An Alien Gospel

Proper 25A: John 8:31-47

Perhaps it is just a legend; I don't know for sure. But just outside of Princeton, New Jersey, is the little town of Grover's Mill. There is not much there now: a farm supply store, a bend in the road, an old wooden water tank, and acres of sod fields. But locals say that if you look carefully at that old water tower, you can still see the buckshot markings from nearly a century ago.

What happened was this: On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast on his radio show a recording of War of the Worlds, a story about Martians who invade the earth. The writers had picked, of all places, little Grover's Mill as the site of the Martians' landing. And when the show was broadcast, it was so realistic that people believed it was real news, not fiction. Frightened farmers in the area grabbed their shotguns and headed into town, looking for the Martians and their spacecraft. There in the moonlit October night, they looked up into the sky and spied what they thought was a spaceship and opened fire, shooting holes in what turned out to be an innocent water tower. Thankfully, that was the only casualty of the night.

That night’s broadcast is I think when aliens, extraterrestrial beings, first entered the popular imagination of Americas. In the century or so since, extraterrestrials have become mainstays in pop culture, objects of fascination and fear. Aliens have appeared in countless movies and TV shows—Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Predator, Aliens, Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Gate, X-Files, Men in Black, to name a few. It’s gotten so that once obscure terms associated with aliens—like UFOs, alien abductions, flying saucers, spacecraft, “Beam me up, Scotty!”—are now familiar to most people. And I bet you, when a child approaches your door on Halloween wearing a hairless, bug-eyed, gray-skinned mask, you don’t need to ask who they dressed up as. Such is the ubiquity of aliens in popular culture.

So far as fictional portrayals go, there are two broad categories that alien appearances fall into. The first is that of “alien invader.” This is where the alien is hostile and their arrival is seen as an imminent threat to humanity. An advanced, extraterrestrial race comes to earth looking for slaves or seeks to gobble up our resources or just wants to eliminate noisome humans. And humanity has to muster its forces, use its ingenuity, technology, and trickery to fend off the alien assault. Examples of this “hostile alien” trope includes War of the Worlds, of course, but also Independence Day, Mars Attacks, Falling Skies, Starship Troopers, even the Bugs Bunny character, Marvin the Martian. It’s a pretty common theme, and the plots of these stories tend to be pretty straightforward—good humans versus bad aliens, where the alien is made to be as strange and scary as possible.

But there’s another category of alien, one which is even more sinister than the alien as monster. And that is the “alien as savior”. Whereas the “alien invader” represents our fears, the “alien savior” expresses our hopes. The general idea here is that aliens are not only technologically advanced, but also morally superior. They come to earth not to conquer and destroy, but to save us, often from ourselves, to teach us unruly, argumentative humans, to help us transcend, to go beyond our present condition and all its limitations and sufferings. This is the plot of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact, Arrival, and Superman. Yes, Superman is an alien, you’ll remember, from the planet Krypton.

Steven Spielberg is well known for directing some of the most memorable movies involving aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and most recently Disclosure Day. Disclosure Day, which just came out a few months ago, is a perfect example of the alien as savior theme. In the film, a TV meteorologist and a cybersecurity analyst race to evade government agents in order to broadcast to the world proof of extraterrestrial life on earth. The plot is a basic cat-and-mouse chase. Eventually, though, it’s revealed that it’s the aliens themselves who have orchestrated the whole thing and that they don’t just want their existence to be known, they have a message the world needs to hear, if we are going to prevent World War III. As dramatic as that set-up is, the movie ends literally right as the protagonist is about to announce the alien’s message, so we never hear what this “saving truth” is. It’s a pretty pretentious, silly and lazy ending, building to a climax only to leave the audience hanging.

Except that this is not just a movie gimmick. It expresses the belief, sincerely held by Spielberg: that extraterrestrials will teach us to be better. Spielberg just doesn’t know what it is they have to teach us, but it’s a matter of faith for Spielberg and others like him that “the aliens will save us.”

I use those terms—“belief,” “faith,” “hope”—intentionally, as aliens have become for many people not just the stuff of fiction but of faith, a religion in its own right. Dianne Pasulka, a professor of religion at UNC-Wilmington, argues that belief in UFOs and aliens functions as a new religion, or if you refer, a new form of religiosity. Like other religions, it has its own beliefs about humanity's place in the cosmos, religious visions (UFO sightings), its own sacred places (Roswell, New Mexico, Area 51 in Nevada, places where UFOs were spotted), its own sacred objects, “relics” (materials associated with UFO crashes), personal testimonies, and apocalyptic expectations (impending nuclear war, ecological destruction, human extinction).

I know calling belief in extraterrestrials a religion seems far-fetched. But looked at from a formal, structural level, we can easily see the analogs, the correspondences with other religions, particularly Christianity. This may not be a coincidence. For if we think that Christianity is true, that God puts these desires, these hungers in us, this need for relationship with a “higher power,” needs that are answered in Jesus, it shouldn’t surprise us that belief in aliens, which follows many of the contours of Christianity, would be attractive. Especially so today, where people’s worldview, their conception of the universe, has little place for the supernatural. Alien belief allows believers to keep the basic outline, the structure of Christianity, while keeping its horizons decidedly this-worldly. No need for a God who makes demands when you can have benevolent aliens fix the world for you.

