“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me! Who hath laid the measures thereof? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Upon what are its bases grounded, or who laid the cornerstone when the morning stars praised me together and all the sons of God made a joyful melody? […] Hast thou entered into the depths of the sea, and walked the lowest parts of the deep? Have the gates of death been opened to thee, and hast thou seen the darksome doors? Hast thou considered the breadth of the earth? Tell me, if thou knowest all things! […] Art thou able to join the Pleiades, or stop the turning about of Arcturus? Canst thou bring forth the day star in its time, or make the evening star rise upon the children of earth? […] Who put wisdom in the heart of man?”
—Job 38:4-7, 16-18, 31-33, 36-37 (Douay-Rheims)—
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Over the past 60 years, beginning with the sexual revolution, three generations of Americans and Europeans have witnessed the steady decline of the Christian imagination—not just in terms of popular culture—but also in terms of how we as a public contemplate certain mysteries of nature and the universe.
Whereas the mind of the average person 60 years ago would wander to Lewis’ Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings, MacDonald’s Lilith, Chesterton’s Father Brown, Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment, and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time when listing off stories and storytellers that had major impacts on Western culture, today the average person thinks of Marvel, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and Disney as the faceless soulless “tellers” who hold a monopoly on the shaping and reshaping of myth and great works.
This transfer of power over narrative—from the religious to the secular, and from the enchanted to the materialist—unsurprisingly has resulted in radically different values being emphasized in the stories themselves. While the Christian story typically contains themes of redemption, adventure being good for its own sake, friendship, and true (often sacrificial) love, modern tales extol a cynical glorification of power and its acquisition, obsession with and devotion to the self as the only way to reach one’s true potential, the elevation of emotions and “following your heart” as reliable paths to both truth (to whatever degree that exists) and vague “happiness”, and that no one in fact needs romantic love or should look for it (because the idea of being made complete by companionship undermines secular modernity’s idolatry of the empowered independent self). If the Christian stories of yesteryear reliably sided with the elves—pure of heart and heroic in deed—today’s Nietzschean original series, live actions, and retellings (“updated to reflect the world we live in”) firmly plant their flags on the side of the orcs.
No more is this sharp contrast in values more striking than how modernity treats mystery both inside and outside of storytelling. Whereas Christians and people of other religions up until 300 years ago understood mystery as a thing to be swallowed up by, meditated upon, and insatiably reveled in, the default modern person (nonreligious or nominally religious) beholds mysteries as time-killing amusements to be analyzed, demystified, and filed away never to be considered again.
This has sparked a call among thoughtful conservatives for a countercultural project of re-enchantment; where architecture that centers glory and majesty replaces cold “efficient” utility-centric monstrosities, where art (including stories) is evaluated according to carefully-but-tightly defined moral and aesthetic criteria, and where traditional values of hierarchy, family, and duty successfully defeat the nihilistic, selfish, empty, “no standards/no judgement” hyper-individualist spirit of the age. In short, the project of re-enchantment can be characterized as a stubborn and relentless insistence that if cultures want to avoid decline and disintegration, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful must always triumph over the false, the degenerate, and the ugly.
Part of that process of re-enchantment is not simply to convince the secular to believe once again in a transcendent and magical universe, but also to convince believers to override our unconscious sabotaging mindset that the God we worship is only a God of the Sunday morning pew between the hours of 9 and 10:30; recognizing (on an emotional and not just intellectual level) that our God really is a God of everything everywhere always. One of the ways the “Enlightenment” achieved such a foothold in the collective psyche of the West is that it succeeded in convincing people to divide their activities and beliefs into “proper spheres” which presumably would become improper if they ever mixed. This concept of keeping certain aspects of our lives into “proper spheres”—though not wrong per se, and in fact could be easily reconciled in certain contexts with the virtue of prudence—nevertheless was weaponized by secularist architects (and subsequent torchbearers) to mean that the spiritual, the physiological, the intellectual, the emotional, and the natural were to be separated into categories that, once separated, would never interact with each other again. This was an assassination attempt on metaphysics. An outright assault on those who strove for a coherent and total worldview. Our family life was to be separated from our work life, our work life was to be separated from our political life, our political life was to be separated from our social life, and our religious life was to be separated from all of them. The result of course being that the Enlightenment self—fully actualized—is by design a fractured self rather than a coherent identity. This component of modernity led the southern Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor to observe that, “When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.”
And this brings me to aliens.
Ever since the publication of H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds in 1898—or maybe further back even than that—Americans have been particularly fascinated by the question of whether occupied planets float elsewhere in the stars. Judging by major films and series like Star Trek, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, E.T., Independence Day, Men In Black, Signs, and the notoriety of the so-called “history” show Ancient Aliens, the idea that somewhere out in the universe there exists other sentient beings has for many decades completely captivated us as a public. Christians too feel that curiosity, and wonder along with others about the possibility of life elsewhere. Yet rarely, if ever, does it seem like we try to incorporate our theology with that curiosity.
But if aliens exist, and if they have evolved consciousness just as humans do, wouldn’t it make sense that the God of the universe would have something to do with them too? Wouldn’t He also be their Creator? Wouldn’t He know everything there is to know about their civilizations, the course of their history, the structure of their languages and customs?
