The Leftovers and the end of meaning
In three seasons, the show offered many different perspectives on how faith is made, formed, and lost.
Watching the three seasons of the TV series The Leftovers is like taking a short course on William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience—except richer and more entertaining. The Leftovers imagines a world in which 2 percent of the world’s population has suddenly vanished, Rapture-like, with no rhyme or reason governing who is taken and who is leftover. In the absence of all scientific and religious explanations, human meaning-making systems begin to collapse.
When I wrote about the series halfway through its first season, I wondered how religion would be engaged going forward. At that point, religion mostly seemed to be a coping mechanism, and not a very good one. The only Christian, Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston), is an Anglican priest on a smear campaign to defame all the Departed. The main cult in town, the Guilty Remnant, refuses to let people get on with their lives. The season has an austere beauty and many rich character portraits, but also nihilism, confusion, and despair.
In season two, the action moves from Mapleton, New York, to Jarden, Texas, also known as “Miracle”—the only place on earth with no Departures. The town has become a national park and a hotbed for every form of religious experimentation. This season offers a primer in big philosophical questions: What is religion? Where does it come from? Can we live without it? This might sound didactic, but the show is so narratively and formally creative that it feels more like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Flannery O’Connor than a philosophy of religion textbook.
