Hunger Games and Religion: What was the Historical Worldview/Culture to best Describe Panem?

[Gxg (G²)]

I was talking to my cousin on the books called "The Hunger Games" - brilliant series in what it sought to represent with addressing the reality of violence and how often it is used wrongly as well as driven by entertainment - with no one benefiting from it in the end (more shared here and here)

And seeing the way that Panem developed as well has been fascinating:

The Fall of North America and the Rise of Panem​

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Does anyone feel that Hunger Games had any religious aspects to it when it came to the dynamic of War and Violence being seen as the means to solve problems? Was Panem a religiously atheistic society? Or was it something else entirely? Going through the movies and the books, I am trying to make more sense of it since it's one of the most powerful movie series I've seen and really speaks to a lot of things others have been feeling about the times we live in - especially in light of what we in the U.S. do to people around the world all the time.

As one individual pointed out:

Diana Butler Bass in the Washington Post:

No religion in "The Hunger Games"? The story eschews religions that glory in crusades, jihads, nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. In Panem, there is no place for religion that supports injustice. The enslaved neither want nor need such a religion. Banished are religions that celebrate bloodlust. There is too much of that already. Yet "The Hunger Games" celebrates faith--faith in family, faith in friendship, faith in song, faith in justice. "The Hunger Games" proclaims that beyond the fences of fear built to enslave, control, and guard, there is joy, beauty, and wonder. In the end, there is true freedom, and the hard-earned hope that human beings can create a better world based not in sacrificial violence but in sacrificial love.

Bass sees the Hunger Games as celebrating humanism while eschewing organized religion. And perhaps that is Suzanne Collins' intent. But there is a deeper truth to Hunger Games that perhaps even its author didn't intend.

Hunger Games is all about religion. It is about a society ravaged by materialism, in which every shred of transcendence has been stripped. Panem is state atheism-- worship of the state, a remarkably accurate portrayal of real communist and national socialist hellholes that have cursed mankind in this past century of atheism. The worship of power, the totalitarian control of intimate aspects of citizen's lives, the reduction of civic life to banality and circuses and violence is the hallmark of atheist-materialism in power.

Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China and Kim's North Korea are our real world antecedents to Panem's dystopia. Hunger games resonates because we've been there, as often as we have been ruled by atheism.

Hunger Games is about atheism's inevitable totalitarian end. In that the story is very true.​

And As another pointed out:

When a science fiction writer writes about the future, the reader expects to have some idea as to how the future got that way. The explanation may be self-evident from the story-e.g. continued technological progress leads to space travel, robots, whatever. But if the change is truly radical, the writer must provide some kind of explanation. If I were to write a science fiction story in which the earth was populated solely by females, the reader will naturally demand to know, "What happened to the men?" I can't let the matter just sit there. It's not fair, and most science fiction readers won't like it.

That brings us to the gaping hole in Suzanne Collins' creation-the total absence of religion. Not just Christianity: all religion. All forms of religion, every trace of religious belief or practice, every vestige of religious thought or language, the absence of even superstition, even the most casual taking of God's name in vain-Collins has erased it all.

People in Panem don't wonder what happens to them after they die; the question never occurs to them. They don't wonder why they exist. They don't ask what their purpose is in life. They don't have God. They don't even have an Unknown God, as the pagans had in Athens. They don't pray. They have no god to give thanks to, no god to appeal to when they're in need. Nothing.

What happened to religion in this not-so-distant future? Collins doesn't answer. She doesn't seem to hear the question. You can read a number of Suzanne Collins interviews online, but they won't help you. No one asks her why she expunged religion from her future world, and she doesn't volunteer an explanation.

This is a very queer state of affairs. There has never existed on the earth a civilization or a culture that was 100% religion-free. The religious impulse is part of human nature. As St. Paul explained, God "hath made of one blood all nations of men ... That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from any one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being ..." (Acts 17:26-28). We know God because He made us in His image. Paul again: "Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them" (Rom. 1:19).

