Religious Tolerance in the World of BSG

There’s beena lot of talk about the creating and casting of strong female characters in BSG, but that’s not the only area where BSG has broken from the past to some extent. Though religion plays a very important role in the show, not all the main characters are religious — and the other characters in the world seem to accept this.

For example, as the president lay on what we believed might be her death bed in the eposide “Epiphanies,” Admiral Adama made an announcement to the crew of Galactica. He said, “I know that many of you believe in the power of prayer. If that is your way, then I urge you to pray for our president. As for the others, I hope you will join me in keeping her in our thoughts.”

That probably didn’t mean a lot to some viewers, but it caught my attention when I first heard it and again when I heard it in our catch-up-to-season-three marathons. Adama openly admitted that he’s an atheist — or at best agnostic. Can you picture political leaders — or even military leaders — in today’s America doing this? And if they did, can you imagine their career surviving it? I can’t, and it blew me away that Adama could.

One thought though: Regardless of the tolerance the Galactica crew seems to have for Adama’s atheism/agnosticism, I can’t help but also notice that even though there were twelve entire worlds of humans in the colonies, we haven’t heard of any other religion than the one based on Apollo and Athena. We live ina world of far less than the 20 billion killed in the miniseries and we worship dozens of gods in thousands of different ways. Are there other religions in the BSG universe, or are there“sects” within their singular religion? It’s something to think about.

I don’t want to drift too far off subject here, so let me just again applaud the creators and maintainers of the BSG re-imagining for their forward-looking views on gender equality and religious tolerance.Â