The Religious Themes & Symbolism of Mass Effect

Mass Effect is a videogame swimming with deep themes and symbolism all wrapped up in a great story with awesome characters, entire worlds and cultures created and developed in this 100+ hour experience, and one of the elements that often flies under the radar is the theme of religion. Almost every character, story point, species, will have some religious belief or opinion, and it's worthy discussing. The first and possibly the most effective in terms of symbolic religious metaphors is Christianity and the Reapers, basically put, the whole thing is a story about humanity overcoming religion. This can be first noted with all the Christian references in the game, the Lazurus Project, Cerberus, I Am Legion-for we are many; it's all over the place, but it goes further than that. Let's go back to the start, by that i mean, the start of man. According to the bible, it all started with Adam and Eve (Also worth noting the character of Eve in Mass Effect 3, as Mordin puts it "seems appropriate") who eat from the tree of knowledge and gain the ability of independent thought, to which God responds to kick them out of Eden and leave them to die, because if they were to also eat from the Tree of Life then they would gain immortality, and to have both, is to become god (according to the scripture). God stopped them just as they were reaching their evolutionary peak, just as the Reapers perform in Mass Effect, destroying all evolved life just as they reach a certain point in evolution. But this isn't a story just told about the Reapers, but also with the Geth and the Quarians.

The Quarians invented the Geth to make their lives easier, once the Geth begin to become self-aware, the Quarians see them as a threat and try and destroy them, all because of the one sentence "does this unit have a soul?". The Geth work with the Reapers, or as they refer to them "The Heretics" as a form of protection, believing it to be the way they upgrade themselves to become independent creatures, but as it turns out, they were the false Shepard (Get it?) offering them a lie, they only truly achieve their independence when they remove themselves from the Reapers and work alongside the Quarians. Another way how the Reapers present themselves as a representation of god is through the belief of Nihilism, in other words, we're lead to believe that without god, we resort to chaos, we're not ready for the responsibility of ourselves and we would lead to our own demise, the exact same logic the Reapers work on, but of course the Geth are proof that it doesn't have to be the case. Another idea that supports this is the Starchild saying "the created will always rebel against the creator", this is what the Quarians fears and it is what happened to God, not only has humanity in a post-modern era turned their back on this system, but even God's child Lucifer defied him, wanting to be his equal and overcome him. One of the defining traits of a post-modern era is the defiance of Meta-Narratives, that humanity lives off one defined rule, and for our advanced Western Culture, the rule was of Christianity, but these days it's more common to not have Religion than it is to have one. And this is one of three ways the Mass Effect defies the Meta-Narrative, wanting to destroy the cycle of the gods deciding what's best for us, to overcome the Reapers is to overcome the Meta-Narrative of religion. And the second and more obvious way would be the fact that it's an RPG, we decide our character's destiny destroying the Meta-Narrative both physically and thematically. The final way also ties into the theme of diversity, no one belief system or mindset ends up being right in the end, it's a combination of everyone's skills and assets that save the day, disrupting the status quo and having everyone put aside their differences for the greater good, Turians and Krogan's working together, Quarians being viewed as equal to the Asari, humans having a place in the high council, destroying everyone else's Meta-Narratives for the sake of a combination of the group.

If you want even more detail on Mass Effect and Christianity then I highly recommend the video by Sole Porpoise on the manner, it's what inspired this debate and is definitely worth checking out: WATCH HERE

But that's just one religion in a very expansive series, let's take a look at this from other perspectives. Another idea presented in Mass Effect is that who we see as gods are only gods because of their age, the Hanar see the Protheans (And extinct species) as gods because our technology was based off of what was left of their culture and thus they were seen as incredibly advanced. But when we actually meet one, we see that they were very similar to us, if anything else they were less advanced for a reason already touched upon. Because they were the most advanced species and were the dominant life forms, everyone lived by their rule and values, they lacked diversity in their ranks and were easily overcome by the Reapers because of it. So why were they seen as this great enkindler? Because they were old enough to be, to quote the great Bill Murray of Groundhog Day "Maybe he's not omnipotent. He's just been around so long he knows everything.".

While the Krogans have a very basic view on life, they believe what they can see and touch. When you live as part of a species in a perpetual state of endangerment, you tend to lose all hope and are much more skeptical on the idea of faith, thus they go by the facts, and the closest they have to diety is Kalros, also known as "The Mother of all Thresher Maws". Basically put, she's a damn big worm big enough and old enough to eat an entire city. The Krogan are also a species that admire strength, they decide their leaders on who is toughest, and Kalros is so tough she even has a shrine dedicated to her.

The Salarians, as a species of pure logic and science, you can imagine don't really have much in terms of spirituality, that is except for Mordin, who still applies to the ideas of logic and science but also still has a moral compass guiding him. After releasing the Genophage on the Krogan's, he turned to Spirituality for answers and comfort, eventually taking a great admiration on Karma based religions like Buddhism, and this is fitting for his character, looking for guidance in a system that doesn't work on acts of morality to please a Deity, but acts of mortality to improve the quality of the world for the next generation of life, a system that co-operated with Mordin's personal views as well as his scientific prowess.

But the most interesting religious symbolism to look at is the Quarians identification with Muslims, not through a spiritual point of view, but a social one. The most basic sign would be the similarities in clothing, both cultures tend to cover their bodies entirely, especially with hoods/cloaks. But also how they are viewed by other cultures. The Quarians are seen as a lower form of existence and often shunned unjustly by society and are the isolated foreigners in a galactic nation, note that they're the only species with an accent when everyone else is American (somehow). Which seems rather similar to a post 9/11 American view on the Muslim culture, unjustly prosecuted for crimes they didn't commit and shunned because of this prejudice.

And this is all just one of the many themes in Mass Effect that can be deconstructed when analysed indepth that just make this a highly intelligent series and one of the greatest videogames of all time.

-Danny