Embark with me upon a brief exercise of imagination:
On planets scattered throughout the many trillions of galaxies sit cathedrals as old—or perhaps more ancient than—our own. Inside them, extraterrestrial monks gather round to chant their otherworldly prayers, honor their own saints and martyrs, and sing their own hymns. They recognize the Christ. A form of Him died on their planet too. These Christians are the bearers of strange Bibles which—though containing the same moral truths and truths about God—also contain entirely different stories with entirely different characters; and may not exist in book form at all, but instead take the form of holograms, telepathic whispers, and verses carved onto the surfaces of planets themselves. The timeline of God’s redemptive scheme for the peoples of these planets may well have been entirely different from His timeline for our own. The universe is, after all, nearly 14 billion years old.
No doubt other religions could be found competing with that of the extraterrestrial Christians, but none of them would be the same as the religions competing with the Christianity of this world. How could they be? Only a true religion could be the common denominator of all universal civilizations.
The famed 20th century scholar and theologian C.S. Lewis, during his lifetime, made clear his beliefs on the matter in his 1958 essay “Religion & Rocketry” (which, despite being a frequently quoted essay on the blogs of pastors and priests, is an almost impossible essay to find online in its entirety; the only way I was able to read Lewis’ thoughts directly was by tracking the essay down in one of his more obscure books titled The World’s Last Night… which, after two hours of hunting, I was able to find a free PDF copy of here). In this essay, Lewis lays all his cards on the table when he writes, “If all [aliens] or any of them have fallen, have they been denied redemption by the Incarnation and Passion of Christ? For of course it is no very new idea that the eternal Son may, for all we know, have been incarnate in other worlds than earth and so saved other races than ours.”
Two immediate disclaimers:
1) I do not believe that aliens are mentioned anywhere in scripture, despite claims by fringe History Channel “scholars” and tabloid kooks to the contrary. A serious exegetical approach to biblical texts and an understanding of ancient Hebrew cosmology rules out any possibility that little green men are what, say, Ezekiel chapter 10 is talking about, or what the Book of Genesis and the non-canononical Book of Enoch are talking about when they bring up fallen angels or the nephilim. (Don’t even get me started on the wild interpretations people have made of the Book of Revelation, I’m not in the mood to throw any chairs.) Suffice it to say, while I am open to the idea of God creating civilizations across galaxies and redeeming each of them in His own way, there is nowhere in scripture that explicitly supports this view.
2) I’m skeptical of all UFO stories and do not believe we have ever been visited by aliens. It seems to me that, overall, the personality types who typically claim encounters with aliens are the personality types that need that sort of thing to happen to them; they’re people who are lonely, or unattractive, or noticeably mentally ill, or who seem to just really like attention. And even the rare “credible” witnesses (however their credibility is judged) fail time and time again to cough up any hard proof. Due to this, my theory specifically of Area 51 is that it’s probably just as much a big fat disappointment as most other military bases. (In essence, it probably only has one restaurant and it’s a Subway.)
But despite firmly rejecting any notion of aliens being part of scripture and despite being critical of all alien accounts, I find the idea compelling that out of two trillion galaxies and 700 quintillion planets, we may not be the only ones in the universe. And while it’s becoming clear that I’m not the only religious person who’s interested in that possibility by a long shot, I’ve noticed that lately this interest has been going in a weird direction for some.
There’s been a reactionary trend among a sizable amount of Christian podcasters, lecturers, and writers proclaiming that any and all extraterrestrial life “must actually be demons”. There’s no justification for this, and frankly it’s a little alarming how quickly consensus got built in the last year or two from “Aliens aren’t real” to “Oh yeah, they’re real and they’re demons” without even the pit stop possibility that if extraterrestrial life exists (near or far away), they might also enjoy redemption from the Savior.
By taking this tack, these apologists of the faith unwittingly echo Lovecraft’s trembling whine that “The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity. And it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straying in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little. But someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality—and of our frightful position therein—that we shall either go mad from the revelation, or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.” (Call Of Cthulhu)
Clive Staples is tut-tutting from his grave.
As for myself, there’s a lot of fun imagining flying saucers one day helping Christendom Infantry retake Constantinople (being careful not to laser beam the Hagia Sophia), and there’s even more fun imagining extraterrestrial brethren telling us the stories of their sainted martyrs depicted on their icons (“Over here you see St. Srixian the Eight-Legged, who, when Xottian the Persecutor hacked off six of them, replied ‘All the fewer to be steadfast in my sin!’ His feast day is celebrated at the time of the fourth moon’s rotation… you only have one moon, correct?”) I can even anticipate some of the jokes that would be made (“greener pastors” and that sort of thing).
But of course I’m also not blind to the doctrinal challenges extraterrestrial brethren would present. For instance, at the end of days, when all souls in all galaxies are judged, and the ones found righteous before God are transformed into perfected beings, will they inhabit one New Earth (Revelation 21:1-4) or will every “earth” become a New Earth? Moreover, if we are in the Image of God and they are in the Image of God, but we and they look extremely different from each other, then what implications does this have for how we think about God’s Image? These are big questions, and ones that are perhaps imprudent to ask before their time, if such a time ever arises at all. Until then, stargazing—needing always to be a regular Christian practice just as prayer, devotions, and fasting are—will ceaselessly reveal “the glory of God” as the firmament never fails to “declare the work of His hands.”
