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{{trope}}
[[File:Calvin-worship-
A [[Cargo Cult]] is
The trope name comes from the documented effect that [[World War II]] military forces had upon natives of various South Pacific islands.
Many Cargo Cults are distinguished by a mixture of native spiritual systems with elaborate economic rituals, as capitalism has come to replace military power as the force of the developed world that is most heavily felt and appreciated in daily life. Such rituals similarly have the aim of appropriating what the natives perceive as the westerner's "power" from his symbols, such as money or materials in addition to technology.
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{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==▼
▲== [[Anime]] ==
* ''[[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]'' had an underground village that worshipped a "face-God", a Ganmen that had fallen into the village long ago. At the end of the episode, {{spoiler|it was revealed that the high priest knew what it really was, and only used the religion to help enact the harsh rules that were vital for the village to survive}}.
* In ''[[Nausicaa of the Valley of
* In one of the episodes of the first season of ''[[Vandread]]'', the Nirvana crew descends upon an aquatic planet who [[God Guise|mistakes them for their "God"]]. They don't mind when the crew mentioned that they weren't Gods, but they do mind when the aforementioned crew was "hurting their true Gods". The Gods that they refer to? The machinelike Harvesters, the same ones that the Nirvana crew have been fighting for at least 5 episodes, who came there for the people's spinal cords (which they knew and willingly offered as part of the religion).
* [[Kino's Journey
* In ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam 00]]'', Setsuna takes his devotion to Gundams to almost [[Ave Machina]] levels, shown by his complete and utter awe when he first saw the 0 Gundam in action right after he declared there is no God, as well as his repeated declarations of "I am Gundam", meaning the complete submission to Celestial Being's ideals by becoming the very symbol of the eradication of conflict (that is, a Gundam). Based on his reaction to the works of [[Blood Knight|Ali]] and the [[Knight Templar|Trinity team]], using a mobile suit even remotely similar in appearance to a Gundam to shed blood [[For the Lulz|just for the hell of it]] [[Berserk Button|borders on blasphemy to him]] - seeing that Setsuna is Kurdish and spent an unknown amount of time as a [[The Fundamentalist|fanatical]] [[Child Soldier]] who killed his own parents in the name of God, he's capable of one hell of a devotion.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* [[Captain America (comics)|Captain America]] was worshiped by a tribe of Eskimos after WWII while he was still frozen in a block of Arctic ice. Part of why he eventually thawed was because Namor, furious at what he perceived to be the Eskimo's idiocy in their choice of religion, hurled Cap's ice block into the ocean, and the currents pulled it into warmer climes.
* ''The Tower King'', a strip that ran in the British comic book ''Eagle'', was set on an Earth that had collapsed into anarchy when a malfunctioning solar-powered satellite somehow bathed the Earth in radiation that made the production of electricity in any form impossible. A cult worshiping electricity set itself inside a power station, carefully maintaining the generators and pretending that electricity still existed.
== [[Film]] ==
* In ''[[Men In Black 2]]'', a race of tiny aliens living in a rental locker worship a watch that K left behind. When K retrieves this watch, J replaces it with his own, becoming a new deity for the locker people.
* Averted and played with in ''[[The Gods Must Be Crazy]]'', a careless pilot throws an empty Coke bottle from his aircraft. It lands in the middle of a Bushmen community, who decide it must be a gift from the Gods. However, it only causes jealousy and inequality and it is decided that, yes, the gods must be crazy, and a member of the tribe is sent to throw the object off the edge of the world. Much of the humour of the film comes from the lone Bushman interpreting the things he encounters from his stone-age perspective.
** With more than a touch of [[Clarke's Third Law]] thrown in as the bushmen never actually worship the bottle, but only consider it a gift, as noted above.
** Compare ''Gods Must Be Crazy'' to ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. [[Nigh Invulnerable|Indestructible]] [[Artifact of Doom|evil bottle]]. Recalls the [[Death of the Author|revisionist interpretation]] that the whole notion of the One Ring was a primitive misunderstanding, or a [[Xanatos Gambit|Big Lie]] designed to mask an economic fight over resources.
* In ''[[Rango]]'', the animals treat human artifacts like pipes this way for their 'divine' ability to provide water in a desert. Verges on [[Humans Are Cthulhu]] at points.
