"Faith of Our Fathers" is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick

Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...

, first published in the anthology Dangerous Visions

Dangerous Visions

Dangerous Visions is a science fiction short story anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, published in 1967.A path-breaking collection, Dangerous Visions helped define the New Wave science fiction movement, particularly in its depiction of sex in science fiction...

(1967). It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette

Hugo Award for Best Novelette

The Hugo Awards are given every year by the World Science Fiction Society for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was once officially...

 in 1968.

The story is a horrifying vision of a God that is all-devouring and amoral

Amorality

Amorality is an absence of, indifference towards, or disregard for moral beliefs. Any entity that is not sentient may be considered amoral. In addition, it can be argued that sentient but non-human creatures, like dogs, have no concept of morality and are therefore amoral...

, and is a sharp depiction of religious despair that prefigured Dick's own later crisis of faith and mental breakdown.

Plot summary

The story's protagonist, Tung Chien, is a party bureaucrat in Vietnam in a future where Chinese-style communism has triumphed over the entire world. The atheist Communist Party rules absolutely over a population that is kept docile by hallucinogenic drugs.

Given an illegal drug by a street seller, he sees the Party leader's appearance on television as a horrific hallucination. He later learns that the drug is stelazine, an anti-hallucinogen, and that what he sees is the true reality of the Party leader: or at least one of them, because different people see any one of twelve different possible visions of the leader. Some (including Chien) see a machine ("the Clanker"), others see a biological monstrosity ("the Gulper"), yet others see a whirlwind, and so forth.

An underground movement, fearing that the leader is not human, contrives to place Tung at a party where the leader will be present. Tung meets the leader, who is apparently an undistinguished elderly man, and takes the anti-hallucinogenic drug.

He learns that all the visions are true, and far more besides; the Party leader is not only alien, he is an almighty, godlike being — perhaps a demiurge

Demiurge

The demiurge is a concept from the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy for an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe. The term was subsequently adopted by the Gnostics...

, perhaps God himself — and one that is a predator on all living things.
Chien, armed with this knowledge, reflects that "A hallucination is merciful. I wish I had it; I want mine back." The story ends with Chien mortally wounded, his life ebbing away, trying to regain his hallucinatory state through intimacy.

In many ways, this story prefigures Dick's later interest in Gnosticism

Gnosticism

Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...

. Dick later said about this story:

"The title is that of an old hymn. I think, with this story, I managed to offend everybody, which seemed at the time to be a good idea, but which I've regretted since. Communism, drugs, sex, God — I put it all together, and it's been my impression since that when the roof fell in on me years later, this story was in some eerie way involved."

and

"I don't advocate any of the ideas in Faith Of Our Fathers; I don't, for example, claim that the Iron Curtain countries will win the cold war--or morally ought to. One theme in the story, however, seems compelling to me, in view of recent experiments with hallucinogenic drugs: the theological experience, which so many who have taken LSD have reported. This appears to me to be a true new frontier; to a certain extent the religious experience can now be scientifically studied. . . and, what is more, may be viewed as part hallucination but containing other, real components. God, as a topic in science fiction, when it appeared at all, used to be treated polemically, as in OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET. But I prefer to treat it as intellectually exciting. What if, through psychedelic drugs, the religious experience becomes commonplace in the life of intellectuals? The old atheism, which seemed to many of us--including me--valid in terms of our experiences, or rather lack of experiences, would have to step momentarily aside. Science fiction, always probing what is about to be thought, become, must eventually tackle without preconceptions a future neo-mystical society in which theology constitutes as major a force as in the medieval period. This is not necessarily a backward step, because now these beliefs can be tested–-forced to put up or shut up. I, myself, have no real beliefs about God; only my experience
that He is present. . . subjectively, of course; but the inner realm is real too. And in a science fiction story one projects what has been a personal inner experience into a milieu; it becomes socially shared, hence discussable. The last word, however, on the subject of God may have already been said: in A.D. 840 by John Scotus Erigena at the court of the Frankish king Charles the Bald. "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." Such a penetrating--and Zen--mystical view, arrived at so long ago, will be hard to top; in my own experiences with psychedelic drugs I have had precious tiny illumination compared with Erigena."

Sources and inspirations

• The basic setting of the story - a dictatorship of the future with a single leader who addresses the citizens on a two-way television screen - is similar to George Orwell
  George Orwell
  Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
  
  's Nineteen Eighty-Four
  Nineteen Eighty-Four
  Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...
  
  .
• The rebels are explicitly compared to "college students of the United States during the Vietnam War" within the story.
• The idea that God is a predator who preys on other living things was also used in Dick's novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a 1965 novel by US science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965....
  
  .

External links

• Faith of Our Fathers on PhilipKDickFans.com
• The Fictional Pharmaceuticals of Philip K. Dick
• Drug References in Science Fiction
• Themes of Reality, Divinity and Humanity in the Short Stories of Philip K. Dick: an essay which touches on the story