**Reflections on Kentucky Route Zero, Religion, and Labor**

I.

“Only where love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes, is the deed ever really done, for Heaven, and the future’s sakes.” So concludes a recorded homily in the Random Access Self Storage facility where St. Thomas Church meets for its nightly mass. There is no congregation, only the building’s janitor, Brandon, who each night faithfully sets up tape machines and acetate photos of absent parishioners to keep it running. The church moved into the storage facility when the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces claimed the St. Thomas cathedral for their own operations, after which the congregation dwindled to none.

Chittering with the clicks of typing bureaucrats, the cathedral is the player’s first experience on the titular Zero, a fantastical interstate below ground that takes one to various destinations along a wavering circle. You’ve arrived seeking directions to 5 Dogwood Drive, a location that seems not to exist, so that antique delivery driver Conway can complete his final run. When the paper trail goes cold, Conway and Shannon are directed to the storage facility where records remain from before the relocation. To find it, just drive until you see the crystal, then turn around. Directions on the Zero are always given this way; while it defies the laws of physics, it at least does so predictably.

The sequence between the Bureau and St. Thomas is dreamlike and distant, a quality of Kentucky Route Zero’s trademark magical realism. One floor of the cathedral is inhabited by bears. Later hermit crabs appear on the ground floor with various office supplies repurposed as their shells. Two more examples of space being “reclaimed,” yet they are hardly strange to the characters of this world. The ominous, wordless gaze of a conference room follows Conway as he walks by their meeting. A stranger sits by the (presumably defunct) organ grilling food, then turns to give an impromptu performance. The result is both luminous and elegiac all at once, unremarked upon by any in earshot.

This tone is furthered by the game’s efforts to decenter its own protagonist, often changing the character you follow seamlessly in the middle of a scene, or giving dialogue options to pick from multiple people in the same conversation. A scene in Act IV plays out with two different conversations taking place simultaneously. In Act V, instead of traditional dialogue prompts, interactions progress through a sort of hypertext with select words highlighted for interaction. Each of the game’s interludes feature different characters in new locations the main characters haven’t yet visited. The story progressively features Conway’s companions more prominently, culminating in his absence from the final act entirely.

While at first bizarre and even humorous at times, it becomes apparent that the strangeness of Kentucky Route Zero’s world reflects the incomprehensibility of the suffering it tries to convey—the suffering of obsolete people adrift in a world they cannot understand. The faded faith of St. Thomas Church may once have acted as a salve for that suffering, but for now waits to be reclaimed.

II.

In 1843 Karl Marx famously declared religion “the opium of the people” for its illusory nature. Religion is a product of society, but claims to be transcendent. To worship is to buy into an illusion that truth is outside the human realm, which limits our action within it:

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are in an inverted world.

Unsurprisingly, Marx’s perspective prioritizes material concerns over their spiritual manifestations: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

One-hundred years later, Jean-Paul Sartre outlines a similar foundation in a defense against criticisms by both Communists and Christians:

[I]f God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence—a being whose existence comes before its essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept of it. That being is man…
If, however, existence truly does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is to make every man conscious of what he is, and to make him solely responsible for his own existence. And when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men (Sartre 22-23).

Ironically, some of Sartre’s sentiment is shared in Surah 5 verse 32 of the Quran: “[W]hoever takes a life… it will be as if they killed all of humanity; and whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity.” The point here being that the world is, quite literally, what we make of it.

While the mass that takes place in Random Access Self Storage could certainly be described as an illusion, it is hard to see it as an opiate for much of anything. More an echo of culture, perhaps, or a ghost. Kentucky Route Zero is intensely interested in such echoes or ghosts. Act IV takes place in a boat on the Echo River, a tributary of Lake Lethe (like the river in the Underworld, literally “forgetfulness” or “oblivion”). Will, a member of the boat’s crew, regales you with stories in between stops:

I met a photographer once - I mean, one in particular. She even took my portrait, I can’t imagine why. She said it would immortalize me. That was a metaphor, of course. She meant I’d never be forgotten.
As she was disembarking - not far from here, actually - the film fell out of her bag and was borne away by the current. I was working on deck at the time. She shot me a sad, apologetic glance, but I wasn’t bothered. It’s no shame, to be forgotten.

A pair of researchers who observe your party at a stop along the river reminisce of lost loved ones, describing the experience as akin to looking at “photographs of people who have died, or moved away. People that are gone… but not forgotten.” One of their test rooms include watercolor paintings, which they debate whether to replace with photographs instead:

Watercolor paintings already have the quality of a half-remembered dream, anyway. Like they’re inviting you to forget them, or somebody else already forgot them for you; like a mama-bird feeding her chicks cotton candy.
Photographs are… it’s not that they’re more accurate or true, but we think they are. They put you in that mindset. They have authority.