* In the sequel to ''[[Planet of the Apes]]'', Taylor uncovers a group of humans survived the apocalypse but had been turned into disfigured mutants. They worship an intact, unexploded bomb which they keep enshrined in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
* Depending on your interpretation of "object," the Ewoks bowing down to worship C-3PO in ''[[Return of the Jedi]]'' counts as this.
== [[Literature]] ==
* In Will Self's novel ''The Book of Dave'', a [[Driver of a Black Cab|contemporary London cab driver]]'s diary has become a Holy Book five hundred years in the future, with savagely satiric results.
* Outright subverted in the [[Discworld]] book ''The Colour Of Magic'', when a
** Cargo cults are also considered by Ponder when he reflects that 'he didn't build Hex, he just put it together'.
* ''Dream Park'', by [[Larry Niven]] and Steven Barnes, features a virtual reality-enhanced [[Tabletop Games|live-action roleplaying]] session based around the real-world Cargo Cult.
* [[Christopher Moore]]'s ''[[
* The Store-living Nomes in [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Nomes Trilogy]]'' worship Arnold Bros (Est 1905), who built the Store. The Floridian Nomes in ''Wings'' worship Nassa, the god who makes clouds. The Nomes living on the streets of Blackbury seem to have been too busy trying to survive to come up with a religion, although the way they treat the Thing comes close.
* Alfred Bester's ''[[
* One book in Isaac Asimov's ''Foundation'' series mentions a temple on a planet built to house one old videotape.
* There was that [[Jules Verne]] novel where they go across Africa in a hot air balloon and at some point the natives decide it's the moon; the characters escape just as the real moon is about to rise.
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* One of the early [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]] novels (''Han Solo and the Lost Legacy'') featured a group of cargo cultists who were the descendants of the crew of the treasure-laden starship of an ancient warlord; they lived on a backwater planet for generations, maintaining sacred "landing fields" complete with mock-ups of spaceships and ritualized "communications procedures".
* In the third ''[[Empire From the Ashes]]'' book, the people of Pardal worship an ancient defense computer as the voice of God, using the "Holy Tongue" (the language of the former Fourth Imperium) to speak with it in such holy rituals as... "System Test"... and "High Fire Test". That same religion also condemns developing technology as heresy. [[God Guise|Sean and crew get mistaken for Demons by the entire population and later for Angels (and their champions) by the rebels]].
* The short story [http://theopinionguy.com/OG25.pdf "Assumption" (scroll down)] by Desmond Warzel features a ''literal''
* The 1984 book ''[[
* [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]]' [[John Carter of Mars]] novel ''The Master Mind of Mars''. In the Martian city of Phundahl, the idol of the god Tur has a system of controls that allow the operator inside to control the idol's eyes and speak through its mouth. The protagonists use this to their advantage by pretending to be Tur and giving the Phundahlians instructions.
* [[Older Than Feudalism]]: The infamous Golden Calf in ''[[
* [[Harry Harrison]] has a story where a man is sent to repair an ancient, [[Ragnarok Proofing|RagnarokProof]] hyperspace beacon on a distant planet. It turns out the builders failed to notice a few stone age reptiles. Since then, the natives found the beacon (a huge tower), and made it a holy shrine (it produced an endless spring of water as part of its coolant system). One of the priests, while cleaning inside, hit the emergency shutdown switch. The protagonist pretends to be a sentry of heaven, sent to restore the spring. After he finishes the repairs, the reptiles attempt to keep him in as a permanent
* In the ''[[
** Being a holy shrine to them, the Tower is off-limits to all. Only once does the current leader send a "word-slinger" (the only person per generation who knows how to read) inside. The latter quickly loses his faith after discovering the ship logs.
* Subverted in the science-fiction short shory 'Hinterlands' by [[William Gibson]]; this time, it's humanity who are on the receiving end, and by the end of the book {{spoiler|we're still no wiser as to how the whole thing works or why. The rule is that you must travel to a set point in space and release a radio-flare; if you do, you 'disappear' and come back after a lengthy period of time, either dead or insane, but carrying a random alien object that might be valuable}}. More than a little unsettling.
* The ''[[
▲== [[Live Action TV]] ==
▲* The ''[[Red Dwarf (TV)|Red Dwarf]]'' episode "Waiting For God" reveals that the race of humanoids that evolved from Lister's pet cat discovered his plan to move to Fiji (which they called Fuschal) and open a hot dog and donut stand, and built an entire religion around it. They decimated themselves in a holy war over what color the [[Burger Fool|silly hats for the wait staff]] would be, and then the survivors left to search for Fuschal using star charts left behind by "Cloister" -- the old laundry list used by Lister to line the original cat's bed. (The colors fought over were red and blue. Lister, however, intended them to be ''green''.)
