Four years before Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out Gene Roddenberry wrote a script for a Star Trek movie aptly called Star Trek II. Despite Star Trek always being ahead of its time when dealing with social issues, Star Trek II was too aggressive in its treatment of religion, something that scared the Paramount executives who ultimately passed on the film. People in 1975 just weren’t ready to see Captain Kirk and the crew face off against God. The movie, and its subsequent novelization, have come to be known as Star Trek: The God Thing.
The God Thing
The movie opens with a mysterious object near Jupiter suddenly appearing and directing asteroids towards Earth while destroying a Starfleet ship. The mysterious object causes people across the solar system to receive psychic messages in which it declares itself God, and through psychic manipulation convinces Starfleet that it 
is in fact, God. The Enterprise crew, who have all been promoted except for McCoy who has become a vet and Scotty who’s now a drunk, are all immune, because you know, plot. Kirk and the gang then go on to engage the menacing object which responds by becoming different interpretations of messiahs before settling on Jesus. They find out that the object is a very old spaceship with an advanced AI that is sentintent and extremely powerful. However, because every movie needs a villain, it’s programming has gone wonky and has become a threat to Earth and only Kirk and the crew can save the day. It then tells the plucky bunch, after cutting off Sulu’s legs and then reattaching them, that it has come to Earth several times before and had some hijinks. It came before to inspire the early Israelites who worshipped it as a god, and then came back later on as Jesus to teach galactic law. Kirk and the gang convince the god thing to travel to another dimension and everything comes out peachy. Pretty wild stuff, but it gets pretty weird at parts.
Covered in Oil and Popping Chubs
The studio rejected the script, according to Roddenberry, because of their religious views and the anti-religious views of the movie. In his own words Roddenberry gives an example.
It was too controversial. It talked about concepts like, ‘Who is God?’ [In it] the Enterprise meets God in space; God is a life form, and I wanted to suggest that there may have been, at one time in the human beginning, an alien entity that early man believed was God, and kept those legends. But I also wanted to suggest that it might have been as much the Devil as it was God. After all, what kind of god would throw humans out of Paradise for eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One of the Vulcans on board, in a very logical way, says, ‘If this is your God, he’s not very impressive. He’s got so many psychological problems; he’s so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He’s a pretty poor excuse for a supreme being.’ Not surprisingly, that didn’t sent [sic] the Paramount executives off crying with glee.
Well that sounds pretty thought provoking and a good use of the Star Trek lore, he also wrote the following about Kirk encountering some sexy ladies, as Kirk does.
They were nude of course except for their paragame sandals, and young women that way had a disconcerting way of looking quite different. It disconcerted Kirk that the thought made his own genitals tighten against the metallic mesh which protected male vulnerability during the game
Only Captain Kirk could end up in a sexy, oiled up threesome and face off against Jesus in the same movie.
Jesus Reincarnated
If some of this sounds familiar that’s because a lot of these ideas were used
. Star Trek: The Motion Picture used some key scenes and character developments, like all the crew being promoted, while Star Trek: The Final Frontier grabbed onto the idea of God as a spaceship. What those works were missing though was the biting commentary that The God Thing was full of. Gene Roddenberry was incredibly forward thinking on countless ideas. Despite being a campy TV show Star Trek managed to tackle some heavy social issues with a tremendous of grace and intelligence. It would have been amazing if Paramount grew some Kirk sized balls and put this movie into production. Religion is a hot topic that too many people shy away from, and a topic Hollywood regularly avoids. It would be interesting to see the landscape of movies and pop-culture today if The God Thing had been produced in the 1970s.
– Ian Benke
Check out this link for the first part of the script
Worried Nerds 