Beyond the apocalypse: How religions are imagining the future

By EditorUpdated on . Posted on
A man standing in front of a Persian window.
Photo by Hasan Almasi via Unsplash.

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. 

This ReligionLink guide offers background, relevant newswriting, expert sources and related content for you to explore the varieties of religious futurism.

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. 

Tips & Suggestions

The idea of religious futurism is deliberately broad.

It can describe the ways people draw on religious traditions, histories and cosmologies to imagine possible futures, but it can also describe efforts to make those futures tangible in the present.

Muslim futurists, for example, have used art and immersive installations to imagine worlds organized around liberation, community and justice. Muslim women writers have turned to science fiction and fantasy to create worlds in which Muslims are not peripheral to the future but central to it.

Similar dynamics appear in Jewish, Indigenous, Black, Sikh and other religious and cultural contexts.

For journalists, this presents both an opportunity and a challenge.

The first challenge is not to treat futurism as prediction. When an artist imagines Muslims living on another planet, a Jewish thinker considers the ethics of artificial intelligence or an Indigenous artist depicts a future shaped by ancestral knowledge, the question is not whether or not this will happen but what kind of future is being imagined? What problem in the present does that imagined future address? Whose values does it embody? And who is being invited into that future, or left out of it?

It is also worth asking what the word future means to the people you are interviewing. For some, futurism may mean technological innovation or life beyond Earth. For others, it may mean survival, cultural continuity, decolonization, racial justice, ecological repair or simply the possibility of seeing oneself represented in a world that has not yet arrived.

Here are a few more tips and suggestions:

Ask what problem the future is solving – A futuristic artwork, novel or technology is rarely only about the future. What does the creator want to escape, repair, preserve or transform today? Pay attention to the historical conditions behind the imagined world as well, whether they be colonialism, racism, displacement, climate change, religious marginalization, gender inequality or technological change.

Do not assume that futurism means technology – Spaceships, robots, artificial intelligence and virtual reality make for obvious futuristic imagery, but they are not prerequisites. A future might instead be imagined through food, clothing, language, land, ritual, architecture, music or community. Some Indigenous futurist projects, for example, explicitly challenge the idea that the future has to look technologically advanced to count as “the future.”

Ask who gets to imagine – Futurism is about power. Whose visions of the future are taken seriously? Whose futures have historically been denied? Who is represented as an inventor, explorer or ancestor, and who appears merely as someone to be saved? Questions of race, gender, class, migration, disability, sexuality and colonial history can become especially important here.

Look backward as well as forward – Many futurisms are acts of recovering ancestral stories, older religious texts, suppressed histories or traditional ecological knowledge to address problems today and in the decades to come.

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