Steven Spielberg this week will drop “Disclosure Day,” his long-awaited engagement-bait alien movie. On cue, the internet is abuzz — with soyfacing and fangirling, dunking and slop farming, chin-stroking and opining, opining, opining. Somehow, therefore, more, but also dramatically less, needs to be said.
I was early to the disclosure discourse. Five years ago, as the topic began to heat up in earnest, I tried to get ahead of the conversation by focusing on the religious dimension. Back then, that wasn’t center stage. The alien thing was still mostly Joe Rogan- and “X-Files”-coded, disclosure a cause célèbre for freedom-minded individualists sure that the evil secret government was hiding the TRUTH that only heroically skeptical intellectual rebels could force to come to light.
In the coming age, many — even believers — will be deceived.
To me, that felt incomplete. At best. The American experience with “alien encounters,” I underscored, had always been depicted and acculturated religiously — not just as a matter of “having a religious experience,” good or bad, but of actual theology.
Its manifestation as popular culture belied not secular origins but spiritual ones: When your religious belief is that “organized religion” is bad and the only authority you can really trust is your own, you’ll see what’s at stake in the alien debate as the ultimate nature of the universe, one where perhaps everything we thought we ever knew about God and our relation to Him could be completely debunked.
The desire to overthrow the authority or even the existence of the unbroken Christian church, that is, doesn’t stem fundamentally from secular principles. It actually stems from a desire to actualize a much different, ostensibly higher or ultimate, spiritual order.
Among us
That is why in 2021 I emphasized that aliens are so often interpreted as proof that Christianity is not the truth that will save us — that the Christian era is over, Christianity is defunct, a new religion is not only “needed now” but has arrived, whether we like it or not. “The invaders are here,” I summed up the claim, “and they impose on us the responsibility of accepting a new age from which there is no turning back. Humans are but one organism, a weak and inferior one, whose only hope of salvation is in satisfying whatever it is the aliens herald and demand.”
I went on to push back on this master narrative by way of Father (perhaps soon to be Saint) Seraphim Rose. He got ahead of the disclosure discourse decades ago, citing key scholars who showed the overwhelming pattern among “alien encounters” is of experiences impossible to distinguish from encounters over the millennia with spiritual entities — specifically fallen angels. Demons, in other words.
“Aliens,” Rose explained, do not behave like angels, who appear as holy messengers cautioning people at once to not be afraid. Instead, like demons, they zoom around at will, produce terrifying illusions, and violate and persecute victims in their bodies and minds.
Nevertheless, as anyone knows who grew up in the spiritual anarchy of the 1980s — where the lines blurred dangerously between “progressive” Christianity, New Age cults, and straight-up demonic occultism — there was already back then a huge and growing swath of alien believers who nursed a kind of syncretism with Christianity or some kind of “biblical” religion.
That was what troubled Rose the most. Today, many people speak of the Antichrist and the apocalypse, topics very close to Christ’s warning that in the coming age, many — even believers — will be deceived that He has returned or the end is nigh.
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Yes, millions of people may now be catching up to what counted as the frontier of the disclosure debate in 2021. X is full of eager, Spielberg-fueled arguments over whether aliens are compatible with Christianity, with both sides producing scripture, doctrine, lore, and receipts in the now-familiar style of the “global public square,” where every question is debated until it has been pulverized.
Even alien-skeptical Christians, or those aligned with Michael S. Heiser-style caution, can find serious authorities noting that the cosmos exceeds human comprehension. The existence of other rational created beings somewhere in that vastness cannot simply be ruled out.
But that is precisely the point. Some matters are best left to God. The human mind can crack them open with curiosity, only to find itself wandering a vast mental labyrinth — and once there, easy prey for delusion, pride, and disbelief.
Take, for one example making the rounds today, the question of whether He has perfect knowledge of all possible counterfactuals — a question that first made the rounds centuries ago thanks to Luis de Molina, a Jesuit theologian who touched off a furious and protracted round of discourse and debate, an effusion of energy that might well have been better spent in other ways.
What other ways? Well, here is where the new frontier of the disclosure debate appears.
Haunted halls
In theaters right now is a film called “Backrooms.” It’s close to being the opposite of “Disclosure Day,” at least in the sense that “Backrooms” is about the danger, and ultimately the tragic horror, of today’s deepening temptation to understand on our own terms the things that confuse and weaken us the most — things of our own flawed and falsely independent mental constructs.
Today the foremost of these false realities — what the ancient monks called logismoi — is the creepy combination of depression and pride that makes people curious to know “for themselves” what is really good and what is really evil.
Rather than trusting God on this matter or trusting God to sort it out and seeking refuge in humble self-denial of what even secular medicine calls the call of the void, we are all being carried along on a massive wave of belief that we somehow must subject all things to intellectual processing in order for us to function.
Increasingly, we treat human beings as if our only real function is intellectual processing. Everything becomes reducible to intelligence, or optimized as an operation of intelligence. Intelligence becomes the only thing that matters because it is treated as the only thing that truly exists. Everything else — the body, the soul, love, worship, suffering, memory, family, place — becomes merely an expression or construct of intelligence.
Under this view, nothing remains for us to do except intellectualize everything. We keep refining thought, language, and computation until we produce an intelligence so pure and complete that it no longer needs the rest of the human person at all, except perhaps for a time as fuel.
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This insane belief has become compelling because it fits the modern mind. It is becoming a new “organized religion,” even among people who most loudly hate organized religion. We entered the current stage of technological development already convinced that spiritual truth could be uncovered, created, or replaced through endless discourse: talking, writing, printing, disseminating, propagandizing, discussing, debating, and filling the world with more and more words.
Eventually, we looked around and saw only language. Not merely spoken language, but language as thought itself. Reality had been swallowed by interpretation. And once everything became words, it was only a matter of time before we mistook the processing of words for the fullness of being human.
In 1962, Beat Generation drug hellion William S. Burroughs, author of “Junkie” and “Queer,” wrote that language is a virus from outer space — in other words, an alien. Any Christian must know that, in reality, the Word, the Logos, is the opposite of a deadly xenomorph. But severed from the divine Word, the merely human word swiftly becomes something alien, monstrous, devouring. (“Time to leave the Word-God behind,” Burroughs wrote in his final doped-up years.)
That is why the frontier of the disclosure debate now expands from the recognition that being sucked into the disclosure debate, by the “Disclosure Day” debate and all the alien debates, is a labyrinth with a minotaur inside our own delusional creation. This is the not-too-cryptic message of “Backrooms,” a message most strongly conveyed in the film by what’s also the cure for our servile and self-destructive yapocracy: silence. Holy silence.
