Jesus Redux
and the New World Order in James BeauSeigneur's Christ Clone Trilogy
and the Raëlian Religion
Stephanie S. Turner
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Cornell University
st265@cornell.edu
Because of the prophetic power that genes
supposedly have to explain the past and predict the future, cloning
narratives can be a compelling way to frame messianic belief systems.
Cloning's imitation of immortality in messianic narratives, which
depict a transcendence of the flesh through a "resurrection"
of the genetic code, becomes in these texts a technological means
of fulfilling Christian prophecy. Given the strong belief in Christian
prophecy in contemporary American culture (Boyer 13-15), such
narratives were bound to increase following the announcement of
the birth of Dolly, the world's first cloned mammal, at the turn
of the millennium. One such narrative occurred in the mission
statement of the now-defunct website known as The Second Coming
Project: "Our intention is to clone Jesus, utilizing techniques
pioneered at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, by taking an incorrupt
cell from one of the many Holy Relics of Jesus' blood and body
that are preserved in churches throughout the world [such as the
Shroud of Turin], extracting its DNA, and inserting [it] into
an unfertilized human egg."
The Second Coming Project's "can do" attitude arises
from the genetic explanation itself, that simplistic equation
in which genotype equals destiny. Yet The Second Coming Project's
confidence is puzzling in light of the cultural anxieties surrounding
cloning, including a distrust of copies; a fear of cloned "monsters";
confusion over cloning's threat to kinship and erasure of history;
and a uniquely American ambivalence over technology, which the
profitable but regulation-resistant U.S. life industry has exacerbated.
Narrative theorist Frank Kermode's classic discussion of Western
apocalypticism in The Sense of an Ending helps to explain The
Second Coming Project's skewed logic. Acutely aware of contemporary
crisis and the possibility of historical loose ends, the project
reflected a cultural "hunger for ends and for crises"
(55) at the turn of the millennium. This is the mechanism by which
apocalypse becomes revelation, and it is well dramatized in the
tension between utopian and dystopian visions of technology.
While obviously a hoax, The Second Coming Project is a useful
opening example because it illustrates the affinity between the
broad explanatory power of the theological imaginary and the contemplation
of the sublime inherent in science and technology. Here, the technoscientific
sublime concerns the possibility that cloning could reproduce
a human being from the centuries-old blood of another preserved
in a relic. In this application of Jurassic Park technology, the
Christian national story manifests as the biblical prophecy of
God's will fulfilled through high-tech human endeavor in cloning
what turns out to be an American messiah with global citizenship
who can at last save us from ourselves-provided he does not, as
the cliché goes, destroy us in the process. Kermode's analysis
of the connection between longed-for endings and sought-after
crises in Western narrative provides a starting point for my discussion
of the apocalypticism surrounding messianic cloning narratives.
Writing of the Judeo-Christian reconceptualization of time as
linear, rather than cyclic, Kermode examines the Bible as the
"model of history," beginning with the Genesis account
and ending with the Apocalypse of John, also known as the Book
of Revelation (6-7). The linear sense of time that arose with
the Judeo-Christian tradition is paralleled in Western science,
which also explains the world in terms of beginnings and endings.
It is here as well, however, that the two explanatory systems
are most at odds. While the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its
emphasis on the fulfillment of prophecy, focuses on closure, Western
science works against closure, identifying ever more problems
to be solved. In contemporary biotech's gene fetishism, cloning
offers a sublime solution to the theological problem of linear
time, and clonable messianic DNA engages the theological imaginary
in a distinctly scientific way. In this paper, I consider how
the apocalypticism in narratives of cloning Jesus challenges the
incommensurability of religion and science in contemporary American
culture in a comparative reading of James BeauSeigneur's Christ
Clone Trilogy (1997-1998), part of a larger body of contemporary
Christian millennial fiction, notably Tim LaHaye and Jerry B.
Jenkins's Left Behind series, and the revelation account of the
Raëlian Religion, a UFO cult whose claim to be experimenting
with human cloning was taken so seriously by the U.S. government
that representatives from the group were asked to testify before
Congress in March of 2001. Together, the trilogy's narrative and
the UFO cult's theology illustrate how biotechnologically mediated
subjects, though they proliferate in a postnational environment,
also tend to shore up national boundaries and promote fascism.
