BioShock is celebrating its 15-year anniversary right now, August 21, 2022. Below, we check out how the spiritual commentary in its sequel, BioShock Infinite, lacks the sharpness it must resonate.

Playing BioShock Infinite at launch, a number of issues caught in my thoughts as a younger Mormon. Zachary Hale Comstock, the sport’s principal villain and cult chief, is a form of Brigham Young: a fiery prophet, claiming visions and prophecies whereas he grasps at energy. His floating metropolis of Columbia is a form of Salt Lake City: a grim capital on the cloud, each a refuge and a jail. Though the sport is drawing on a melting pot of historic and fictional inspirations, these parallels have kicked round in my thoughts for almost 10 years. Creative director Ken Levine even named Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as inspirations for Comstock in an interview again in 2013. To the sport’s credit score, these are touchstones relatively than full-on parallels. In flip, although, the depiction of Comstock and his faith lacks precision: Rather than haunting resemblance, it performs as frivolous caricature. It is that flatness that fuels the sport’s best-remembered false equivalences between the revolutionary Vox Populi and the white sepulchers of Comstock’s floating metropolis.

Part of that caricature is the sport’s reluctance to make clear Comstock’s explicit theology. We can infer that Comstock’s faith (which by no means will get a denominational title) believes in trendy miracles, as Comstock claims to have spoken to an angel and produced a miracle little one. It practices baptism by immersion. White supremacy and racism are woven into each facet of its doctrine. It uplifts the founding fathers to the extent of sainthood. Besides these fundamental traits, there isn’t a context for Comstock’s faith. There are not any adjoining actions or sects. Though Comstock’s journey to grow to be a prophet started with a baptism, the sport by no means makes clear what group he entered. This lack of specificity unties Comstock from any explicit historic second. BioShock Infinite appears to attract extra from the conservative Tea Party movement–which, although politically targeted, had a devotional character–more than any particular spiritual group, particularly from the time interval.

Still, the parallels to Utah and Mormonism stay. Before the sport begins, Comstock’s floating metropolis seceded from the United States. After the demise of prophet Joseph Smith by the hands of mob violence in 1844, Brigham Young led a caravan to settle in what would grow to be Utah. Thousands of Mormons would observe over the following a long time. The territory was then beneath Mexican management till becoming a member of the US in 1850, and was the house of many indigenous peoples, together with Shoshone, Paiute, and Goshute.

The key distinction is, in fact, that Columbia is a dream metropolis floating within the sky. No individuals might have lived there earlier than, and so Columbia imports, relatively than imposes, the sociopolitical construction of a segregated United States. Though the bloodbath at Wounded Knee options into the sport’s plot, there are not any voiced indigenous characters and solely racist cartoons seem in a propagandistic museum degree. Intentionally or not, the floating metropolis implies that the sport can largely sidestep the difficulty of colonial occupation.

While Columbia’s decrease lessons aren’t explicitly enslaved, they’re segregated and overworked. Columbia’s secession from the US allows it to follow “extra excessive” types of institutional racism. In historical past, Mormons introduced slavery from the US to Utah. Three enslaved men–Hank Wales, Oscar Smith, and Green Flake–came with Brigham Young’s get together to the Salt Lake Valley. There was an enslaved inhabitants in Utah till slavery was outlawed within the territories. Therefore, the historical past of slavery in Utah is essentially related to the US’s personal help of the horrific follow. Although BioShock Infinite positions Columbia as an extremist deviation from the right United States, the Mormon settlement of Utah is finest understood as a specific, if peculiar, occasion of the US’s expansionist colonialism.

Columbia is curiously unified exterior of the primary two factions. There are individuals who don’t neatly match into both the revolutionary Vox Populi or Comstock’s Columbia, however they’re few and much between. Mormonism, in distinction, was topic to a flurry of schisms and divisions, even in its early years. Not each Mormon traveled to Utah. Some of those that remained in Illinois fashioned a church of their very own, beneath the management of Joseph Smith’s son, Joseph Smith III. When the church in Salt Lake City ended the follow of polygamy as a consequence of stress from Washington, paving the way in which towards statehood, the church suffered a mass exodus of polygamists. The level is that Christianity, as a lot as every other web site of meaning-making, is controversial even amongst its adherents. Because BioShock Infinite passes by the schisms and battle that outline American Christianity, it can’t supply a holistic criticism of its failings.

To be clear, the difficulty right here shouldn’t be an absence of “historic accuracy” or “respect for the subject material.” BioShock Infinite is science fiction by means of and thru; it intends to characterize an alternate world. Additionally, establishments as large as Mormonism and American Christianity can take the hit. However, these gaps between the actual historical past and the fiction serve to distance Comstock’s religion from real-world teams. What criticism it hefts up lacks specificity and chew. What resonance it may need lacks actual religion. In truth, the longer the sport goes on, the extra Comstock’s faith turns into concerning the sport’s inside mythology, a backdrop to its curiosity in inter-dimensional drama and alternate selves.

While Comstock and crew do have clear inspiration factors, the Vox Populi, led by Daisy Fitzroy, haven’t any coherent resemblance to any actual revolutionary second, particularly within the United States. They are known as Anarchists, however not like anarchism, they haven’t any imaginative and prescient for a future world. All they get are slogans and blood. The sport ultimately labels them as too violent and strikes on. The method BioShock Infinite can get to an announcement like “The solely distinction between Comstock and Fitzroy is the way you spell the identify” is thru these ideological vagaries. It’s telling, for instance, that Columbia’s spiritual artwork by no means depicts Christ and the cross. Even the sport’s Ku Klux Khan is clad in darkish purple, relatively than white. It’s additionally telling that Fitzroy, much more than Comstock, comes from nowhere, with no clear connection to any real-world historical past.

It would possibly look like there’s a lot to unpack right here and in some sense there’s. The historical past of American Christianity, even of Mormonism particularly, carries the load and blood of this nation’s historical past. However, BioShock Infinite doesn’t conjure that historical past, nor its weight or blood. Rather, it’s content material with light caricature, with a imaginative and prescient of Christianity that’s too fictional, self-obsessed, and distant to really offend or resonate.