Please forgive my ignorance. I love Star Trek but am not a real fanatic. Questions are… Have there been episodes that deal with Christianity in the future? Is there a logical way out of it on the show?
Star Trek: TOS - “Bread and Circuses”
Uhura: “Captain, they’re not talking about the sun up in the sky. They’re talking about the Son of God.”
There was one in the original series, which is the only one I have really watched. It is a truly awful episode. It’s been a lot of years but they were dealing with a planet whose people worshiped the Sun which was supposed to mean that they were primitives or something. At the end, Uhura has this revelation, “they don’t worship the Sun in the sky, they worship the Son of God!”
How retarded is that? It’s one thing to believe that they have a universal translator that can figure out how to go from one language to another. It’s quite another thing to have it so that the puns come out the same.
Gene Roddenberry was an atheist and, in general, his (unrealistic in the extreme IMHO) view was that religion in humans had died out by the 24th century.
“Who Mourns For Adonais” suggested monotheism at least was alive and well during TOS.
TNG and later would happily embrace whatever “spiritual” babble drove that week’s episode.
To be fair (if you want to be fair to such a silly episode), Spock pointed out that the residents of the Roman planet actually spoke English, so it wasn’t being translated.
Or that “God” is the Judeo-Christian god. Why not Hercules/Mithras/Horus/a zillion other demi-gods?
I always wondered why Roddenberry let that one get past him.
Yes, for whatever reason, that particular planet was just Earth running about 2500 years behind schedule or something. 
I actually thought it was pretty funny, and no worse than numerous other weirdities in Star Trek. The original series implies that people still did have religion, although afterwards they abolished it. Of course, then people got into all kind of BS mysticism.
In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, McCoy mentions the Bible (more specifically, Genesis) as “Ancient Earth mythology.” In the book made from the movie, there’s a little more about it, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read it.
Get past him? He wrote it!
OK. Fair enough.
Except for that they spoke 20th Century English and not Latin.
Well over on the USS Voyager the Doctor played played a priest in that Irish village the crew created in the holodeck (Janeway also had an afair with one of the holo-villagers which someone led to them becoming aware that they were holograms).
It wasn’t that the Earth-copy was 2500 year behind, it was that the Roman Empire never fell. But they had 20th century technology.
Picard does not profess a faith, but he clearly understands some basic tenets of Abrahamic monotheism:
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier has a powerful entity that professes to be a god (of indeterminate religion). He wants the Enterprise so he shoots some lightning and scares some crewmembers and then Kirk asks “What does God need with a starship?” and saves the day.
ETA: Actually, that God actually looks like the generic Judeo-Christian “white bearded old dude”.
More than most people probably need to know…behold the power of people who really love their star trek universe.
On TNG they pointed out that society had developed beyond religion… with the exceptions of all those Native American style animism that always works out to be correct in episodes that feature it.
Thank you!
The last episode of Deep Space Nine “what you leave behind”. They couldn’t have said “Sisko is Bajoran Jesus, and Dukat is the Bajoran Antichrist” any harder if they wrote it on their foreheads.
Dukat dies, and is then resurrected, with super natural powers, by the Bajoran version of fallen angles, Pah-wraiths. Sisko finds him and after a struggle manages to seal Dukat with the Pah-wraiths in the fire caves (which look a lot like Hell) forever. Then he’s transported to the Celestial Temple to be with the prophets with the promise that, he doesn’t know when, but he’ll return.
But in one of the old episodes, the one with the bored Adonis no one mourns for, I think, Kirk says something like “Earth doesn’t need gods. One is enough”. I can’t imagine the writers were referring to any God but the Christian one.
(Aside from that, the remastered episode is really sweet. I was curious to see what they did about the Big Green Hand).