The new Battlestar Galactica began with an Old Testament apocalypse. Appalled by humanity’s sins, particularly the pagan worship of “false gods,” the monotheistic Cylon robots rained down Armageddon, with nukes standing in for an old-fashioned flood.

“I know that God loved you more than all other living creatures and you repaid his divine love with sin, with hate, corruption, evil. So then he decided to create the Cylons,” explained captured toaster Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie).

Exec-producer Ron Moore elaborated on this theme in an interview with Beliefnet.com: “It’s not just that they’re space Nazis, it’s that they have an intricate belief system that leads them to this horrific answer.”

Using pious Cylons as surrogates for Islamic jihadists/Christian fundamentalists might be Moore’s creation in the reimagined series — now concluding the first half of its fourth, final season — but even original-recipe Battlestar employed a complex spirituality well beyond Star Wars’ esoteric “force.”

Creator Glen Larson was a Mormon who initially pitched BSG under the title Adama’s Ark. His story of 12 colonies adrift in space, looking for Earth and its lost colony is neatly analogous to Exodus’ 12 tribes of Israel wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land. Israel’s “lost tribes” are vital to Mormonism and Battlestar’s civilian government is named after the Church of Latter Day Saints’ Quorum of Twelve. But despite the biblical allusions, overt religiosity on the show was verboten.

When Ron Moore revived BSG in the wake of 9/11, he made religion a primary underpinning — but gave Cylons our modern one-true god while humans prayed to a Greco-Roman pantheon.
Moore previously wrote for Star Trek, where organized religion was absent because creator Gene Roddenberry believed it would disappear by the 24th century. Moore wanted BSG’s world to be more familiar to our own while also addressing how Mid-East monotheism drove paganism out of Europe. In BSG’s typical tables-turned fashion, humanity is on the losing side of that conflict.
Further blurring matters, aside from a couple of fundamentalist colonies — and born-again president Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) — most of the rag-tag refugees thank the gods out of habit. It’s hard to remain devoted to deities that allow a holocaust.

Religion has been largely used for plot-progressing prophecies and political conflicts until this season, when it took centre stage in first episode, “He That Believeth in Me,” with the evolution of Gaius Baltar (James Callis) into a messianic figure — albeit one prone to bedding his followers.
Baltar, the scientist whose affair with a Cylon sleeper agent (Tricia Helfer) enabled nuclear genocide and who later led a Vichy-type government under Cylon occupation, was found not guilty in last season’s climactic war-crimes trial. He was taken in by a cult of low-caste women who believed him to be their saviour based on his prison writings. The long-haired, bearded Baltar began preaching the Cylon’s one-God religion — with his own self-loving twist — which caught fire across the fleet, in part by assuaging survivor’s guilt. Baltar has since been persecuted by the government, attacked by Sons of Ares and stormed a pagan temple in a mirror of Jesus’ money-lenders throwdown.

The show’s theology becomes even more complex with the return of Starbuck (Katee Sackoff), who may now be an “angel,” and the destruction of the Cylons’ Resurrection Hub — which had allowed them to download into new bodies after death?— by an alliance of humans and rebel Cylons who desired mortality in the belief that “to live meaningful lives we must die and not return.” 

This week’s spring finale, “Revelations,” largely revolves around an armed human/Cylon standoff but it also re-emphasizes that some “higher power” has been manipulating the chessboard, providing supernatural signposts to the 13th tribe’s homeworld, Earth.

Battlestar Galactica’s religious parallels don’t have the same narrative impact as its political and military ones — belief-system spread is hardly as dramatic as insurgency — but the intertwining of both is what fuels their wars and our own. Leave it to a sci-fi serial filled with sexy cyborgs to be the first terror-era TV show to take religion seriously.

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