Science and Religion in Media: Welcome to Night Vale

The thing I've noticed about studying in the humanities is that you start to see your topic everywhere. Books, TV shows, superhero movies, podcasts... to me, science and religion is there, mostly in the background but sometimes coming up to the forefront to wave and say, "Consider me!"

So, if I have my life together and can get some posts banked, what I'd like to do on Fridays is offer you a sampling of how science and religion plays into our media and the questions that are being gestured at. There's no better way than to start off with a video and a script from a (five-minute) talk I gave on Wednesday on science and religion in Welcome to Night Vale. I wrote a longer paper on all the things I talk about and I'm happy to send it along to whoever's interested. Enjoy the weirdness and the nerdiness, my friends!

Welcome to Night Vale reflects the status of science and religion as sources of knowledge in contemporary American culture. If you watched the video, you've got the gist, but in this written portion, I’ll try to hammer it out a little bit more concretely. I'll give you some background on Welcome to Night Vale as a gothic novel, go through the representations of science and religion in the book, and draw conclusions from there. I should specify that the “religion” I’ll be talking about is primarily Protestant Christianity, since that’s the monolithic religious resonance in the cultural discussion.

My main text is the Night Vale novel but I’ll also bring in information from the podcast. Welcome to Night Vale, for those who don’t know, is an American narrative fiction podcast written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which takes the form of broadcasts from a community radio station in a small town in southwest US desert where every conspiracy theory is true. That’s the construct. More than that, Night Vale is weird, with an undertone of horrifying.

There’s a cat floating four feet off the ground in the bathroom at the radio station. Mysterious hooded figures patrol the dog park, which doesn’t allow dogs. There’s a literal five headed dragon who runs for mayor and an almighty Glow Cloud on the PTA. And that’s just in the first five episodes.

Night Vale is an example of American Gothic literature and Gothic literature in general uses its horrors to reflect cultural anxieties. Frankenstein, for example, is not just a story about a mad scientist who “creates” life from body parts he stole from dead people, it’s about, to quote from the Rutledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the 19th century's “anxieties surround[ing] the fast-developing natural sciences” and the “nature of the self in the face of scientific rationality.”

American Gothic over its history has dealt with slavery and the conquest of indigenous peoples, all the way up to contemporary concerns like the impact of the Cold War or the post 9/11 surveillance state. Night Vale touches on all of this, but what’s interesting for our purposes is how it treats science and Protestant Christianity as as equal but incomplete sources of knowledge.

Knowledge in Night Vale is a scary thing. It’s guarded by government agencies, the city council- who are so frightening, they’re not actually depicted in fan art-, or the most terrifying creatures in Night Vale, librarians. So instead of engaging with the subjects themselves, Night Vale embodies science and Christianity in the characters of Carlos the Scientist and Old Woman Josie.

Old Woman Josie is a respected community member with whom the angels live, so it’s to her that Jackie Fierro, one of the novel’s protagonists, first turns for help. In a town where there are bloodstone circles and cults galore, Josie’s angels are the closest thing you get to an explicit Christian reference point. The angels go off on missions from God, they offer angelic protection, and they’re described as being tall, winged, and accompanied by trumpet sounds. The City Council denies the existence of angels, and in the world of Night Vale, that’s proof that there’s something very real going on.

Even so, Josie and her angels are unable to completely solve Jackie’s problem and so she turns to Carlos the Scientist. Though he’s more caricature more than anything else, he’s the closest thing to a scientist that Night Vale has. Carlos collects empirical evidence, runs experiments, and gathers a consensus from other scientists when investigating problems. He also trusts the evidence of his senses- Carlos believes in the existence of mountains, another thing that’s also often denied in Night Vale.

Carlos and Josie enter the story in the first 100 pages and then move to the background, working together to solve a secondary plot problem involving trans-dimensional flamingos. It’s up to protagonists Jackie and Diane to use the information they get from Josie and Carlos to solve their problems on their own.

Through the plot of the novel, then, Welcome to Night Vale deals with the American postmodern concern over trustworthy information sources by taking the novel’s characters on a journey that leads them from religion to science to seeking out information and truth for themselves. Night Vale places scientific reasoning and Protestant Christianity on an even footing, tools to be used by the characters as they move forward.

Let's take a second to put this discussion of science and religion back in the larger context of the novel. For Night Vale, the real value is to be found in human relationships. Though the plot is driven forward by the angels and Carlos, it’s Jackie’s journey to find herself and Diane’s effort to preserve her family that make up heart of the novel. Night Vale encourages us to use all the resources we can find, be they scientific, religious, or otherwise, to make our own meaning for life in a universe that is at best mostly void, partially stars.