77 pages • 2 hours read
Parable of the Sower
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Themes
Religion as a Living Framework for Hope and Change
The phrase “God is change” is the central tenet of the religion that Lauren is developing. To her, change is the only constant in life, and her religion is a way of allowing herself to survive traumatic events. It’s different than other religions in many ways because it does not encourage prayer or the idea of an afterlife. Instead, it encourages its followers to “shape God” themselves and live in a way that encourages peace and compassion in the present world. Earthseed followers should care about others and choose a way of life that helps everyone feel safe and nurtured. Lauren understands that change is inevitable, and it’s better to plan and prepare for it than deny it or hope passively for better days: “Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures. Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind” (226). By rooting its ideology in the present rather than a hoped-for afterlife, it requires its adherents to be active, informed participants in the real world. In doing so, Earthseed followers can actively work to create a better world, symbolized by their farming and planting acorns on their new land at the end of the book.
Throughout Parable of the Sower, Lauren’s Earthseed religion contrasts with the Baptist faith in which she grew up. Being a preacher’s daughter, she is intimately familiar with Christianity, yet she feels that her father’s faith is insufficient to offer enough comfort in a world like this one. She maintains that it keeps people rooted in the past and rote repetition of rituals that they don’t understand. This is emphasized by the scene in which Lauren is baptized—she and her family take a risky journey into the outside world to attend the church, and she only goes through with the ceremony to please her father. For Lauren, this is not faith, and it’s not something that allows her to deal with the reality of the world as it is. Despite her indifference toward her father’s Christian god, she sees the value in a religious framework as a way to build a more hopeful world. When Travis tells her, “Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” she replies, “All the more reason to care about myself and others. All the more reason to create Earthseed communities and shape God together” (228). This reveals the limitless potential of faith—religious or not—to inspire others to endure and help each other. Lauren sees this faith manifest in the novel’s final chapters when all of the group members decide to stay and build Earthseed rather than continue journeying north. The prospect of shaping their own destinies is a divine promise worth believing in.
Community Versus the Individual
Written in the 1990s, Parable of the Sower reflects on a near-future dystopia that is made worse by individualism. This is a reflection on the political situation in the United States, in which the rise of neoliberal policies in the 1980s led to decreased funding for social programs and an increased emphasis on individual responsibility. Butler challenges this individualistic worldview throughout Parable of the Sower by showing how it fails to save society or even guarantee individual survival during times of crisis.
The tragedy of being alone is established early in the novel when Lauren’s neighbor Mrs. Sims dies by suicide. After her family is killed and her house is robbed, Mrs. Sims feels utterly alone in the world, which is a situation that can’t even be assuaged by her religious devotion. Though she believes she will be condemned for her actions, she still chooses suicide. With this, Butler establishes the parameters of hope and despair; the only time hope is truly lost is when one is abandoned, left behind by their community and loved ones.
Lauren’s very being is a stark contrast to this bleak nihilism; as someone with hyperempathy, she feels every other living creature’s joy and pain. This means that she is not physically capable of acting just in her own self-interest; if she harmed someone else for her own benefit, she would also suffer. This insight into others’ pain helps Lauren formulate her value system and emphasize collaboration with others to persevere. She first seeks this sense of community in her best friend, but Jo’s unwillingness to engage in discomfort makes her a poor ally. This adds another dimension to Lauren’s hyperempathy, as she is not capable of making this choice to disengage. Instead, she finds the commiseration she yearns for in her father, and they help each other strengthen their emergency plans. This early emphasis on teamwork and sharing ideas sets Lauren up to survive when tragedy hits, even as her father does not.
Just as Lauren embodies the importance of community, Keith represents the dangers of individualism. Unlike his sister, Keith steals resources from his family—Cory’s key and a gun—and runs out into the world to carve his own path. Mean and rough, he initially succeeds and comes home with nice clothes and treats for his family, but his reckless disregard for others—including the drug dealers he links up with outside—results in his brutal death. Here, Butler shines a light on the pitfalls of a society where everyone is violently self-centered—everyone is willing to harm others to keep what they have, meaning that no one is safe.
Even as Lauren becomes a religious leader in her group, she emphasizes the value of community rather than acting as an all-powerful leader. She listens to others’ ideas about her religion, making it a space where everyone can help shape the philosophy. Her arguments are stronger for having been questioned, not weaker. This creates an environment that nurtures its people; even though people are wary of Earthseed’s potential success and aren’t necessarily adherent to its ideas, everyone chooses to stay on Bankole’s land because the community there is a safe space to learn and grow. Planting the trees at Acorn and moving into the future together ends the book on a cautiously optimistic note, one that asserts that humans can endure the apocalypse through community care and teamwork over individualism.
Class Divisions and Inequality
In keeping with Butler’s critique of American individualism, she also examines how class divisions and inequality can be exacerbated by disaster. While people everywhere in this version of 2024 California suffer, the wall that separates Lauren’s neighborhood from the outside is a stark image that symbolizes the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Those who live within Robledo’s walls are privileged, and they do their best to keep everyone else out. While this is a necessary step to protect themselves, the lack of resources available to the increasingly desperate people outside makes the crisis more dangerous for everyone, no matter their class position.
At the beginning of the novel, Lauren can’t imagine living without a wall to protect her, showing how engrained class divisions are in this society. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to keep people safe. However, this idea is undermined by the novel’s trajectory; walls cannot keep Robledo safe, and she will need to go out into the world and encounter people from all walks of life to move forward into a more hopeful future. Butler examines the way class divisions and inequality are manufactured—not innate—by revealing the walls’ fragility. They are constantly breached by intruders who harm the people within, raising the question of whether they’re protective at all. These occurrences raise the tension within the wall and prime the insiders for violence; they must be prepared to kill others to keep what they have, further entrenching class divisions. This is symbolized by the role of guns in the novel, which are valuable and rare. In teaching Robledo’s children to fire guns, Lauren’s father is indoctrinating them in class warfare, preparing them for a life where they must kill to keep their power.
Robledo’s fate—and that of every other walled community the Earthseed group encounters—shows that class divisions cannot survive this kind of crisis. Even Lauren notes that with Robledo ruined, she is “street poor […] full of books and ignorant of reality” (162). Humans, then, are left with two options; the violent individualism of the paints and the pyros or the type of egalitarian society Lauren creates with Earthseed. Butler is not utopic in her meditations on this subject; destructive, individualistic forces remain a constant threat throughout both this novel and the sequel. However, Earthseed offers an opportunity for a truly egalitarian society for its adherents. Allie reflects that on Bankole’s land, she can build a home, the first time in her life she will have something that’s hers. Chapter 17 is preceded by a quote from Lauren’s verses:
Embrace diversity.
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
or be destroyed (203).
With this, the promise of Earthseed is a society free of class divisions and inequality.
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