Election Day

So since the blog wandered accidentally into dystopian territories, I’ve been kind of pondering how I would write Election Day as a Christian dystopia. Where would I let my little five point recipe from a couple of posts back take me?

Well, I could go with the Christian fundamentalists, corrupted by power, as we saw in Broken Angel on the blog tour. But I think I would rather go the other way: religion repressed, the State becoming an all-powerful, self-serving ultra-secular organisation. Technology, consumerism or any number of worldly 'gods' could easily take the place of God, depending on the upheaval that led to the shift in power and the decline of religion.

The religiously-inclined (assuming, for the sake of a story, that some small numbers still exist) would quickly find themselves an under-class, abused, imprisoned, or hiding out in secret churches. (You see, even now, it’s hard to conceive these things without thinking ‘holocaust’.)

I think we would all agree that outlawing sex in an Orwellian way would render any story too far beyond belief for any useful purpose. I think the approach of Southland Tales – the cult of celebrity bestowing power and influence on a former porn star – is a more realistic extrapolation from 2008, so I would probably explore that more. I like the idea of a lonely voice railing against an increasingly powerful porn industry.

Yes, I think I may have just added something to my WIPlist...