I’m starting to write this on the night of the winter solstice (or Yule if you’re a dirty pagan like me), which seems oddly appropriate. The longest night of the year. The turning point when darkness gives way to light. A beacon of hope in the inky blackness. At its core, the celebration of the winter solstice is a celebration of optimism. It’s about holding hope inside even when things around you seem dark and bleak. And this is what Star Trek is about too. We might find ourselves in a pessimistic society where the gulf between the haves and have nots is only widening. But Star Trek (and in this, I mean especially The Original Series since this is what I’m most interested in exploring) offers an idea of the future wherein there is a lack of the scarcity that plagues our Earth-bound societies now and instead there shimmers the hopeful idea that maybe someday soon humans will finally figure their shit out.

A lot has been written already about Star Trek’s inherent optimism and how at odds it can seem in a genre peopled with a hefty amount of post-apocalypse stories or cyberpunk ideas around the power (and greed) of corporations going unchecked. Science fiction is a wonderful, amazing genre but it has its fair share of debbie downers: stories of bleak futures that seem nigh inevitable. The heart of Star Trek says something different. It says that the world is not going to end in a ball of flame, with zombies or killer robots or alien invasion. War and radiation and extreme poverty are not going to destroy us. Instead, we’re going to reach for the stars and the stars are going to welcome us with…. mostly open arms.

What I like about this is that it doesn’t happen overnight. Humans in the Trek universe don’t just wake up one day and decide to stop being dicks. There are still wars and conflict and bigotry and corruption. But that isn’t where the story ends. It isn’t where the story stays. We rise above it. We get over it. We transform ourselves into something new.

That lack of focus on huge conflicts like the Eugenics Wars is actually a huge selling point for me. These wars have already happened by the time The Original Series starts. They’re ancient history. Science fiction that is constantly high stakes, that is violent and aggressive, or prides itself on being “dark” and “gritty” is a snooze fest. There is no heart and no love in it. I don’t want to imagine a future where nothing gets better and we’re all just as stressed as we are now, only with cooler laser guns. I want to imagine a future that is better.

Star Trek is built on love and curiosity and playfulness. The stories it tells are themselves teasing little things. It’s goofy, awkward, and weird. The philosophy that it toys with very rarely trends toward the nihilistic, especially if we’re mostly looking at TOS. And it’s not afraid to ask the weird questions that we might not think to ask. Namely, how do we interact with alien cultures that are so vastly different from our own? Other pieces of sci fi answers this question of interacting with difference by saying that we’ll lean on colonialism, on war and subjugation, on fear and prejudice. And while there is certainly prejudice in the Trek universe, as well as battles and skirmishes, the core of humanity’s response to the weird is curiosity. Starfleet, at least the members shown on screen, are explorers and diplomats at their hearts. It is the soldiers in Starfleet that are the bad guys. Problems are solved with wits and kindness over guns more often than not.

It’s this softness that makes Trek so appealing. Yes, there are action scenes and fighting, but they are last resorts. Starships are peopled by folks who understand that they are guests in whatever area of space they wander into. They are visitors. As a pagan, a big tenet of my religion is built on the idea of “right relationship” and the concept of proper “guest/host relationship”. The Ancient Greeks used the term “xenia” for this, while the Ancient Norse used “gebo” or “frith”. In this schema, both guests and hosts have obligations toward each other. Obligations of care and kindness and hospitality. This is how we are called to order our interactions with each other but also with the Gods (since when we approach the Gods, either in prayer, ritual, or offering, we are guests within Their purview). We act as good guests, bringing gifts and good conversation and politeness, and the Gods act as good hosts, sheltering us and offering us gifts in return. Star Trek is in a constant state of this xenia. We are pushing into the frontier, ie entering the homes of alien cultures who may or may not act as proper hosts, and we may or may not act as proper guests as we do so. Even Deep Space Nine, despite being based on a stationary place, falls into this, though Starfleet in this instance acts more in the role of “host” than “guest” (and the Dominion do a poor job of being proper guests). But when we all act in accordance with the proper frith we wish to establish, then things run smoothly.

And that’s where the optimism of Trek comes in again. In the future, we are not perfect and the aliens we meet out in our galactic neighborhood are not perfect, but we try to live in right relationship with them and that’s part of the life-giving aspect of the practice of pagan religion. We aren’t expected to be perfect (though we are expected to defend ourselves and our loved ones if frith is broken), we’re just expected to try. And we’re expected to go out into the Weird© and meet the denizens there.

I know I come at this from a non-normative understanding of religion, since polytheism is still something of a rarity in modern Western culture, but for me, religion has always been about having fun. Many religions have called us humans “children of [the] God(s)” and what do children do? They play. Star Trek’s spirituality is a playful one. And that’s where the light can shine through.

This blog post is going up significantly later than the solstice (oops) but remember to take its light with you through the darkness. Just as the Enterprise zips its way through the inky blackness of space.

Live long and prosper!