In the shared politics of representation between religion and
science, Kermode's analysis of "our deep need for intelligible
Ends" (8) proves to be limited. The question of who, precisely,
is included among his "us" highlights the problem that
"Ends" are under constant negotiation. James Berger
offers a revision that is helpful in a post-Dolly critical response
to messianic cloning narratives. According to Berger, "Apocalypse
is not, [. . .] as Kermode describes it, primarily an existential
expression of a universal wish for narrative closure. The wish
to end the world, or to represent the end of the world, arises
in each case from more particular social and political discomforts
and aspirations" (34-35). And these discomforts and aspirations,
I am arguing, are informed and seek expression through technologies
of representation, which are also technologies of reproduction.
For Berger and other theorists of American apocalypticism following
Kermode, contemporary apocalyptic thinking "is almost always,
at the same time, post-apocalyptic" (Berger xii-xiii), that
is, visions of the End have given way to visions of what happens
after the End. At the same time, post-apocalyptic narratives evince
a different kind of "representational impasse" (13).
These narratives, fraught with contradiction, return to that traumatic
historical moment at which a revelatory shift has occurred between
what can and cannot be known and represented. In this view, the
bioprospecting impulse that is central to Jurassic Park-style
narratives can be described symptomatically, as an effort to express
that which the connection between biotechnology and computer science
has made inexpressible: a posthuman view of life.
Lee Quinby qualifies Berger's view of American post-apocalypticism
by foregrounding its idealism, with important implications for
praxis. Framing the post-apocalyptic in terms of a "millennial
seduction," Quinby understands post-apocalypticism as being
fed by a "steady diet of apocalyptic imagery and belief"
manifesting both "catastrophic and utopian forms" (9).
Americans' insatiable hunger for Shroud of Turin lore, for example,
feeds on the catastrophe of the torture and crucifixion of Jesus,
on the one hand, and on the utopian aspect of his resurrection,
on the other, both of which the Shroud as an artifact supposedly
documents. For Quinby, the "dream of bioperfection"
advanced by genetic engineering figures prominently in her observation
of catastrophic and utopian forms; it threatens "biodomination"
even as it promises to make death itself a choice (134-36). But
Quinby's objective is more political than Berger's. Following
Michel Foucault's genealogical method of questioning accounts
that arise from absolute origins, Quinby advocates a "millennial
skepticism" that "specifically questions truth claims
that are authorized through faith alone, whether its source of
authority derives from the divine, the natural and social sciences
and the humanities, or the legal system" (8). Quinby argues
that millennialist practices such as the "programmed perfection"
of cloning (135-36) tend to "interfere with the goals of
democratic societies" (5). The millennial skepticism that
Quinby advocates is especially important in the biotech age. Unlike
Cold War apocalypticism, with its emphasis on nation against nation
and the proliferation of nuclear warheads, the proliferation associated
with cloning and other reprogenetics technologies describes a
more diffuse deployment of biotechnologies in the New World Order.
Yes, some sort of Jesus seems destined to come again in such a
world, to be recreated, Jurassic Park-style, DNA fragment by DNA
fragment. What is the threat to democratic practices in this scenario?
--------------------
What distinguishes BeauSeigneur's Christ
Clone Trilogy from other Christian millennial fiction is its premise
that, contrary to the scientific evidence acknowledged by the
Vatican, the Shroud of Turin really is the burial cloth of a clonable
Christ-like entity. Radically antiscience and technophobic, the
trilogy represents technoscience as the "necessary evil"
in the predestined unfolding of the apocalypse. Because the novel's
relentlessly gruesome, 1,040-page apocalypse hinges on biotechnology's
millennialist role in the creation of life and the promise of
everlasting life-what until quite recently in human history has
been God's business-this contradiction invites a skeptical examination
of its genealogy.
As a Christian national story, the novel features the apparent
cloned Jesus-who is, in fact, the Antichrist-as an American-born
but increasingly postnational subject. Named "Christopher
Goodman" by his father-creator, scientist Harold Goodman,
who described his discovery of viable DNA on the Turin Shroud
as "the most important discovery since Columbus discovered
America" (Book One: 25), the much-admired clone's good works
ensure his rise to power in the "one-world government"
brought about by a centralized United Nations. The novel thus
establishes the clone of Jesus as the ultimate copy problem, history's
biggest fake, situating the United States as the prime mover in
the global apocalypse. Specifically, the cloned Antichrist functions
as the scapegoat for the United States' support of the U.N., linking
that support to U.S. tolerance of religious pluralism, construed
as dangerous in BeauSeigneur's propaganda piece.