One of the most striking examples of remembrance is a memorial on the water that you come across just before the end of Act IV. Built for the tragedy in Elkhorn mine, mining helmets float in the river surrounding it and a sign explains its purpose.

SIGN: WE CLAIM THESE HELMETS IN THE NAMES OF THE FOLKS WHO WORE THEM AND WE PLACE THEM HERE IN THEIR MEMORY BUT ALSO AS A SPIT IN THE GREEDY GREEN EYE OF THAT POWER COMPANY WHO BOUGHT UP OUR OLD MINE AND TRADED OUR BROTHERS’ AND SISTERS’ SAFETY FOR A LITTLE MORE YIELD BUT ONLY YIELDED TWENTY-EIGHT GOOD MEN AND WOMEN DEAD WHEN THE WALLS COLLAPSED AND THE TUNNELS FILLED WITH WATER
THEIR LUNGS WERE BLACK BUT NOW THEY’RE WASHED CLEAN AND FULL OF WATER TOO AND SWEPT THROUGH HIDDEN TUNNELS INTO SOME AWFUL CAVE WE NEVER WILL FIND AND SO WE GUESS THE WATER BURIED THEM FOR US SO LET THIS HERE BE THE MARKER FOR THEIR GRAVE

The memorial is a way of not forgetting, an act of defiance on behalf of those who were lost. Moments like this show the game’s fierce empathy for all its characters. As greed seeks to diminish them, every fleeting soul is worth remembering.

III.

On May 1, 1886, roughly 40,000 people marched in Chicago for the eight-hour workday, a labor victory now commemorated as International Workers’ Day around the globe. On the liturgical calendar, May 1 also marks the Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker, foster father of Jesus and patron saint of workers. These are to what the homily in Random Access Self Storage refers in its entirety:

There are many days on which we proclaim the value of labor, and celebrate the piety of the hard-working, through feast or abstinence, recognizing St. Joseph the worker, who was foster father to our lord Jesus, and who trained him in carpentry and in the merit of sweat. And this is one such day.
On this day, we celebrate with the feast of St. Joseph the worker, and, on this day, other workers are also celebrating, workers who do not attend mass, or even one like it, even workers who do not attend a Church at all, but who toil with clarity, with dedication, with perspicacity, who do as we do here in our Church, inasmuch as they reflect the activity of God. As we do, they cultivate the earth, and, at sundown, they call the fruit of their labor “very good.”
Beyond the Church, this day is celebrated in remembrance of a violent protest in Chicago, and to honor the four martyrs who were unjustly persecuted in its wake, having not only pursued their vocation in their daily labor, but also having pursued their avocation in the form of protest, activism, community-building, radicalization, scholarship, and finally martyrdom. Their, and our, avocation being, as it should be for us all, as members of the Church or otherwise, to secure for our fellow workers the right to labor with dignity.
So, just as there is no dignity without sacrifice, there is no vocation without avocation, just as the left eye perceives that which is to the left, and the right eye perceives that which is to the right, and these images are summed, differentiated, and incorporated, and we find in our minds eye an after-image of divine light, only where love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes, is the deed ever really done, for Heaven, and the future’s sakes.

Wikipedia describes this moment briefly as “a pre-recorded sermon on the virtue of hard work,” an interpretation Conway himself would likely agree with. Early in the game, after suffering an injury in Elkhorn Mine, a doctor amputates his leg and replaces it with a flickering prosthetic that mimics the skeletal workers of the Hard Times Distillery. Another church appears later in a graveyard, the structure itself abandoned, dilapidated and grey. Inside the church is an entrance to the distillery, with seating for intake arranged like pews. Assuming that Conway was there for a job, a worker treats him to a tour that incidentally accrues so much debt Conway is forced to “accept” the job. With one night of freedom left, as the prosthetic leg slowly consumes the rest of his body, Conway reacts not with anger, but gratefulness: “I’ve got to repay my debt. Well, I should be grateful for the opportunity—if you want to die with any dignity you’ve got to settle up.”

Conway missed the point of the sermon; hard work is not enough to escape the distillery. The system was designed to exploit him and others like him. The whiskey is literally casked in coffins. In the factory the visual language of religion, life, and death is used not for transcendence, but bondage; in Kentucky Route Zero, if religion is the opium of the masses, capitalism has become the creed.

IV.

