness of the stories, the light — the Good in Good Friday — seems unremarkable.
Lewis understands this. In Narnia, Aslan is not sacrificed by stripping, scourging, and nailing on a cross to suffocate, as Jesus of Nazareth was, but is shorn of his mane, tied to a stone table, and stabbed though the heart with a silver knife. Thus, Lewis makes a story children can handle, but by playing on children’s, and adults’, natural empathy for animals, Lewis doesn’t lose the dark. The children realize and the adults rediscover a sense of the pain and humiliation endured though another telling of the crucifixion.
Lewis even states his intent in the story. From the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
“Please Aslan, before we go, will you tell us when we can come back to Narnia again? Please. And oh, do, do, do, make it soon.”
“Dearest,” said Aslan very gently, “you and your brother will never come back to Narnia.”
“Oh, Aslan!!” said Edmund and Lucy both together in despairing voices.
“You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to come close to your own world now.”
“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”
“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.
“Are — are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”
Most works that inspire fandoms are not so direct, but they contain the same themes, which is the foundation of the second use for fandoms by the religious.
Understanding religious themes in fictional universes is like speaking multiple languages. Thus, religious fans of many ‘verses can provide translation services.
For example, I can speak family breakdown in legalese, Testaments, Old and New, and Skywalker; often the Skywalker version is the one that strikes home, because many people already know the story and the characters. They have the context for the Skywalker version. Repeat for any number of weighty life concerns. And while it is true that we would not need to use popular stories if Biblical stories were still widely taught, what of it? It isn’t happening, the wide spread biblical storytelling. We could whine about this until two Sundays come together for all the good that would do.
Christians talk all the time about the need to spread the gospel and grow our churches. We see people obviously searching. We scream out “Here we are! Listen to what we have to say.” And then we open our mouths and speak what sounds to them like gibberish, using an insiders’ vocabulary and stories they do not know. Is it really any surprise that they’d rather go home, crack open The Chamber of Secrets, a book in the most popular fandom of the modern era, and then sleep in on Sunday morning and head to brunch to analyze Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s exploits with a group who already knows what they are talking about while enjoying some mimosas and avocado toast?
Give me a moment and I could probably come up with a communion analogy for that.
