Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah explores the dangers of religion, especially when mixed with forces of government. In Dune Messiah’s prequel, Dune, the Fremen people of Arrakis choose Emperor Paul Atreides as their messiah, and Paul starts a religious jihad. When Dune Messiah picks up 12 years later, the powerful jihad continues to reign supreme. Paul struggles to steer humanity toward safety while also maintaining his role as messiah for the Fremen people. Not only does this dual responsibility weigh on Paul, but the religious Jihad has become corrupt: it has conquered most of the universe, killing billions of people and leading thousands of religious pilgrims to flock to the streets of Dune. These pilgrims are fanatical to an extreme degree, supplicating themselves before Paul and his sister Alia as gods, much to the siblings’ irritation. Paul often wishes that he could escape the jihad through retreating to the desert or even death, but he knows that his name will outlive him and continue to fuel the corrupt jihad. Eventually, Paul discovers that the head of Arrakis’ religious group, the Qizarate, has been conspiring to overthrow him. This discovery reveals the disingenuousness and corruption of the group’s fanatical religiosity and brings Paul’s mounting frustration with the jihad to a climax. Ultimately, Paul ends his life and his rule by walking into the desert, fulfilling a Fremen requirement of all blind citizens. Consequently, Paul act allows him to evade deification by the jihadists while also ensuring their lasting respect and induction of his children as heirs to his empire. Thus, the novel ends with the message that religion, when practiced to a fanatic degree, is a threat to government. As such, Dune Messiah makes the claim that governments operate most smoothly when humans trust humanity above religious authority.
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Religion Quotes in Dune Messiah
I’ll yield up myself, he thought. I’ll rush out while I yet have the strength, fly through space like a bird might not find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.
His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind. He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that the universe still eluded him.
“People cling to the Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place […] Perhaps religion serves the same purpose.”
“[Genghis Khan] didn’t kill them himself. […] He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”
The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?
Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws must inevitably replace morality, replace conscience, even replace the religion by which you think to govern.
He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout at them: if you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!
The Fremen […] had said Muad’Dib would never die, that he had entered the world where all possible futures existed, […], wandering there endlessly even after his flesh had ceased to be.