To Marx, religion is an illusion obscuring true happiness: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” But could the religious space again be reclaimed to resist the illusion of capital? Catholic social teaching has a tradition of support for labor rights and unions, typified in the work of Dorothy Day or the anti-war activism of Thomas Merton (as an aside, the Abbey of Gethsemani where Merton resided for most of his life is in Kentucky). In 1917, Baptist preacher Walter Rauschenbusch published A Theology for the Social Gospel, arguing for a faith that views salvation as collective, specifically targeting systems of poverty and inequality:

The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it (5).

Philosopher John Dewey carries this impulse beyond any single sect or creed, writing in A Common Faith that the evolution of faith across time and cultures “compels us to ask what conception of unseen powers and our relations to them would be consonant with the best achievements and aspirations of the present” (6). If faith traditionally means assenting to a theological system, it could also mean assent to a non-sectarian moral vision:

An unseen power controlling our destinies becomes the power of an ideal. All possibilities, as possibilities, are ideal in character. The artist, scientist, citizen, parent, as far as they are actuated by the spirit of their callings, are controlled by the unseen. For all endeavor for the better is moved by faith in what is possible, not by adherence to the actual (23).

This imaginative correlation between faith and social change is what Richard Rorty—an inheritor of Dewey’s philosophical pragmatism and the grandson of Rauschenbusch—utilizes to make unwitting allies out of Marx and Jesus. In an essay titled “Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes,” Rorty argues that while the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto got their predictions wrong about the Second Coming and the rise of the proletariat respectively, this need not diminish their social force:

Most of us can no longer take either Christian or Marxist postponements and reassurances seriously. But this does not, and should not, prevent us from finding inspiration and encouragement in the New Testament and the Manifesto. For both documents are expressions of the same hope: that some day we shall be able and willing to treat the needs of all human beings with the respect and consideration with which we treat the needs of those closest to us, those whom we love (203).

It is the hope that matters, not the actual, as a way to meet the actual. As Marx and Sartre find primacy in the human realm, Dewey and Rorty find a form of faith necessary to change that realm. Albeit often misguided, religions could be participants in that process:

If one treats the term ‘Christianity’ as one such appeal [to our better nature], rather than as a claim to knowledge, then that word still names a powerful force working for human decency and human equality. ‘Socialism’, similarly considered, is the name of the same force—an updated, more precise name. ‘Christian Socialism’ is pleonastic: nowadays you cannot hope for the fraternity which the Gospels preach without hoping that democratic governments will redistribute money and opportunity in a way the market never will. There is no way to take the New Testament seriously as a moral imperative, rather than as a prophecy, without taking the need for such redistribution equally seriously (205).

In America’s current political climate there are signs that the decades-long dominance of the religious right has inspired just such a resurgence of a religious left, drawing from the social teachings of various faiths to support progressive or socialist policy positions as an essential expression of their beliefs. Theologian David Bentley Hart echoes Rorty in a vigorous religious defense of the need for socialism:

[I] honestly cannot imagine how anyone who takes the teachings of Christ seriously, and who is willing to listen to those teachings with a good will and an open mind, can fail to see that in the late modern world something like . . . socialism is the only possible way of embodying Christian love in concrete political practices. I have heard American Christians claim (based on a distinction unknown in the New Testament) that Christ calls his followers only to acts of private largesse, not to support for public policies that provide for the common welfare. What they imagine Christ was doing in publicly denouncing the unjust economic and social practices of his day I cannot guess. But it should be obvious that certain moral ends can be accomplished only by a society as a whole, employing instruments of governance, distribution, and support that private citizens alone cannot command. We, as individuals, can often aid our brothers and sisters only by acting through collective social and political structures. I admit that the New Testament makes still more radical demands upon Christians (Matthew 5:42; 6:3; 6:19-20; Luke 6:24-25; 12:33; 14:33; 16:25; Acts 2:43-46; 4:32; 4:35), and I would certainly agree that it is just as bad to relinquish all one’s moral responsibilities to the state as it is to promote policies that do not oblige human government to obey the laws of divine charity. I know that Christ in the Gospels calls his followers to a different kind of “politics” altogether—for want of a better term, the politics of the Kingdom. Of this, even the wisest, most compassionate, and most provident form of democratic socialism could never be anything more than a faint premonitory shadow.
Even so, a shadow is not nothing.

V.