​

Hunger Games - the entire series will always be brilliant in showing the reality that NO ONE ever wins in war or violence....and glad I was able to see the film today. But when it comes to history in what the film symbolizes, I wonder how much it can speak to today. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear. And for other resources:

Mockingjay's Syrian refugees | Think Christian

Film Review: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
The Political Message of The Hunger Games | The Artifice

The Hunger Games vs. the Reality of War | War Is A Crime .org
warisacrime.org

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[Gxg (G²)]

This review of the series was truly stellar:

'

I was talking to my cousin on the books called "The Hunger Games" - brilliant series in what it sought to represent with addressing the reality of violence and how often it is used wrongly as well as driven by entertainment - with no one benefiting from it in the end (more shared here and here)

And seeing the way that Panem developed as well has been fascinating:

The Fall of North America and the Rise of Panem​

​

Does anyone feel that Hunger Games had any religious aspects to it when it came to the dynamic of War and Violence being seen as the means to solve problems? Was Panem a religiously atheistic society? Or was it something else entirely? Going through the movies and the books, I am trying to make more sense of it since it's one of the most powerful movie series I've seen and really speaks to a lot of things others have been feeling about the times we live in - especially in light of what we in the U.S. do to people around the world all the time.

As one individual pointed out:

Diana Butler Bass in the Washington Post:



Bass sees the Hunger Games as celebrating humanism while eschewing organized religion. And perhaps that is Suzanne Collins' intent. But there is a deeper truth to Hunger Games that perhaps even its author didn't intend.

Hunger Games is all about religion. It is about a society ravaged by materialism, in which every shred of transcendence has been stripped. Panem is state atheism-- worship of the state, a remarkably accurate portrayal of real communist and national socialist hellholes that have cursed mankind in this past century of atheism. The worship of power, the totalitarian control of intimate aspects of citizen's lives, the reduction of civic life to banality and circuses and violence is the hallmark of atheist-materialism in power.

Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China and Kim's North Korea are our real world antecedents to Panem's dystopia. Hunger games resonates because we've been there, as often as we have been ruled by atheism.

Hunger Games is about atheism's inevitable totalitarian end. In that the story is very true.​

And As another pointed out:

When a science fiction writer writes about the future, the reader expects to have some idea as to how the future got that way. The explanation may be self-evident from the story-e.g. continued technological progress leads to space travel, robots, whatever. But if the change is truly radical, the writer must provide some kind of explanation. If I were to write a science fiction story in which the earth was populated solely by females, the reader will naturally demand to know, "What happened to the men?" I can't let the matter just sit there. It's not fair, and most science fiction readers won't like it.

That brings us to the gaping hole in Suzanne Collins' creation-the total absence of religion. Not just Christianity: all religion. All forms of religion, every trace of religious belief or practice, every vestige of religious thought or language, the absence of even superstition, even the most casual taking of God's name in vain-Collins has erased it all.

People in Panem don't wonder what happens to them after they die; the question never occurs to them. They don't wonder why they exist. They don't ask what their purpose is in life. They don't have God. They don't even have an Unknown God, as the pagans had in Athens. They don't pray. They have no god to give thanks to, no god to appeal to when they're in need. Nothing.

What happened to religion in this not-so-distant future? Collins doesn't answer. She doesn't seem to hear the question. You can read a number of Suzanne Collins interviews online, but they won't help you. No one asks her why she expunged religion from her future world, and she doesn't volunteer an explanation.

This is a very queer state of affairs. There has never existed on the earth a civilization or a culture that was 100% religion-free. The religious impulse is part of human nature. As St. Paul explained, God "hath made of one blood all nations of men ... That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from any one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being ..." (Acts 17:26-28). We know God because He made us in His image. Paul again: "Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them" (Rom. 1:19).

​

Hunger Games - the entire series will always be brilliant in showing the reality that NO ONE ever wins in war or violence....and glad I was able to see the film today. But when it comes to history in what the film symbolizes, I wonder how much it can speak to today. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear. And for other resources:

Mockingjay's Syrian refugees | Think Christian

Film Review: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
The Political Message of The Hunger Games | The Artifice

The Hunger Games vs. the Reality of War | War Is A Crime .org
warisacrime.org

​

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