I teach a religious studies course to junior level high school students entitled, Bible and Western Culture.  The course is a twelve week trimester elective designed to introduce students to an academic study of the Bible together with its influence on western art, literature, music, and other cultural phenomena, including film.  A film I currently incorporate into my curriculum, one made for television, is an episode from Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek series entitled, A Piece of the Action.  In gist, I find no better example of a modernist perspective on the Bible, and the Bible’s influence on western culture, than in this particular episode. 

For starters, I never have considered myself a Trekkie, but I have to admit that I am a fan of the original Star Trek series when it comes to science-fiction engaging (no pun intended) with contemporary thought and social values.  Those who have commented on the show and the life of its creator, Gene Roddenberry, have well noted Roddenberry’s Secular Humanist perspective on matters; viewpoints he brought across in his Star Trek scripts. I simply point out here that as a science-fiction writer, Roddenberry (and others who wrote for him) brought across to audiences a scientific-rational viewpoint on the relationship of science and philosophy to religion, and to the Bible in particular.

A Piece of the Action is one of my favorite episodes, and one that I show to my students as an entertaining, but thought provoking, way of summing up the course.  As the plot goes, the U.S.S. Enterprise and its crew investigate a reported case of cultural contamination on a friendly planet, one instigated by a Federation starship a century before the arrival of the Enterprise and prior to the Federation’s enactment of its “Non-Interference Directive.” That being any peaceful, scientific investigation of a strange new world must never interfere with the inhabitant society’s natural evolution (better known as the Prime Directive).  The crew’s mission in this episode is to study the culture, identify the cause of contamination, and repair it.  As the story unfolds, however, the crew finds themselves held captive by a culture strangely patterned after 1920’s Chicago and themselves accidents to territorial gang warfare.  With the help of a bystander who asks for “a piece of the action,” the crew eventually locate the cause of contamination.  It turns out to be nothing more than a book left behind by the previous Federation crew entitled, Chicago Mobs of the Twenties.  According to science officer Mr. Spock, the fairly imitative inhabitants “astonishingly,” and unfortunately, utilized the book as a blueprint for their developing society.  Dr. McCoy, in typical McCoy fashion, puts things into medical perspective: “It’s the Bible.”

What I find particularly hilarious, and one of the things I point out to my students, is the form and manner in which the “contamination” – that is, the book –  is presented on set.  When the Enterprise crew happens upon it, they find it poised on a tall pedestal in a gang-boss’s office (that of gang leader Bela Oxmyx) and in a very conspicuous location. Moreover, the book is an oversized, white covered folio with its title printed in gold, Old English lettering.  According Captain Kirk, the book was published in 1992.  Given that one typically would find oversized folios in the 60’s (and 90’s) only in rare book collections at the library or on home coffee tables, even my students recognize the book as a caricature of the old family Bibles their grandparents displayed in their living rooms.  To make the analogy especially clear, gang leader Oxmyx takes immediate offense at the crew when questioned about it: “That’s the book…THE book!...I don’t want any more cracks about the book.”  

At the end of the episode, that is when Captain Kirk finally places himself and his crew in a position to establish control over the warring gangster culture, I find Kirk’s fix to the problem of the contamination an interesting but perhaps not unexpected one.  He tells the Iotians (Sigma Iotia II, by the way, is the name of the planet) that in order to establish an orderly and efficiently productive society they must come together “like reasonable men.”  Reasonable, meaning here, that they must live according to humane, democratic principles, rather than outdated standards recorded in a book about ancient times.  After having solved the problem successfully and returned to the ship, Dr. McCoy unfortunately discovers that he, in fact, accidentally has left behind a piece of equipment in Bela Oxmyx's office, a communicator.
Astounded, Kirk exclaims that maybe in a hundred years, ".they'll demand a piece of our action." The message? Only science and reason will take us into the world beyond, not a book.

Why show a feature like this in my course? I do so, firstly, for a number of simple, practical reasons. With respect to my subject matter, and that addressed in this particular episode, the broad message regarding the Bible and its influence in A Piece of the Action serves as a pedagogical tool with which I can wrap-up my course (as mentioned previously).  Showing it to my students, in other words, provides a way to move class discussion away from particular biblical narratives and motifs (the core of the curriculum) to the influence of the Bible on western culture as a whole.  Secondly, incorporating this feature enables me to address a form of cultural media my students are familiar with on a daily basis: a fine finale to discussing examples of classic art and literature.

There are other and more intellectual reasons for incorporating the film.  Given the enormous influence Roddenberry has had on our culture, not only on the development of the science-fiction genre, but also on modern technological innovations (the cell phones I have to tell my students to turn off from time to time, for example), I think it worth while in a culturally-oriented course such as this one to allow students to engage with Roddenberry’s creation.  Moreover, as science-fiction film, what Roddenberry (and writers Harmon and Coon in this case) present in this episode is an excellent example of a Secular Humanist perspective on the continuing influence of religion on our society.  The intellectual/philosophical elements apparent in the script get across to my students that religion, and the Bible in particular, remains an integral part of everyday western (indeed American) society, despite the attempt to free it from such influence. Such is true, furthermore, in our present post-modernist society with not only its mistrust of the biblical narrative broadly speaking but also, and I think this apropos here, its skepticism even of scientific inquiry.  My students have inherited these ideas as a part of their culture.  They simply need to be made more aware of this fact and learn to think intellectually about it. I think showing them A Piece of the Action and discussing it with them can help them, at least in an introductory sort of way, to do just that.

1. On the significant role of television as cultural phenomena, see the Introduction by Porter and McLaren in Jennifer E. Porter and Darcee L. McLaren, eds., Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture (Albany, N.Y.: Sate University of New York Press, 1999), p. 1.
2. Or maybe I should say Trekker?; see Patricia Byrd, “Star Trek Lives: Trekker Slang,” American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage 53:1 (Spring 1978): 52-58, cited in Susan R. Gibberman, Star Trek: An Annotated Guide to Resources on the Development, the Phenomenon, the People, the Television Series, the Films, the Novels, and the Recordings (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1991), p. 33.
3. I recommend reading Robert M. Bowman, Jr., “Strange New Worlds: The Humanist Philosophy of Star Trek,” CRJ Fall (1991), 20, graciously made available online in full by the Christian Research Institute at http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-jrnl/web/crj0147a.html.
4. For discussions specifically about Star Trek and religion, see Porter and L. McLaren, eds., Star Trek and Sacred Ground; see also Ross S. Kraemer, William Cassidy, and Susan L. Schwartz, Religions of Star Trek (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001).
5. For a humorous documentary on the influence of Star Trek on modern technological innovations, see How William Shatner Changed the World (available on DVD).

Biographical Information:

Stuart Chepey teaches religion and history at the Parish Episcopal School in Dallas, Texas.  He also serves as an adjunct instructor of religion at Richland College.  He received his D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2004 and has authored a number of publications, including book reviews for The Expository Times and Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and the monograph, Nazirites in Late Second Temple Judaism: A Survey of Ancient Jewish Writings, the New Testament, Archeological Evidence, and other Writings from Late Antiquity, published by Brill Academic Publishers in 2005.