Fallout 4's Use of Religion

Hide your children and delete this blog from your bookmarks, because I’m about to commit that grave sin once more: I’m recycling a comment I made on Youtube into a rant.  Because I’m fucking evil, that’s why.

A few months ago, a small quest mod for Fallout 4 showed up on the Nexus, and as I still like to keep up with promising user adventures for the game, I checked it out.  It was a fairly decent little adventure, centered around religion (specifically Christianity), and its creator clearly put some time, effort, and most of all, sincerity into the work.  I didn’t personally get a lot out of it, but I can appreciate the work for what it is and intends.  The thing that interested me most, however, wasn’t within the mod itself, but rather the stated intent of the creator--he essentially was surprised at the lack of religious themes and content in Fallout 4, compared to previous games, and felt that there should have been more, making the mod to fill that gap a bit.

This interests me, because I feel that it’s quite the opposite.

Now, to clarify, the gentleman isn’t wrong on the point that religion has been a significant theme in the Fallout series prior to Fallout 4.  It certainly has.  The original Fallout 1 and 2 made mention occasionally of prewar Christian beliefs having slight holdouts here and there, albeit now passed along more through family than outright cultural communities.  More significantly, The Master’s army is as much a cult worshiping him and the ideals of super mutation as it is an actual military force in Fallout 1.  Fallout 2 ups the religious theme quite a bit by making the Hubologists (basically the Scientologists) a significant entity, incorporating tribal spiritual and paranormal beliefs frequently into characters and groups (such as Sulk* and Arroyo), and establishing a (largely ignored, admittedly) pseudo-Christian priest as a prominent figure in the major city of New Reno.  Fallout 3’s entire plot centers around a verse from the Bible, and introduces a cult of radiation worshippers, while Fallout New Vegas incorporates a decent smattering of tribal beliefs, introduces the Bright Brotherhood (which is yet another cult, but a refreshingly benign one), has a few more references to Christianity here and there, and gives Mormonism a substantial.background presence in its Honest Hearts DLC.  So yeah, while it’s never really a huge focal point of the game (the Master’s cult is a secondary revelation to the discovery of his military ambitions so the religious side isn’t the major mental image the player has of his forces, and Fallout 3’s Bible passage is significant for its poetic concept, not specifically for its religious nature), religion’s a definite part of the series.

And in a sense, he’s not completely wrong in thinking that there should have been more religious content in Fallout 4.  I agree from the perspective that Fallout 4 is about Boston and the surrounding area, and the fact of the matter is that the cultural history of Massachusetts, and by some extension the United States as a whole, is (unfortunately) hugely influenced by having been founded (or invaded, depending on your perspective) by the Puritans.  Given Fallout’s core premise of analysis of American culture and history, there really should have been some thematic spotlight shed on the whole Puritan thing.  Preferably one that emphasized what a bunch of self-important, philosophically self-defeating whiny dickweeds they were, but I’m not picky, I’d take whatever as long as it’s written well.

However, to get back to my main purpose, I strongly disagree that Fallout 4 is lacking in content utilizing religion.  I think, in fact, that it is the installment of the series with the most focus upon and influence of religion!

It’s just not blatant and outright proclaimed, that’s all.  Like, if you’re looking for narrative road signs spelling out who’s believing in what and which holy book’s influencing what faction, then yeah, there’s not much to be found--there’s a preacher in Diamond City who can wear whatever religious hat you want him to, the Children of the Atom are unfortunately mucking about here and there, and you can do a couple minor quests for some Hubologists in the Nuka World add-on, but that’s about it, and it’s all exceptionally tiny and mostly irrelevant.  If what you want is some overt, surface representation of religion, yeah, Fallout 4’s pretty weak.

But just because you don’t see it as obviously, that doesn’t mean it’s not there, and in great quantity.**  Remember how Shin Megami Tensei 3 didn’t so much directly analyze and fixate upon any specific, outright belief system (like most of the rest of the series does), so much as it made its focus the underlying, core approaches that religions are built off of?  Similar situation here with Fallout 4.  If anything, I would argue that the theme of religion plays a greater role in Fallout 4 than it has in any previous entry of the series...in the form of the Institute.