The xenophobia underlying the fear of religious pluralism, global
unity, and indeed, the possibility of life existing anywhere else
but Earth is apparent right from the beginning of the Trilogy,
when the apocalypse signified by the clone is linked to his extraterrestrial
origins. For Professor Goodman, the scientist-cloner, is a non-believer
who can only explain the superior viability of the Shroud cells
as having come from outer space. "The image of the man on
the Shroud of Turin," he reasons, "is the result of
a sudden burst of heat and light energy from the body of a crucified
man as his body went through an instantaneous regeneration or
'resurrection,' if you will." This remarkable being "was
a member of [our] parent race [from elsewhere in the galaxy],
sent here as an observer" (Book One: 32). This hypothesis
is, of course, a variant of the "colonizing outer space fathers"
account of genesis developed in lavish detail by UFO cults like
the Raëlians. In an interesting instance of a thinly veiled
theological appeal to scientific authority, Goodman conjures credibility
for his space fathers proposal by citing DNA co-discoverer Francis
Crick's "Directed Panspermia" hypothesis from his book
Life Itself (1983), which speculates about an extraterrestrial
origin for life on Earth. However, Goodman views his success in
the cloning experiment as proving not a scientific point, but
a theological one: cloning "the man on the Shroud [was] proof
positive that he was not the son of God" (Book One: 41),
for how could a divine being have DNA? So Goodman's naming of
the clone "Christopher"-not after Jesus Christ but after
the Spanish explorer (Book One: 50)-is a tribute to the "master
race" of extraterrestrial explorers from which he is supposedly
descended. "I hoped that like Columbus, Christopher might
help lead us to a new world: a better world," Goodman explains
(Book One: 51), with no apparent regard to the colonialist legacy
of disruption and displacement underlying this millennial ideal.
When hypotheses about the physical universe are met with the millennial
hopes and fears that Lee Quinby observes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century
American culture, the strange appeal of the colonizing space fathers
hypothesis becomes apparent. The American experience, which was
founded on overthrowing colonization but was soon characterized
by imperialism, confers an elite sense of national destiny, in
this case as ambassador for the whole planet. Of all nations,
the Trilogy suggest, the United States seems best suited to launch
a return visit from our extraterrestrial forefathers, from whom
we might learn, through their superior technology, how to save
the world. Goodman's hope of bringing about a new and better world
by cloning the ET-messiah exemplifies this sensibility.
But as Quinby notes, the Judeo-Christian tradition is also marked
by a resistance to embodiment (Millennial 135). Her examination
of "bodies [as] a crucial site of power relations" in
her earlier work, Anti-Apocalypse, explains why (45; see also
64-66). In a moral order that privileges spirit over matter, the
body, with its needs, diseases, and excesses-in other words, because
of its imperfections-is not to be trusted (69). Technologies of
the body like reprogenetics, which operate by perfecting bodies
and the reproduction of bodies, work against this imbalance. By
doing so, they risk becoming one of the "modes of technological
power [that] thrust toward domination," a phenomenon that
Quinby terms "technoppression" (13). Exemplifying the
other end of the polarity in cloning scenarios, the "perfected
copy," Christopher, the Antichrist, is the very embodiment
of technoppression. The world's first cloned human as well as
the reincarnation of one of Earth's extraterrestrial ancestors,
he uncannily embodies the space alien "other." The novel's
ongoing disdain for the flesh and distrust of technology climax
in the activities surrounding the cloning of Christopher's own
blood for communion. Here, BeauSeigneur allows his right-wing
Protestant contempt for the global economy of the New World Order
to run rampant. From the ultimate evil that biotechnology can
effect-proliferating the Antichrist-to the gross corruption signified
by the Catholic Eucharist-the mixing of spirit and flesh-the blood
cloning episode epitomizes the divisive and even regressive isolationism
of Christian national apocalypticism. Having perfected the blood-cloning
technique and set up more than 12,000 "communion clinics"
worldwide, Christopher chooses to begin offering the communion
capsules on July 4, this "being the [date]," as he puts
it "that was best recognized by the world as representing
a day of independence" (Book Three: 79). The millions of
people who line up outside the clinics days in advance of their
opening are happy to recite the mandatory "pledge of allegiance"
to United Nations leader Christopher Goodman and accept his signature
mark when at last comes their moment to swallow the pill, believing
that they will then attain the same healing powers and immortality
he enjoys and with it, the ultimate freedom from the flesh (Book
Three: 84). This is, however, not to be in the novel's foregone
conclusion, in which Christopher, finally revealed to be the Antichrist,
dukes it out with the few remaining forces of good-the post-Rapture
converts to Christianity, both gentile and Jew-in the requisite
fiery Armageddon of New Testament fame.
