Fallout and religion

B

BonusWaffle

Still Mildly Glowing
Given the relationship between religion and nationalism, and the ongoing theme of nation building in the fallout series it seems odd that there isn't more focus on it. Fallout had the children of the cathedral, but they were more of a cult than a major religion. Fallout two had the hubologists, but again they were more of a cult. The only game that really had a good grasp of it was the honest hearts dlc for new vegas. I hope they will incorporate more of that kind of thing in future games, as it seems like religion is the first thing post apocalyptic survivors would turn to.
 
Personally, I don't want a bunch of religious sects running around. I have to deal with it enough in the real world.
 
Regardless of how i feel about it, it is a very real factor in the world and I think its an interesting thing to play with in a game like fallout. Maybe its just too touchy a subject and they dont want to hurt their marketability, but I dont think honest hearts caused much controversy and they did a great job of including it there.
 
That's my point exactly. I play games to get AWAY from the world, which religion happens to be an unfortunate part of.
 
You're right.

Honest Hearts showed alot of Mormonism and Bible play.

Not that Fallout 3 counts, but there were a few references to the Bible on that game to.

To me, these are indicators that people in the Fallout universe are still perhaps following Christianity (or at least in its most basic form, following the word of the Bible), and several other "Old World" religions.
 
Religious extremism is all the same so you will have a whole shitload of factions that are all carbon cutouts.

Otherwise what other concepts besides evangelism, religious hucksters, and all sorts of stereotypes.

In all honesty :), I thought the mormon references were a bit unnecessary since it never really added much at all to the game besides 'Hey lets give a shout out to the mormons YAY!'
 
Buxbaum666 said:
What is, for you, the difference between religion and cult?
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Religion is just a nice word for it, usually indicates that it's widely accepted as well. I guess any religion in the fallout universe would be deemed a cult unless its for some personal spiritual thing.
 
I'm not sure if the world of Fallout would have a lot of religion in it.
It is based on how the people of the 50's imagined the future, and the futurists of old rarely imagined religion to have a big part in social life in the future.
So I guess while the pre-war society of Fallout had quite a lot of gung ho muhricanism, religion wasn't all that big. Of course, pockets of religious belief remained, but all in all the society was very scientifically minded. So the majority of the people was not religious at all, and so after the War people did not go back to religion because they didn't really know about it in the first place.
 
Surf Solar said:
BonusWaffle said:
Given the relationship between religion and nationalism
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Stopped reading there
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You dont think they have a relationship? There are lots of theories on exactly what that relationship is.. but no one disagrees that there is one.
 
Religion and nationalism haven't always been as strongly linked in America as they are today. The "God, mom, and apple pie" refrain is one thing, but the degree to which religion is present in nationalist rhetoric and is drawn up in (mostly, conservative) political discourse only really started coming about around the 60s or early 70s as a pushback against the counterculture.

Regardless, the ubiquity of religion, like the rest of the social fabric it was a part of, would probably have faded away after the bomb. It may yet be alive and well (in some form) in communities with a direct link to the pre-war past like Vaults and the Enclave, but we have to remember that Fallout's setting draws as much from Mad Max and that ilk as from the retro-future aesthetic, and wastelands of that stripe tend to bleach faith and hope from people rather than reenforce it. There would be scattered exceptions, and we do see evidence of religion being around (aside from the community of Mormons in Honest Hearts, which is largely justifiable, you do see God and in specific Christianity cited in a few places), but those are always on a community-by-community or even person-by-person basis. The wasteland is still a wary and dangerous place, and people are (perhaps rightly) a tad suspicious of putting themselves in the hands of institutions or devoting themselves to anything other than practicality and survival.
 
Oh ill agree with that, religion has a much more limited role in modern society, but thats because people are already united. When you want to unite a group of people, history shows that religion is an incredibly useful tool. After a nuclear armageddon I think the state of religion would be more like it was in the medieval times than how its portrayed in most of fallout, like it is in modern society.

By the way I define a cult as religion that goes against the goals of society and instead supports only one central figure.
 
cult
/kəlt/
Noun

1. A system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
2. A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

Synonyms
worship - religion - adoration

So in essence, all religions are a cult.
 
Yep, cult is wrongly used as sect, which at the same time is used as something different than its origins means.