** In the novelization, the cats are waiting for "Cloister", who has been frozen in time, but will one day reemerge to lead them to "Bearth". The other cats believe exactly the same thing, except he was called "Clister". Naturally, they nearly wipe out their own species in religious war, then leave to find the promised land.
== [[Recorded and Stand Up Comedy]] ==▼
▲== [[Stand Up Comedy]] ==
* During his Dandelion Mind tour, comedian [[Bill Bailey]] gets the crowd worshiping an [[wikipedia:Oud|oud]].
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* The ''[[
* ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)|Call of Cthulhu]]'' adventure ''Glozel Est Authentique!'' by Theater of the Mind Enterprises. In the distant past the people who lived in Glozel, France interacted with Phoenician traders. When the traders stopped coming the people created tablets with Phoenician characters on them to try to bring them back.
* ''Sufficiently Advanced'' includes Cargo Cults as one of the types of civilizations PCs can come from. Due to the hectic far flung nature of the diaspora, and the insanely advanced science of most of the cultures cargo cults are incredibly common, and the PCs can end up dealing with them fairly often.
** Interestingly, the original premise for the game was entirely based around cargo cults, until the creator had a better idea.
*
**
== [[Video Games]] ==
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* ''[[Project Eden]]'' has the earth people, who live on the ground (everybody else lives in a really tall skyscraper) and mentioned they would be scared to live so high up, in case they fell down like the rubbish they collect.
* The Covenant from the ''[[Halo]]'' games and [[Expanded Universe]]. In addition to worshipping the [[Precursors|Forerunners]] as literal gods, the Covenant hold all technology created by them as holy, to the point where improving or modifying any technology reverse-engineered from Forerunner ruins is tantamount to heresy.<ref>In ''First Strike'', Cortana improves the Covenant Assault Carrier ''Ascendant Justice's'' slipspace drive and plasma weapons by ''modifying the settings.''</ref>
* The native Nali in ''[[
* In ''[[Avernum]] 3'' you encounter a
* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'', there is a minor race of gorillas called the Imga who worship High Elves and seek to emulate them, to the point of shaving off their fur and powdering their skin.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Done in ''[[The Order of the Stick
** Of course, Elan also thinks Banjo's a God. He's actually pretty stoked that someone else is acknowledging it, although he's not so happy that the orcs won't give Banjo back.
*** Technically, Banjo probably ''is'' a God. Possibly [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0080.html the weakest god imaginable], but, somehow, [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0137.html divine nonetheless]. This is due to ''OotS'' using the [[Gods Need Prayer Badly]] rules.
== [[Web Original]] ==▼
* A few [[
▲== Web Original ==
▲* A few [[SCP Foundation (Wiki)|SCP Foundation]] objects are considered parts of a god worshiped by the Church of the Broken God. One in particular, [http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-882 SCP-882] has had at least one known cult worship it due to its effects.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
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** Then Cosmos crash-lands on the planet, and they start worshipping ''him'' instead (this counts since he is deactivated at the time).
*** Then ''Astrotrain'' arrives, and [[God Guise|starts taking advantage of all this nonsense.]]
* ''[[Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers (
** In "Kiwi's Big Adventure", a tribe of Kiwis worship the Ranger Plane as a deity and expect it to give them back their ability to fly.
** In "The Case of the Cola Cult", a large group of mice in tunics worship a soda brand.
* In the ''[[Jonny Quest]]'' episode "A Small Matter of Pygmies", a tribe of pygmies worships airplanes: they have have small statuettes of airplanes in the place where they perform human sacrifices.
* [[
* Given a quick jab in ''[[Futurama]]'', which references the ''[[Planet of the Apes]]'' films (see above).
{{quote|
'''Vyolet:''' Yeah, but nobody's that observant. It's mainly a Christmas and Easter thing. }}
* In ''[[
* In ''[[Rocko's Modern Life]]'' Heffer joins a cult that worships sausage.
== Real Life ==
* As mentioned in the description, the John Frum cults. Frum himself is a sort of amalgamation of Uncle Sam, Santa Claus, and John the Baptist; the name is believed to be a corruption of "John from America", though another theory holds that it's based on a letter "from John". They believe he will return on a February
** Interestingly enough, John Frum brought wealth to
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Cargo Cult]]
[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]
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