NY Times: Spielberg, Aliens, and God

New York Times Op-Ed: Does U.F.O. Disclosure Threaten Faith?, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025)):

Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is a movie in which characters argue about whether the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be a threat to religion, something that a great many people have decided to argue about since the Pentagon started releasing tranches of U.F.O.-related files.

The film’s formal perspective, not surprisingly given that Spielberg has always been both alien-obsessed and friendly to religious ideas and motifs, is that extraterrestrial encounters need not be a threat to faith in God. A nun who asks why a divinity would “make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us” seems to be speaking for the film itself.

But the story also illustrates why one of the popular conceptions of extraterrestrial encounters is a potential challenge to organized religion, with aliens stepping into the role that’s traditionally occupied by popes and prophets and mystics, angelic messengers or the Holy Spirit. …

[W]hen it comes to the nature of the aliens themselves, the movie deliberately draws on U.F.O. encounter stories that evoke the supernatural, from William James’s varieties of religious experience to folk tales about what happens when you meet a fairy in the woods. …

[I]f God exists in the movie’s universe, the alien race seemingly stands in a closer relationship to the deity than human beings, and they’re here to act as the divinity’s interpreters and agents. And that idea — again, a commonplace one in certain circles of U.F.O. discourse — is in pretty obvious tension with the belief that an existing scripture or teaching authority is the surest guide to faith and morals. (Indeed, a natural implication of the events in “Disclosure Day” is that many past religious revelations were probably mediated by an alien race, as in Erich von Däniken’s 1960s-era book, “Chariots of the Gods.”)

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Are You There God? It’s Me, Spielberg., by Spencer Klavan (Claremont Institute):

Steven Spielberg’s new movie “Disclosure Day” hits theaters this week. It’s the culmination of the director’s lifelong fascination with visitors from outer space.

The movie contemplates the much-discussed possibility that extraterrestrials have been among us for decades while powerful government conspirators kept their presence a secret. If a truth like that were ever revealed, Mr. Spielberg suggested in a recent interview, it would destroy most people’s comfortable assumptions about the universe—including those supplied by religion. “Is God our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?”

Believers were quick to point out that most major religions are actually well-equipped to handle the possibility of life in outer space.

Since the planets are named after Greco-Roman gods and have been associated with cosmic intelligences in a variety of cultures, you could say that stargazing is inherently theological. Historically, Christians have had no problem contemplating a diversity of conscious beings populating the heavens. The late-antiquity author known as Dionysius the Areopagite enumerated the canonical ranks of the celestial host, for example. The medieval poet Dante Alighieri pictured the souls of the saved perched amid the spheres of the solar system.

In the age of science fiction, this long tradition of Christian thought has given fuel to rocket-ship adventures like C.S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet” (1938) and his ensuing “space trilogy,” in which the hero Ransom meets a variety of hnau, or “rational animals.” The lucky species on Lewis’s Mars and Venus never ate the forbidden fruit and so remain in happy agreement about the nature of their common maker. One Vatican astronomer went so far as to speculate that aliens, if they exist, might remain “in full friendship with their creator” and so without need of Christ’s salvation. The most venerable kinds of faith are more wondrously imaginative, less brittle upon contact with new knowledge, than Mr. Spielberg seems to suppose. …

Since we haven’t yet met any aliens (that we know of), it can’t be a given that their arrival would rock the foundations of our religious beliefs. It’d be equally likely to strengthen them beyond measure. At the very least, there’s an irrepressible human suspicion that we aren’t alone. The success of Mr. Spielberg’s career testifies to that, as does the recent frenzy of speculation about “disclosure” that followed President Trump’s declassification of UFO-related material last month. But if there is something out there, that something need not disprove the existence of the Author of Life. If anything, it might be a credit to His name.