ALIEN - CONTRACTED: Faith-Group Partnership Colonies

 

ALIEN3 introduced religious groups into the ALIEN/S universe, and such groups have had some sort of presence in it ever since. There are numerous allusions to faith-based communities throughout both ancillary texts, as well as in later movies. ALIEN RESURRECTION features a scene in a chapel aboard the Auriga. Both PROMETHEUS and ALIEN COVENANT feature religious characters whose faiths and beliefs play at least some part in their personal motivations. I was wondering how to approach this subject in a manner that made most sense for the setting. This is of course a fine line to tread, and a difficult needle to thread, since religion can be a very touchy subject.

 

The RPG mentions mostly just the apocalyptic cult seen in ALIEN3, as well as the Church of Immaculate Incubation, which was a driving force in the plot of the ALIENS OUTBREAK comic and the subsequent Earth Hive plotline. I'm not sure how well Immaculate Incubation really fits into the overall canon that FLP establishes, since the whole Earth Hive plotline is not canonical at this point. With the presence of the Engineers in the canon, we have a much more viable candidate for religious veneration than the xenomorph, if we wanted to go down that route. Personally I find that not terribly interesting though. I am more intrigued by the plot potential of religious communities in space, and the role such communities could play as corporate partners.

 

I am trying to maintain some cohesion within the CONTRACTED setting. Which is why I am again using the Rand Doctrine as a foundation for further world building. Due to the Rand Doctrine and the wholesale abandonment of the welfare state in the ICC nations, faith groups and religious organizations are relatively more important for overall society in the world of ALIEN CONTRACTED. Religion is strictly separate from the state still, and only fringe voices clamor for the removal of the church/state barrier. At least on Earth and the core colony worlds. Church groups have filled in gaps that the government left open when withdrawing from large parts of their citizens lives at the end of the 20th century. Religious groups provide a sense of community and togetherness in a world that has been ravaged by war and corporate malfeasance

 

But in that regard in the world of ALIEN CONTRACTED religious groups are just another tool of social control. Corporations and state governments have long since discovered that churches are useful to keep people in line. So faith groups that don't rock the boat get rewarded, while social gospel organizations and liberation theology are largely frowned upon. Churches are implicitly expected to be social organizations and provide social services which governments can no longer deliver. But they are not supposed to further dissent against the ruling system. This has long since been a source of discontent between corporate government and faith groups. Not all faith leaders are content with the roles of their organizations. 

 

I wanted to provide some more interesting conflicts and story seeds here, as well as possible character backgrounds. And it's not that the UPP gets away clean here either, it's just that they are generally less open to religion in general, so they don't use religious groups in quite the same ways that the ICC powers do.

 

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In the 2070s during the initial expansion period of space colonization both corporations and governments needed scores of volunteers to abandon their lives on Earth and take to the stars to establish long-lasting colonies and engage in the hard work of terraforming. Replicant labor was just becoming affordable enough to be used for the most taxing physical work off-world, but living human beings were needed to make extra solar colonies thrive. In the so-called free world governments, both state and corporate, approached religious organizations for this purpose. Faith groups made a lot of sense for space colonization. The religious groups of the 2070s had better social cohesion than the rest of society. Studies predicted that a tight-knit faith community would make for a better initial colony population.

 

Among the groups that most directly attracted corporate attention were Latter Day Saints splinter organizations that followed the United Order of Enoch ideology. These groups largely eschewed personal property, working together towards spreading the faith and living faithful, spiritual lives within their community. The corporations involved in space colonization offered members of many such religious groups education, scholarships, and degrees that would allow them to become effective space colonists. These educational programs also focused on educating to educate, so that the individuals who went through these programs then had the requisite knowledge to effectively teach others in their community.

 

Many faith groups entered into contracts with corporations. Both churches and corporations are after all entities that pursue long-term goals that often exceed a single human lifetime. The corporations would gain an effective, tight-knit workforce, and the faith-groups in turn gained a foothold in the colonization of space, and as such a guaranteed place in mankind's future. Or so they thought.