They may not wrap it up in the usual trappings that we think of being religion-related, but the Institute is basically a corrupt religious institution, in all the ways that matter. Its members blindly follow its single leader (even when they’re privately unsure of his vision), for starters.  Next, the leader they’re virtually unquestioningly following is a man who has used carefully selected language and rhetoric to refine the group's behaviors, and viewpoints on other people, very specifically to serve the organization's convenience and restrict the ability for different viewpoints on human nature to grow--this can be primarily seen in the Institute's terminology regarding Synths.  While not solely the property of social faiths and belief systems, there’s no denying that these kinds of manipulatively dogmatic behaviors are most iconic of religious groups (especially, though not exclusively, cults).

Then there’s the fact that the Institute is utterly, adamantly convinced that it is the sole salvation of all humankind, whether the rest of humanity agrees or not. It sees those not within it as unenlightened and in need of guidance because they're simply unequipped for self-determination.  From little grassroots compound-based cults on up to world-spanning titans of faith like Christianity, that one there’s a particular favorite of religions.  Tell me you’ve ever, ever seen any group wholly unaffiliated with a social religion engage in as much self-congratulatory back-patting over being the autonomously-appointed saviors of humanity (again, regardless of how humanity itself feels about the matter) as the Institute does.

Additionally, the Institute operates with fanatical devotion to ideals and goals that are almost completely undefined, described in vague terms of a better, shining tomorrow that only they know how to bring about, while having no concrete description of what that 'better world' end result will look like or how they'll know it when it comes about. And, for that matter, they carry on with this certainty of being the ones who will bring about this completely nebulous utopia also while lacking any concrete plan or set of steps specifically and logically leading to their desired conclusion.  Essentially, the members of the Institute all labor out of faith and faith alone that they're going to save the world.  Again, pretty big, signature behavior and belief of religious organizations, here.

These are not just random quirks of this faction--they are the most signature characteristics of the Institute and the ways in which it is run! And not a single 1 of them represents or even resembles the behavior of an actual scientific organization. These are the actions, mentalities, and methods of a religion, and a very worrying one, at that. Technological progress and fixation on scientific discovery are the Institute's trappings, yes, but these clothes don't cover up the fact that its members' behaviors, goals, beliefs, attitudes, and hierarchy are that of a cult , with Father as its charismatic leader.

And since the Institute functions as the faction upon which the strong majority of the game's lore, personal conflicts, philosophical questions, and narrative events are based, and as both the home and, effectively, genesis of the game's primary antagonist Shaun, I think it's reasonable to say that religion has never been a greater factor in a Fallout game than it is in Fallout 4.














* The game even commits to canonizing some degree of Sulik’s belief in the spirits as a fact of the Fallout universe.  While the Hubologists are as full of crap as the real-life cult they’re based on, and you can kind of disregard certain minor paranormal events and quests as being questionable at best as to whether they’re meant to be taken seriously, Sulik’s spirits are straight-up spitting facts.  When you ask Sulik what the spirits tell him of locations you visit, he occasionally relates insights about the area that he really couldn’t possibly know on his own.  And it’s hard to discount these as something intended not to be given real consideration as canon, because a lot of these bits are fully voiced, major lines of his dialogue--quite a lot of resources to put into something not intended to have any weight.  It’s certainly not the only time the series validates paranormal factors (The Sight of Mama Murphy and that Ug-Qualtoth nonsense, for example, are both validated to differing degrees on multiple occasions), but it’s significant for being the first, and perhaps setting the precedent that allowed those other examples to come about at all.


** As my sister, who graciously wasted way too much of her time listening to me blather on in this rant and is at least 90% of the reason it’s not garbage, as she is for almost every rant, pointed out, this is actually a good bit of Christianity right here--finding the non-overt factors of religion in Fallout 4 is perhaps not dissimilar to the whole thing of seeing God in the subtle and understated happenings of His works, and whatnot.