But the spiritual dimension of aliens isn’t limited to its function for people. One of the things you run into, if you spend any time reading about UFOs, is what is known as “contactee literature,” people’s stories about encounters with aliens—sightings, abductions, and the like. I know, it’s easy to make fun of people who claim to have been “abducted by aliens.” Often such people do not seem to us to be most reliable of sources. But there are many more people who claim to have encountered something uncanny, “alien,” than we often imagine, too many to dismiss out of hand. And many, perhaps most, are normal people, some Christians, even pastors who are trying to make sense of what they’ve seen and experienced.

Now, among ufologists, people who study UFOs, many attribute “abduction experiences” not to extraterrestrials but to human agents, that is, to brainwashing techniques and trauma-induced disassociation, losing track of where you are, leading to susceptibility to suggestion.

In fact, there was actually a big conference in 1992 held at MIT on alien abductions, if you can believe it. It was convened by a famous professor at Harvard, from the psychology department, a psychiatrist named John Mack who was heavily into alien abduction research. At that event, there were a number of scholars who wrote and published papers, and one of them was on the similarities between abduction narratives and Satanic ritual abuse. They noted several touch points, parallels, between what people say was done to them in both cases and, more importantly, the messages they got about it was happening to them. People in both groups received messaging that said essentially, “You’re special, you’re chosen.” Or they were promised: “this event will help tune you in more to the realities of the spiritual world and that will prepare you to take a message that people need to hear.” Sometimes you have women who are convinced that as a result of their abduction experience, they are carrying a child that is essentially a hybrid, a creature that will be able to bridge the human-alien divide or the divine-human divide. These things that are common to human abuse, to Satanic abuse, and to abduction stories too. Sometimes though there seems to be an explicit supernatural element.

One of the very famous contactee episodes involved a guy named George Adamski. Adamski became very famous in the 1950s and thereafter for supposedly being contacted by an alien presence visiting Venus and for having visions of all these different planets, actually saying he went to these places with his alien friends. The aliens were telling him things like every human has the light of God or the light of the supernatural realm in them. They just need to remember who they are., to be “enlightened.” If you are at all familiar with church history, you’d recognize that these messages about the salvation being “from within” and recognizing our own “divinity” are really nothing more than warmed-over Gnosticism.

Gnosticism was an ancient belief system that was a strong competitor to the early church because it often used biblical language as part of its teachings. Only it changed what those words, what those ideas meant. Without going too far into the mythology, Gnosticism taught that the God of the Bible, who created humanity, is actually the bad guy. The good guy in the story is the serpent, because the serpent tried to enlighten humans to the nature of who they are—there's a little spark of divinity in them because of where they came from. It's a very old system. And it's very self-oriented in terms of salvation. Salvation, for Gnostics, is not about taking care of a sin problem; it's about becoming personally enlightened, awakened to your own divinity. You can see this kind of messaging in a number of contactee episodes in the history of UFO studies.

Now, why, do you suppose, would aliens be so interested in spiritual matters …unless perhaps they were themselves spiritual beings. Is it possible that the “aliens” involved in the abduction experiences may not be extraterrestrials so much as spirits, spiritual beings? Could it be that this part of ufology is really nothing more than intelligent demonic beings using old lies (Gnosticism) repackaged for a 20th and 21st century audience? 

Who’s to say? But it kind of makes sense. I mean, what to a 20^th and 21^st-century person would be god-like? An extraterrestrial! A technologically-advanced alien race. It's very simple. It’s an intelligent being that isn't us. It's not part of the animal kingdom. It may not be transcendent per se, but it is more powerful, superior when compared to us. And so belief in aliens becomes a very convenient vehicle for transforming the teachings of Christianity. It removes all the supernatural stuff and replaces it with alien stuff, converting heaven to outer space, exchanging miracles for advanced technology, and making salvation into a matter of achieving “higher consciousness.”

It’s certainly appealing. This way, the whole question of sin isn't even on the table, but you get to keep all the good parts. You have heaven without the God of the Bible. You have a transcendent destiny for humanity without any accountability. And, you don’t have to take it all on faith; there’s “scientific proof,” or so it is claimed.

This is why aliens really are so scary. Not because they want to kill us or eat us or use us as hosts for alien babies. It’s because belief in aliens points us away from God. The alien replaces Jesus, and belief in extraterrestrials becomes a new religion, a counterfeit religion, one which sounds like Christianity, but is in fact very different.

Notice, nothing I’ve said here says anything about whether I believe aliens really exist, or if they do, what they are, how we should understand them. I accept that people who see lights in the sky or who’ve had an encounter with the uncanny, with the otherworldly, are seeing something, experiencing something real. Whether they are extraterrestrial creatures or spiritual beings, angels or demons, or some other non-human intelligence, I cannot say.

But for our purposes, as Christians, what exactly “they” are is really of secondary concern. The cultural narrative about aliens and alien encounters is already doing something to us. The stories we watch and read about aliens teach us to expect revelation, and ultimately salvation, from an outside intelligence more "advanced" than ourselves. “The truth is out there,” X-Files insisted. But we witness to the fact that truth is not “out there.” Truth has come here, come to us, in the person of Jesus Christ. So, we’ve no need for “alien saviors.” The savior we know is the only savior we need. Thanks be to God!