I’ve been watching a lot of The X-Files and Millennium over the past several months. I watched the original run of The X-Files when it aired back in the ’90s, but I missed Millennium. And it’s a real shame that I did, because it’s a pretty fabulous show and was well done by Chris Carter & Co. (the same writers and such of The X-Files).
Millennium is necessarily a dated show, as it was all about various conspiracy theories related to the new millennium (Y2K) being the beginning of The Apocalypse from various cultural and religious traditions and the battle between various factions and forces to either bring about or prevent that apocalypse.
Between The X-FIles and Millennium, conspiracy nuts could get nightmare fuel for decades. These shows were nods to radical theories from every fringe group from government to UFO to the Battle of Armageddon believers and adherents.
A Word about Transmetropolitan
When the world starts getting too crazy for my brain to handle, I tend to sit down and read through Warren Ellis & Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan series of graphic novels. Set in a nightmare version of The City where everything and everyone is for sale and advertising even runs in one’s dreams, Spider Jerusalem is an outlaw journalist that always tells it like it is in all its cold, brutal, and acerbic glory. The society that Ellis is a hyperbolic look at where unchecked consumerism could have gotten to from a ’90s perspective that is still frighteningly relevant satire even today. Definitely worth reading if you haven’t (and you have a strong stomach because Spider is most definitely a rude boy).
Even though Millennium’s end was unsatisfying to me (purportedly because they didn’t realize that they were going to get a 3rd season and so it was sort of slap-dash and abrupt, and in my opinion sort of lost its way), I really enjoyed the more religiously and psychologically focused plotlines surrounding the Millennium Group. In the end, whether it be alien conspiracy, ancient cult prognostications, or religious apocalypse, the story always seems to end up the same way - it’s never truly about stopping or starting said apocalypse but more about controlling it and the outcome.
And that’s just as relevant today is it ever was. We see it in the U.S. in just about every facet of our society from the government to religion. It’s always about control and who can benefit the most in whatever the new regime turns out to be. With religion in particular, watching this show coupled with real-life events in the Middle East and all sorts of eschatological markers, I just see so many people scrambling and doing things to “help bring about the prophecy” and hope that they’re going to be on the upside of whatever comes after.
But if one really believes in God, that He is a Supreme Being, and that there is some sort of Divine Plan, then surely one must also realize that God doesn’t need anyone’s help to bring it to pass.
I believe that this sort of “help” is the reason that not only does Israel have a state but also why the U.S. is so closely tied to both its creation and continued existence. Christian fundamentalists gained influence in the government and thought they could “help God along” with plans laid out in the book of Revelations by making sure that Israel could reclaim its “ancestral lands”, regardless of anyone else that was currently living there and it’s why they support Israel’s continued genocide and atrocities now.
It’s some of the roots of the Christo-fascist Nationalist movements in the U.S. as well and why they pick on whoever they don’t like so hard because they have a warped vision of what the Kingdom of God looks like and they’re trying to bring their vision to pass in an effort to help God out so that they’ll all look pretty enough and be right enough to gain entry to Heaven when Jesus comes back.
It’s been that way for thousands of years, across all sorts of religions, societies, governments, and creeds. Wherever there is a belief in any sort of “higher power”, there will always be humans - particularly those already with power - that will do whatever they can to control the outcome so that they come out ahead. What happens to everyone else is inconsequential to them; so long as they “win”, then that’s all that matters.
In the Millennium stories it all came down to essentially the Rosicrucians/Knight’s Templar versus Science versus the Nazis (there’s always Nazis!) for control over the outcome of the apocalypse. There were questions of faith, of gifts, and whether there really is such things as good and evil. A little cliche if I’m being honest, but it was mostly entertaining and thought provoking for a person of faith myself.
As a practicing Christian, and as a believer in God, I see all of this that is going on, both in fiction and in real life, to be a whole bunch of people missing the point and not understanding the goal of the religion they claim to follow. My belief is that I am only called upon to do two things: make a choice to believe and if I do, simply bear witness to how my life has been changed by that belief and what God has done for me. It’s not my job to convert anyone to my faith. It’s not my job to judge others (in fact, we are told repeatedly that there is only one Judge, and that person is God). It’s not my job to tell others how they should live. And it’s certainly not my job to speak for God and do things that control others in the name of some plan that I cannot fully understand.
The only person that I can control is myself, and even that seems like a herculean task most days. When the main tenet of Christianity is giving up your control and putting your faith in another person, it continually baffles me why so many people that claim to believe this way use that belief to control others. I lived in that world for many, many years so I guess I really should be able to understand why people twist their faith in this way. So many of them just want to be right and know that God approves of them, and that is just not going to happen until (if) our belief in Jesus’ return is proven to be true.
I believe that my faith is sound and well-founded, but I can’t truly know until it is realized upon my death. How can I then force that belief on others who don’t have that same belief as if I do actually know for certain? That’s the whole point of faith - “now faith is the essence of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” - but that’s no basis for a secular system of governing human beings with disparate belief systems, much less trying to control world events or cultures to engineer them to fit the mold of one’s personal belief system. And way more “Christians” need to understand the differences between “faith”, “belief”, and “conviction”, and read their Bibles a bit more carefully. God doesn’t do “pronouncements from the mountain” anymore; He speaks to individuals. And in this case, what’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander.
Humanity really is unbelievably full of hubris. Individuals or small groups of individuals thinking that they know best for everyone else is ludicrous. There’s a reason that the saying “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a maxim.
It has yet to be proven wrong.
