The Last Church

THE LAST CURIOUSLY DENOMINATIONAL CHURCH!

"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."

– Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly

The Last Church by Graham McNeill is a short story describing the conversation between an old and lonely priest named Uriah Olathaire of the very last church on Terra (The Church of the Lightning Stone) during the Unification Wars (where the Emperor banned religion and the worship of gods) and a mysterious character named Revelation, the story is pretty deep and thought provoking and shows you that you don't need XTREME GRIMDARK and violence to make a great 40k story (even though the story doesn't take place in the 41st millennium). As well as being the earliest complete story in the 40k canon, the story focuses on morals, religion, atheism and humility and the benefits and costs of each. And also, Uriah is probably running for 'most badass non-augmented human' in the setting at first place. What's more badass than getting killed by Horus? Telling the Emperor to his face why he sucks!

On religion: remember that the Emperor was never Jesus - in fairly old lore he was at most implied to be Jesus's 13th disciple, which in turn means not only that he knew Jesus, but purposely tried to do better than God at guiding humanity with predictable results. What's more, other than its being called a "church," there is not really anything specifically Christian about Uriah's religion explicitly described; rather, it seems like a vague syncretic religion that venerates miracles, saints and nature.

Plot Summary

In the titular last church, the very last worshipper and priest on Earth, Uriah Olathaire, is visited by a mysterious figure who tells Uriah to call him "Revelation" when asked for his name. They talk about why the church is the last of its kind, and what happened to all of the faithful who once cherished it so much. "Revelation" argues about all of the harm that religious worship and organizations have inflicted on humanity throughout history (solid truths, wilfully ignored by the religious throughout the ages), whilst the priest attempts to refute it (unsuccessfully). Finally, Revelation reveals himself as the Emperor of Mankind, and more specifically as the being who originally (and unintentionally due to Uriah's experiences during a brief and dramatic encounter between the two during the Unification Wars which is entirely the point the Emperor was trying to make regarding the confirmation bias of the religiously focused and stupid) inspired the priest to believe in his religion. He then gives the priest a chance to recant his false beliefs and leave; the church will be destroyed, but he does not have to perish as well.

The priest refuses. Instead, he points out the Emperor's hypocrisy in the various things he has done - and in which doing made him no different than the crusaders and fanatics of the past. The Emperor disregards Uriah's words (because unlike those men of the past, the Emperor has the wisdom of hard fought knowledge and foresight, to know this is the only true road to take for humanity) and escorts him outside before his troops start destroying the church. As his church is destroyed, Uriah gives the Emperor one last warning about the folly of his plan before calmly walking back in to the church, preferring to die with it. He prays while he waits for death, crushed beneath the rubble.

The Emperor dismisses him as a lost cause and moves on. As the rain lifts, and the morning sun rises over the smoldering remains of the last church on Terra; inside, a broken clock, prophesied to chime only when the world is at an end, begins to softly ring...

Moral

The moral of this story was that there wasn't supposed to be one; it was supposed to be thought-provoking on the part of the author. That anyone who takes anything away from this seriously tends to have a problem with how atheistic the Emperor comes across. He was supposed to come across as an arrogant pompous tyrant; that was the point of His perspective. That however does not detract from the fact that He was also right; it just makes it unpalatable.

The Emperor is a well-intentioned secular extremist fighting against four monstrously powerful daemonic entities and trying to curb their reach by spreading the Imperial Truth. The point of the Imperial Truth is not to starve Chaos, but to limit/curb humanity's instinct to reach out for succour and thus be susceptible to the whispers that answer back. He made mistakes, yes, but his intentions were pure (sort of; his methods weren’t at all necessary, merely easier than worrying about people calling him out on immoral acts, as proven when his ultimate rebuttal to Uriah calling him out was to eliminate him).

In this, He had the stereotypical view towards religion that some atheists have: that humanity has a proclivity for leaning on explaining the inexplicable away with make-believe and that eventually it is twisted to darker more nefarious purposes. However, the Emperor focuses on the fact that all of that could be forgiven from religion if it wasn't so dogmatic about refusing to accept any reality bar its own in spite of evidence to the contrary. Of course, it is rightfully countered that religion is not the sole cause of this type of errant and destructive thinking/behaviour from Mankind and it dismisses any comfort, real or imagined, that religion brings to the uneducated and simple-minded masses. That to remove that crutch without offering a replacement is doomed to fail as Mankind is hardwired to seek meaning where none evidently exists; thus ignoring the inherent flaw in the Imperial Truth: that without religion; the less fortunate and educated of Mankind (aka the bulk) continues to seek answers to questions that can't be answered and that Chaos is all too willing to answer.

The story also is about the Emperor's adamant refusal to accept that extremists are extremists, whether religious or secular. The extremists who might have become religious extremists instead become secular extremists thanks to his own secularization of the galaxy and this comes back to bite humanity horribly for the next ten thousand years. By ridding Mankind of its previous religions or even any evidence of them, the galactic soil has been toiled and fertile for a new religion to spread; one with absolute extremist control of the entire of humanity. The Emperor himself was prepared to do whatever it took for his beliefs because it appeared to him that he was undeniably correct - just like extremists; and even though in the universe of 40k the Emperor may be right, He also cannot help but be a hypocrite here no matter how justified He may be.