--------------------
A similar colonialist account of alien disruption and displacement
frames the Raëlian Religion's theology, which, like the Christ
Clone Trilogy, also contains a cloned extraterrestrial messiah.
The essence of Raëlian theology, as presented in the cult's
key text, The Message Given by Extra-Terrestrials (1998), is a
eugenic enthusiasm arising from the Raëlians' belief that
life on Earth originated as part of a genetic engineering project
of a superior race of scientist-father extraterrestrials, the
Elohim (Hebrew for "those who came from the sky" Message
20). Although this is a common tenet of UFO movements (Wojcik
175-208; Saliba), what distinguishes the Raëlian Religion
from other UFO cults is its emphasis on cloning. Raëlians
hold that the resurrection of Jesus, an extraterrestrial-human
hybrid created by the Elohim to spread the word of humanity's
origin and destiny, was an instance of ET cloning intended to
reiterate and authenticate the extraterrestrials' message. Rather
than seeing a copy problem in cloning Jesus, as the novel does,
the Raëlian theology upholds cloning as an authenticating
strategy. Indeed, the potential of human cloning, in conjunction
with accelerated cell growth and uploadable consciousness, to
confer immortality offers a means by which humans can realize
their true nature as the offspring of superior beings. Created
by the Elohim in their image, humans are destined to collaborate
with them. The problem, however, is that Old Testament one of
a jealous god-in this case the Elohim-who, distrusting the intelligence
of their own creation, try to destroy it but succeed only in scattering
it to minimize its threat. The scapegoating of Jews is a case
in point. These descendants of Elohim-human unions "did not
show [them]selves worthy of [Elohim] confidence" in supporting
Jesus as their messenger, and thus their persecution has been
justifiable, according to Raëlian leader Raël, one of
a long line of cloned Elohim-human hybrids (Message 204) whose
arrival in human history is meant to be the latest corrective
(Message 163-64).
More than the Trilogy, the Raëlian worldview demonstrates
the syncretic tendency of the Christian national apocalypse to
incorporate cultural anxieties regarding new genetic technologies
like cloning. Cult leader Raël's treatise Yes to Human Cloning
(2001) and his testimony before Congress regarding the group's
plans to begin human cloning demonstrate the decisive influence
of the Dolly experiment on Raëlian theology. Utopian elements
in the Raëlians' scientistic cooptation of the Old and New
Testaments and religious zeal over contemporary reprogenetics
developments, though they seem technophilic, in fact demonstrate
a technophobia similar to that of the novel. Here, Quinby's skeptical
method works well to identify contradictions in the Raëlians'
post-apocalyptic amnesia of the same eugenic colonialism that
they claim has brought humanity to the brink of destruction. The
group's mission to gain enough converts to establish a worldwide
"geniocracy" of biologically superior persons, a "cloning
of the fittest" project initiated by the U.S. but with Israel
at the top, suggests a regressively antidemocratic vision.
Despite the distinct but related efforts of religion and science
to conceptualize beginnings and endings in some definitive way,
these representational difficulties have merely intensified in
the biotech age. Regarding the beginnings associated with genetics,
the representational problem involves repetition and displacement,
the antithesis of apocalypse in the sense of a literal ending,
but certainly a revelation of sorts. With somatic cell nuclear
transfer cloning, a new life has "always already" begun
in any given cell, while cells themselves leave a genetic trace
of the comings and goings of the body proper long after that body
has died. The revisionary explanation of life presented by reprogenetics
technologies like cloning calls for a reappraisal of the representational
problems of beginnings and endings in the twenty-first century.
The importance of critically examining these narrative forms resides,
as Berger insists, in the "real ethical and historical consequences"
resulting from the representational impasse of post-apocalyptic
modes of expression, their obliteration, in other words, of "particular
political needs and relations of power" (218). Such an examination
can reveal the underlying assumptions about the relationship between
the sacred and the secular that have proven to be problematic
in American culture. Identifying these assumptions and tracing
in them the network of conflicting interests is a necessary step
toward representational practices that effectively locate the
limitations-and possibilities-of scientific and religious authority
in secular society.
Linking the mixed success of technoscience to effect messianic
change with the fallibility of Judeo-Christian authority, narratives
like BeauSeigneur's Christ Clone Trilogy and the Raëlian
theology tell a partial truth more credible than the truths they
purport to uphold. Cultural anxieties over the authenticity of
clones, their threat to historical beginnings and endings, and
their eugenic intimations of geniocracy together comprise the
crux of this revelation-comprise, in fact, the "true"
revelation of messianic cloning narratives.
