Dune, Belief, and the Entrepreneur Messiah

Dune: Part Two—the second installment of Denis Villeneuve’s planned trilogy based on the Frank Herbert science-fiction saga—raises a problem for believers. That problem is the historicity of faith: the fact that intense, sincere religious belief has often taken hold among people as a result of social conditions, a hustling clerisy, or both. The movie’s principal theme is the formation of faith under such circumstances, and it confronts us with a challenge: To look too closely at the human and historical agency involved in the spread of religion is to endanger the possibility of faith.