There is a curious irony in the newest iteration of Star Trek, a series branded Starfleet Academy. The franchise that once imagined a future of exploration has turned inward, not outward, toward its own past, toward its own iconography, toward the endless recycling of its own sacred objects. The show’s structure resembles less a narrative than a reliquary: a procession of callbacks, references, and recognizable fragments from earlier ages of Trek.
South Park’s “Memberberries” joke lands because it names something spiritually precise. These references function as a kind of secular anamnesis.
Do this in remembrance of us.
This is a a ritualized invocation of memory meant to reassure the faithful that the franchise still “remembers” them. But the effect is not one of genuine remembrance. It is closer to what I described in William T. Cavanaugh's Being Consumed: the way consumer capitalism offers the form of communion without its substance. The liturgy remains, but the sacrament is hollowed out.
The Soft Power of Nostalgia
Many contemporary franchises are performing soft power nowadays. They participate in what Cavanaugh called, in Migrations of the Holy, the displacement of religious energies into secular institutions. The State absorbed the liturgical imagination of the Church and now corporations do the same. They inherited the desire for belonging, for recognition, for a community gathered around a shared table.
In Starfleet Academy, this manifests in two intertwined strategies:
Nostalgia as a political technology
Identity signaling as a substitute for character
The former reassures the audience that they are still part of the story; the latter reassures global markets that the franchise is aligned with contemporary cultural expectations. Neither, however, constitutes storytelling in the older sense of the word. They are gestures or rituals that are repeatedly performed for the sake of cultural recognition.
The red‑carpet premieres, with their emphasis on celebrity self‑promotion, only underscore the shift. The original casts of Trek were often chosen for their craft, their histories, and their gravitas. Today’s promotional cycle centers on the actor as brand, the individual as product. The franchise becomes a platform for personal visibility rather than a narrative space shaped by a shared purpose or imagination.
This is the logic of late‑stage capitalism: we have been trained to treat our own visibility as a virtue and our franchises as stages for self‑display. But beneath that logic lies a deeper displacement. The original moral architecture of these franchises, whatever their flaws, was shaped by a cultural imagination still faintly downstream of Christ. Even secular stories once borrowed their sense of goodness, sacrifice, and hope from a Christian moral horizon.
When that horizon is removed, the vacuum does not remain empty. We do not replace Christ with nothing; we replace Him with ourselves. The center collapses inward. The story becomes a mirror for what we now recognize are the worst aspects of our society. That's why the cast are a bunch of weirdos who dress like fruitcakes during the premiere. The characters aren't real characters; they are extensions of personal branding. The franchise is a platform for self‑assertion rather than a narrative ordered toward the good, the true, or the beautiful.
This is why so much contemporary media feels hollow. Human beings cannot sustain themselves as the source of meaning. We cannot be our own fulfillment. When the self becomes the object of devotion, the result is a spiritual thinness that no amount of nostalgia or identity-signaling can repair.
The failure of the new show is the predictable outcome of a theological displacement. A franchise that once gestured toward transcendence now orbits around the self. It asks the audience to find meaning in being “seen,” but offers nothing beyond that recognition.
Why Pandering Works: The Theology of Memory
To understand why this strategy exists and why audiences respond so strongly to references, callbacks, and Easter eggs, we must return to the biblical grammar of memory.
Scripture repeatedly speaks of God “remembering” His people:
God remembered Noah
God remembered Rachel
God remembered His covenant
In the biblical imagination, to be remembered is to be loved. Memory is fidelity. It is the assurance that one has not been abandoned. Corporations have learned to mimic this pattern. When a franchise inserts a reference to a beloved episode from 30 years ago, the fan experiences a small thrill of recognition: They remembered me. The Easter egg becomes a secularized sacrament, a sign that the institution has not forgotten its covenant with the faithful.
This is why pandering works. It is not because audiences are shallow but because human beings are liturgical creatures. We long to be remembered.
In Migrations of the Holy, Cavanaugh argues that modern institutions inherit the religious impulses we pretend to have outgrown. Nowhere is this clearer than in fandom culture.
Conventions function as secularized Sunday worship: a gathering of the faithful, a pilgrimage to a sacred space, a communal sharing of symbols and stories.
The convention floor is a kind of Eucharistic table. The “communion” is not bread and wine but shared consumption of merchandise, of lore, and of the franchise itself. Human beings do not cease to be religious simply because they cease to attend church. The forms of devotion migrate.
When the Liturgy Becomes Too Obvious
The backlash to Starfleet Academy reveals that it is too self‑aware about its own liturgical functions. If the last decade has taught us anything about injecting woke elements into a product, it is that when our secular rituals becomes too transparent, the spell breaks. Audiences can tolerate being pandered to, but not being told they are being pandered to. They can accept soft power, but not when it is wielded with so visible a hand of self‑congratulation.
A liturgy must feel like worship, not marketing.
What we see in Starfleet Academy is the logical end of the franchise model. When a cultural product becomes a replacement religion, it must provide:
A canon
A priesthood (showrunners, actors, influencers)
A liturgical calendar (release cycles, conventions)
A communion (shared consumption)
A sense of being remembered
But unlike God, the corporation remembers only to the extent that remembrance can be monetized. Memberberries are not a sign a covenant; they are a marketing strategy.
As time goes on, the crisis of modern franchises becomes more and more apparant: they offer a form of communion that shows itself to be without the substance. Corporations can promise recognition but cannot deliver the eternal love that only Christ is capable of
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Every franchise has been destroyed or falsified, every book dumbed down, every picture has been p-shopped, every statue and street building has been negrified, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. Quality entertainment has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which ✡️ish perversion poisons everything.
Excellent analysis. The idea that franchises mimic religious memory structures really explains why these callbacks land so differently when they're obviously calculating the nostalgia feels transactional instead of earned. I remeber being obsessed with Trek as a kid, and there's definitely a differance between genuine world-building and just cycling through familiar imagery without actually building on it.