Star Trek: Discovery boldly goes where no Trek has gone before by saying religion is... OK, actually
Star Trek’s future is a secular one. Franchise creator Gene Roddenberry was an avowed atheist, and the series and its spin-offs have routinely criticized organized religion as manipulative, illogical, and detrimental to the evolution of a society.
Individual members of the human race may have an undefined spirituality, a curiosity about the afterlife, or a sense of wonder at the unknown or unknowable, but specific religious beliefs are typically reserved for alien cultures.
But, if Trek’s fervently pro-science and anti-superstition has remained constant, so have the attempts by different storytellers within the franchise to approach religion from other, more tolerant angles.
And the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery, “Whistlespeak,” may present Trek’s most even-handed take on faith to date. Somewhat restrained by the standards and practices of 1960s television, Star Trek: The Original Series used sci-fi allegories to criticize religion as an institution that stifled advancement and expression.
In two episodes (“The Return of the Archons” and “The Apple”), Captain James T. Kirk and his Enterprise crew encountered a planet where a population was cowed into willful ignorance or repression by a deity that turned out to be a computer, which Kirk summarily destroyed.