With all the Trek franchise frenzy focused on winning back the "young'uns"--i.e., anyone under 30, or born with digital video impulses in their blood—we sometime forget about other demographics of fandom that are just as vital.
Case in point: I
really enjoyed
this crossover post into Trekland... from an unexpected blogging realm, to be sure. Which, of course, only goes to show the Power of Gene:
To-wit: a young housewife/mother nominally blogs on family survival on "Under $1,000 a month"—but it's also spiced with her devout yet open-minded Christianity. Now,
there's two adjectives I don't usually hear together, but this post reveals how the "silent majority" of believers like her is still alive and surviving. "Emily Under" offers a spirited defense of how her beliefs get along just fine, thank you, with her Luv of Trek.
Is it surprising this is an under-explored concept? Either the louder Trekfans are humanists like Gene himself and show anything from discomfort to outright disdain for theology ... or it's the believers of any faith who point to that humanism, as Gene wove into his secular Federation Starfleet, and ignore one or the other as irreconcilable.
But for once, one of the latter crowd queried "Emily" on this very topic--"Why does your family love Star Trek so much? It is not a Christian program and in fact it strongly promotes a lot of non-Christian ideas"— and it's her reply that caught my eye:
"...It is possible that our children may think the world of Star Trek is real, but we are planning on teaching them the difference between what is imagined and what is real. Star Trek is a great way to get them thinking about imaginary worlds, possibilities, new ways of thinking and other peoples' points of view. In our opinion, that is a good thing for children."
I tend to think the only young'uns in the bag for fandom these days are the actual kids of uberfans, the ones I see at Vegas and such: they are brought up in the "family." But Emily is an earnest but hardly hardcore Trekfan, so thanks to her her kids will likely join that majority of armchair fans, present and future, that love them some Starfleet in their own "silent majority" way....buy the products, see the movies, pile up the TV ratings—all in the privacy of their own home, and no further.
Since I caught this post, I've since realized that Emily is no longer blogging on her main family homemaking topic, though the archive is there. That's what makes this sidebar post--and the slice-of-nonfandom comments below it—all the more illuminating.
A healthy love of Trek while embracing religious views is a great thing and hardly inconceivable—and thank goodness that Emily, at least, got to spread the good news. About that. At least to a few.
Hey, packin' my bags tonight for a con trip like no other all year long: a voyage home to land-run land OK City and SOONERCON again!
ey" ... fusing two forces I never thought I'd embrace "out in the open" while growing up: geekdom, and red-neckedness! (Though there was the year the cowgirls in the country bar were dancin' with the Klingons, and their cowdudes didn't appreciate it...)