In Act III, a digital echo of Lula Chamberlain—employee at the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces and Limits and Demonstrations exhibitionist from the first interlude—appears in the Xanadu computer program. The computer itself is a relic, still housed in the same cave the actual research occurred in years earlier. As Conway follows in her footsteps, Lula muses on the legacy of the dead:

Do you know, I think cultural fossils are the saddest fossils? Sadder than animal remains, I mean… We might come across a petrified mollusk, or a partial dinosaur footprint, and we say: “There was a point of contact here, where a body touched the earth, and maybe there’s a little bit of evidential garbage, but the life who owned that body never cared and has moved on anyway.” And that’s the end of it.
But suppose I shine my lantern on one of these walls, and I see a crude painting, thousands of years old. Two men and a woman. Charcoal and blood, on rock. Someone put that there, to keep something on the rock after she passed. A hope, a relationship, or a moment. A worry, maybe… a regret. She made a painting to keep something alive for her, but like that dead mollusk and that itinerant dinosaur, she had to move on. Whatever it was is gone, and now we’re looking at this painting. This dangling copy, with no original.

Once enough time has passed, all that’s left of culture is a copy with no original. In the world of Kentucky Route Zero, everything the characters may once have relied upon is detached and ephemeral in this way. Lysette is losing her memory as she sends Conway on his final job; the roads connecting the community give way to the transience of the Zero; the workers’ bodies become flickering skeletons in the factory; restaurants and gas stations on the Echo River float aimlessly with no tether. Faith is yet another fossil, a ghost, a hollowed out space waiting to be reclaimed.

When Act V finally brings your companions into the sunlight you find a town flooded by a storm from the night before. It was a company town, built on top of a burial mound and left to fend for itself just as quickly. Now its remnants debate whether they should leave as well. The delivery address is here, an empty shell of a house yet to be filled. Conway’s story ended in the previous act, so now the player controls a small cat chasing a dragonfly around the town, observing interactions between the town’s current residents and the newcomers from the Zero. Slowly time passes as people clean up the wreckage, unload the antiques, and prepare a funeral for two horses that died in the flood.

Tragedy and hope intermingle, though. The broken people brought together by Conway’s strange errand imagine a life for themselves here. Shannon looks at the old church in town, remarking she might be able to use it as a workshop. Junebug and Johnny, the mining-androids-turned-musicians, consider taking over the cafe and hosting music acts. Ezra, the boy whose family disappeared during the housing crisis, says Junebug and Johnny are his family now.

Shannon asks the cat, why this folding rocking-chair? Why this stuff, particularly? Who would order this? Why bother delivering it for someone who is gone? She continues: “Now we’re setting it all up, trying to ‘reverse-engineer’ this person we’ve never met. I kind of feel like we are that person. We’re making that person, right now, together.”

The empty house at 5 Dogwood Drive accrues forgotten items from and for forgotten people, becoming a home for “the unsteady steadying the unsteady” (Act IV). I can’t help but see it as a sort of church without a facade, gleaming white in the sunset. The faith necessary to create it is apparent in the song Emily sings at the funeral for the horses, "I’m Going That Way" by James Rowe, surrounded by shadowy ghosts from the past:

I’ve heard of a land of joy and peace and wonderful light,
A beautiful place of mansions fair and skies so bright,
Where all who believe the Savior dear, forever shall stay,
And having been saved by grace divine, I’m going that way.
I’m going that way, I’m going that way,
Yes dear the savior I adore is with me each day,
I’m clinging to him, and never to stray,
Just singing praises all day long, I’m going that way.

The metaphors of Appalachian Christianity emerged in tandem with the material conditions of its people. What may seem like a facile attempt to distract believers from the world often orients them to its injustices: “Otherworldly hope was less about escapism than it was about ultimate vindication and hope for a miracle that would ‘bypass the repressive machinery of society’” (Flynt 14). Kentucky Route Zero taps into this strain of faith as one of its cultural fossils, an echo, a copy without an original in its dreamlike world, preserving the sigh of the oppressed people within it. In this, the literary project of magical realism and the webs of significance a lived faith creates may share similar goals—to comfort the afflicted, memorialize loss, and tempt our imagination with visions of paradise. Though this paradise needs us to help create it.

How will we know when we’ve arrived? Only where love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes, is the deed ever really done, for Heaven, and the future’s sakes.

Gallery

Sources:

Dewey, John. A Common Faith. Yale University Press, 1971.

Flynt, Wayne. “Religion in the Blues: Evangelicalism, Poor Whites, and the Great Depression.” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 71, no. 1, 2005, pp. 3-38.

Kentucky Route Zero. Cardboard Computer. Annapurna Interactive, PC, 2013-2020. All screenshots by author.

Rauschenbusch, Walter. A Theology for the Social Gospel. Westminster John Knox Press, 1997.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. Penguin Books, 1999.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism. Yale University Press, 2007.

Fossils of Faith

Reflections on Kentucky Route Zero, Religion, and Labor

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

Gallery

**Reflections on Kentucky Route Zero, Religion, and Labor**