The Emperor may have been tens of thousands of years old, vastly intelligent and unbelievably powerful, but even He could not predict everything try as He might; to which He admits in Master of Mankind. Perhaps that was His greatest failing: he attempted to impose how He saw and knew the world without providing His own people with the full context and scope of knowledge He possessed to make them understand. And that by doing so; only strengthened the very force He opposed. His reaction to anything but blind obedience was "kill them with fire." When you're claiming there must be no religion and kill anyone who wants a reason to believe your claim that religion is bad, you set yourself up for self-destruction at best. Murdering countless worlds while claiming it's because religious people are violent really just gets people to think "then what the fuck are you!?" In short, the Emperor turns out to be a high-functioning psychopath. There's a reason religion exploded shortly after the Emperor's internment into the Golden Throne; because they were offered no other alternative when confronted with a Hell they were told did not exist with no explanation.

Uriah acts as the audience's viewpoint for Humanity; that Mankind has always been hardwired to stumble and fall and to reach for the unreachable. He stands in stark contrast to the Emperor who is not only perfect but nigh all-knowing. The Emperor expects Mankind to follow in His footsteps without showing us either how or why; and we like Uriah, fall tragically short of His impossible standard. It's easy to be an atheist when you have 40,000+ years of life experience and knowledge and unlimited power to grasp the finer concepts and merits of theology and secularism; for your regular man, it requires nuance and often intense education to be able to look past the instinct to believe in the unbelievable.

Author's Opinion

McNeill's website has an explanation for his thought processes when writing the story as well as his opinion of it on its own page, but it's been copypasted here for convenience. Strangely, Graham states that "he didn't want to preach", but then states he wanted Uriah to be "wrong" and the Emperor to be "right" (see below).

I came late to this anthology, as I was finishing a novel while the bulk of writers were thrashing away at their keyboards. So when it came time to start developing a story, I asked the editors to send me a one-line pitch for each of the other stories so I didn’t waste time replicating a story that had already been written. When I got them, they were mostly bolters blazing, chainswords hacking stories, which is great, but I felt needed balancing by one that had a more thoughtful pace, with less fighting. One of the aspects of the Heresy I’ve liked the most has been the dichotomy between a growing secular empire butting heads with humanity’s urge to worship things in the sky. I saw this story as a challenge to myself, the readers and to BL. Would I be able to write a story like this that was exciting and engaging? Would the readers buy into it or would they be bored without the action? Would BL publish a story like this? Turns out that it seems all three were answered with a resounding yes. There’s a lot of me in this story, though I’m certainly not preaching to anyone with it. It’s more like I wanted people to talk about the story, to ask themselves questions and look at things in a different light. Some folk have said that Uriah is a straw man, and that the arguments made on both sides of his and Revelation’s debate are simplistic. Part of me agrees with that, as I’m not a theologian (and, crucially, neither was Uriah. He was a drunken rake, called to be a priest by a personal experience. No years of training in a seminary for him…) and I wasn’t trying to write a treatise on religion or belief, but rather a story that got people talking and entertained them. It’s also the first time the Big E turns up in a Heresy story in any real form. He’s appeared a few times to deliver the odd line of dialogue, but this was the first time we’d seen him talk, interact and appear for any length of time (even though most of it is in another guise) so I needed to be careful. In the end, to really stir the pot, I wanted to end the story in a way that, while Uriah might have been wrong, he was the one you liked better and who came out with the apparent moral high ground. The Emperor was right, yet he came across as the arrogant, short-sighted tyrant – the very kind he rails against in the story. Now go back and read it again and see if you agree!

Trivia

• Isandula Verona's paintings depict 3 events of Old Earth (both factual and presumably fictional). One painting depicts "nude figures disporting in a magical garden", likely the Garden of Eden. The second is a painting of "a battle between a golden knight and a silver dragon", undoubtedly based of the battle between the Emperor and the Void Dragon in ancient Libya. But the third painting is by far the strangest: it depicts a "wondrous being of light surrounded by a halo of golden machinery" (couldn't possibly be foreshadowing the Emperor on the Golden Throne) ... Also, there is the description of an "explosion of stars", possibly referring to the creation of the Eye of Terror.
• The church in question appears to be Lindisfarne: perched on "a rocky promontory jutting from an island that was said to have once ruled the world". Uriah even references it being raided by Scandi. **Alternatively, according to Alfabusa (yes, that one) on a Reddit post, he asked McNeill directly, who said "it is not Lindisfarne, it is actually located on the Isle of Skye." To quote (McNeill) further, he said: "The Church of the Lightning Stone is not Lindisfarne. It set on the Isle of Skye, built around the Old Man of Storr which is the titular Lightning Stone."
• Many of our currently existing countries and continents are mentioned in the story, though are spelled and pronounced differently.
• The Mariana Canyon where the giant stone figures are carved in is most likely the remnants of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point of the Earth's present-day oceans; given that this place is now exposed, you can grasp just how much the Earth has changed. The oceans boiled away due to various factors and some of the new land exposed became known as the "Panpacific".
• Given Uriah's knowledge of (and ability to travel to) other countries and his reaction to the Emperor's plans to conquer the galaxy, it seems likely that the Age of Strife on Terra was less of a complete societal breakdown and more of a regression to the Dark Ages in which knowledge of the past remained largely intact but functionally useless. Ironic, considering the state of the Imperium ushered in to save humanity from that. So, the inverse of the 40k Imperium.
• Lastly, The Emperor's claim that "humanity will not be free until the last stone of the last church falls on the head of the last priest" is lifted from a quote of Émile Zola. Interestingly, he doesn’t seem to have a reason for believing this.