Religions with few followers and/or religions which have, at least for the general view, a tendendy to brainwashing, are called sects.
However, none of those things are what sect mean; a sect is something that got separated (I think the latin noun was sectum, but I'm not too sure, it means "to cut") from an original faction, of whatever it was. Its association to small religions comes from the fact most of them (but not all, scientology for example is not) are sects from christian or jewish religions. I don't think there is a word with clear origins for what people use cult and sect for, and that might be why they call them sects.

I don't know what lead to the use of cult as a smaller religion, other than confusion.
 
One way to define "sect" or "cult" is that it is simply a minority religion. One that perhaps is not recognized by the leading religion in a given area.

Like the word "dialect" vs "language", they are just the same. But the latter is recognized as an official, regional form, while the first is usually considered a variant of the latter, something that comes "below" it, in a old fashioned classification.
 
Semantics aside, we all know what im talking about. There is a clear difference between islam and the branch davidians.
 
Yamu said:
Regardless, the ubiquity of religion, like the rest of the social fabric it was a part of, would probably have faded away after the bomb.
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I found it rather curious you felt that way about religion most likely fading away after (perhaps because of?) the bomb.

The best historical example I can think of as to why I found that strange was the Black Death, a period in human history where famine and disease, combined with war, wrecked such utter havoc on the human population, that as a single event it was the most damaging thing humanity has, historically, ever experienced. So I draw a relative comparison to the fictional post-apocalypse for that very reason. In several periods of history, religion went from forming the central social structure of given civilization, and petered off over the course of said civilization's rise and prosperity; many of which were very self-aware of their overall discard of religion. Homer's epics The Iliad and The Odyssey are (now) written evidence of a society that recounted olden religious customs and beliefs with strong, parodying overtones.

By contrast, whatever religious vanishings that were underway by the time the bubonic plague struck, and largely BECAUSE of the plague, religious faith flew into a frenzied fervor, and people became much more (blindly) pious because of the belief that the suffering and widespread death was the result of God punishing them for their sins. Immediately preceding this, of course, was the incredible socioeconomic growth and prosperity brought on by the pinnacle of the Roman Empire. A mere few centuries earlier, the official religion of the empire had been updated to Christianity, and now that it had fallen and the people had succumbed to the proliferating disease and social disassembly of society, religion made an unprecedented comeback.

Avoiding further needless details (since I'm sure I've droned on long enough, already), my point is that, given what happened at the onset of the Dark Ages, I would imagine that, most likely, religion would GROW in strength as a result of a nuclear apocalypse, rather than fade out. I wouldn't think it strange for many people to, like the Courier, find olden religious customs laughable and strange, because religions always evolve, and it's not unthinkable to assume that the *particulars* of a specific religion would be lost to the ages, following a massive cataclysm. But the gradual and total loss of the custom of practicing faith as a whole? I doubt very much that such a violent social upheaval would do anything but ENHANCE the custom, not slowly erase it.
 
You make some valid points, but I think the key to the situation lies in the differences between the Black Plague and Fallout's nuclear apocalypse. The plague could subjectively be argued to be one of the most damaging cataclysms in history, but it left the society and the actual, physical areas it struck (if not their populations) largely intact. Losing a total war tends to have more drastic effects. Fallout's America has been completely torn down, its culture largely obliterated, and historically speaking there are at least as many cases of decimated cultures going extinct or receding to the fringes of society as of those cultures concentrating and fortifying under the strain. The in-game evidence points to pre-war religions falling mostly into the former category. A rare few, in scattered pockets, were reenforced, but mostly, believers are scarce and infervent, probably eclipsed in numbers and orthodoxy by post-war cults and tribal religions (which even still are still a minority of the population.)

Also, Fallout's wasteland differs from most other case studies not only in that the decimation wrought there was near-total, but that the society it was wrought upon was falling from a far loftier height of sophistication. During the plague, people turned to religion in droves out of desperate hope. In the pre-wasteland world, though, people had been taught that science was their hope, and it was that very hope that visited an unprecedented devastation upon them. For the hardcore religious faithful, it must have seemed a final judgment from which there was no salvation, so it was a real double-whammy: if not God, if not
Science!, what was there to believe in?

The Wasteland is largely a post-hope, post-faith kind of place, and I think that's integral to the bleakness of the setting.
 
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