 

Today many Faith Group Partnership Colonies dot the Stars of the Middle Heavens. Most notable among those are the United Order of Enoch colonies, a Mormon splinter group. The colonists in those settlements live almost monastic lives, dedicated to work, community, and prayer. Members of these groups are referred to as "Huweys" (because UOE) by outsiders. Huweys generally don't strive for personal possessions and individual, worldly gain. Instead they work for the good of their communities. And if their communities engage in the construction of space colonies, then that is what the individual members will dedicate their lives to. Many UOE colonies practice polygamy, in which men of the community will take multiple wives. In order to keep competition low, most of those colonies then ship off their male offspring to either the Colonial Marine Corps or on missionary duty. In the 2180s a significant number of Colonial Marines come from UOE colonies. Polygamist UOE colonies are usually operated by women with the men occupying positions of authority and administration.

 

Corporations preferred UOE groups due to the ascetic lifestyles of their members. Colonists who do not seek personal riches and worldly gains, who will engage in the hard work of colony building and terraforming for barely any compensation at all are generally good for the bottom line. But these colonies are not foolproof models of profit generation. Once a colony has been successfully established, a process which takes somewhere between forty and sixty years, the corporations who bankrolled the efforts will come in and start taking over. This transition process has resulted in a few violent uprisings, in which corporate security forces and even in some cases the Colonial Marines had to be called in to ensure that the colony builders relinquished control and allowed for "gentile" (secular) settlers to live side by side with them. Corporate administrators learned their lessons here though. Today the transition period is approached with a much more forgiving hand, with the initial colonists being eased out of their positions of authority. Today many UOE colonies that transition to official corporate colonies retain their original religious administration, which will then co-exist with the corporate level for an undetermined amount of time. While these arrangements also sometimes lead to tensions, they usually do not result in full-scale civil strife.

 

Another problem that is specific to the UOE polygamist colonies are ageing male populations that oversee groups of women most of whom are pregnant for most of the time. Colonies like this frequently collapse without careful intervention. However these problems usually manifest well into the terraforming process, so a new group of colonists can be flown in to replace the dysfunctional community and the expensive world building project does not need to be abandoned.

 

Mormon and evangelical Christian groups are dominant in Faith Group Partnership Colonies. However there are many other kinds of faith groups too that engage in these efforts. Some Catholic religious orders such as Franciscans and Benedictines operate dozens of settlements among the stars. These communities are usually not completely made up of monastics, but tend to bring a smattering of ley personnel along. Many younger religious groups such as new-age sects and Sufi Muslim communities also operate some extra-planetary colonies.

 

Of course not every single colonization project run by ICC powers is related to a religious organization. After the initial expansion era push, and after some spectacular failures, corporate and state governments scaled their efforts to recruit faith groups back. But due to the significant groundwork laid in the 2070s, and due to the massive investment into educating religiously affiliated space colonists, faith groups still play an outsized role in building new colonies. In 2180, the most experienced terraformers and the best teachers of how to build and operate extra planetary colonies have strong church affiliations.

 

Curiously, the UPP experienced similar trends independently. Originally the Politburo thought it a good way of getting rid of pesky religious organizations that they ideologically deemed counterrevolutionary. Shipping religious zealots off-world seemed like the perfect way of making them useful for the grander UPP project. Like the ICC counterparts, the UPP invested in educating members of religious organizations in how to build and maintain space colonies. The UPP's colony building process however differs greatly from that of the ICC members. Colony building is still a laborious endeavor, however UPP colonies usually do not attempt to build an atmosphere on the worlds they chose. Also, while the UPP also used religious groups as an early vanguard of space colonization, these groups never became quite as dominant in the field as they did in the ICC worlds.

 

The groups that the UPP utilized were mostly from orthodox Christian monastic orders, who went into space together with small detachments of ley people. Other colonies were started by members of Buddhist sects. The UPP never quite had the same issues with those groups that ICC member worlds had when it came to transitions of power. Also, while some of the most highly decorated colony builders of the UPP are members of religious orders, they also did not see the dynamic play out wherein religious terra formers largely took over the field.